Cail’s lore

This blog post was initially going to be very different – a pictorial of the Harviestoun Brewery, taken during a recent Guild of Beer Writers’ tour of their facility in Alva. Instead, in a complete switch of the usual ‘picture is worth a thousand words’ mantra, it’s going to be simply a series of quotes.

Harviestoun’s head brewer Stuart Cail has been around for many years, and is one of the best in the business. As the tour he gave us progressed, I stopped writing down the figures, put the camera in the back pocket, and just tried to scribble down as much of what he said as possible…

“Three or four years ago, we moved to silos of bulk malt. Our speciality malts – wheat, crystal, pinhead oats and so-on, we still weigh out by hand. But, price wise, bulk malt comes in considerably less than sack – and with Crisp Maltings up the road in Alloa, we have that connection. It makes sense to use it.”

“Our main competitor for malt is the big distilleries. Cereal has become a commodity now – which I think is disgraceful – trading foodstuffs on the market. Go and make money in gold or diamonds if you want, but not from food.”

“The joy of hops is that you don’t know until the beer how the hop flavour will come out. Some smell amazing on the rub, and you think it will transfer into the beer – but it just doesn’t. Others, the opposite is true, and they really surprise you. I love that.”

“The difference between big beer and that from smaller breweries is like a ready meal versus home-cooked food. The home-cooked will be better – but there’s room for both. Neither is wrong. Ready meals are consistent and can be good – whereas every time you cook a meal the quality can vary. But one day, it tastes better than you’ve ever made it. This desire to improve each time is what truly drives brewers.”

“If a pub serves badly, it’s the badge of the brewer that suffers. If a new drinker gets a great pint of real ale, it’ll spur them on to try more. If they get a bad first experience, they’ll never come back.”

“Most beer is built to be drunk young. Budweiser’s ‘Born-On’ dates were the best thing they ever did. The rest of the industry missed a trick not getting on the back of that. Instead, we have best before dates for supermarkets. When I started, it was three months – then six, nine, twelve, eighteen – soon they’ll be wanting two year shelf life. You’re talking higher filtration, bigger pasteurisation – you’re buggering the beer, basically.”

“We need better ranges of bottles in pubs. When the casks aren’t on form, people look to the fridges. Get great beer in the fridge, otherwise customers think ‘Well, I’ve got better beer than that at home, so why am I here?'”

“Rules are being re-written since I was at Heriot-Watt. Using lager malt, for instance. It’s just as good as distiller’s malt – do people think they make a different product for brewers? The difference between top and bottom-fermentation is another – these days, it’s more down to the shape of your vessel than the yeast. Certain aspects of brewing are changing quickly and moving. Others have never been questioned. Why is this?”

“The growth of craft keg is happening – and it will mirror the growth in the cask market, which is doing better because it’s better beer [these days]. The same is going to happen with keg. Good quality cask beer takes some beating – but we’ve got to get away from this ‘if it’s not cask, it’s shite’ mentality. All good real ale and craft keg brewers help the industry. Don’t blame the container. It’s not the container’s fault.”