Celt Experience: Resonance, Cheese and Bowling

Over the years I’ve been going to the Stockbridge Tap, I’ve seen many things occur inside; many strange and beautiful things. Never a cheeserush, though – that’s a first. Last Tuesday, there was more than one occasion when a polite, but eager, queue formed instantaneously following the appearance of a wooden board, laden with the finest of Welsh dairy. The reason? A tap takeover, meet the brewer, and cheese-pairing evening (a craft, or Kraft, triple) featuring Caerphilly’s Celt Experience brewery, and owner Tom Newman.

Celt have had their beers in Edinburgh before, but I’ve never actually tasted any of them, at any point. As Gob Bluth would say – I’ve made a huge mistake. Goodness me, if they aren’t terrific. Celt have the c-word on their pump clips (‘Crafted Ale’), and when you go across the board, from low to high, you realise why. It’s all about range with Tom. From a 4% cask dark mild “There are so many shit milds. I’m not trying to break any rules with this one”, to an 8.8% keg double IPA; every base is covered, and then some.

That mild – Dark Age – won a Silver medal at yesterday’s SIBA National competition in Sheffield. Hopped with Amarillo, Magnum and Perle, it’s a belter. Native Storm, a tribute to Owain Glyn Dwr, is a Kazbek dry-hopped, Bière de Garde yeasted brown ale, and the DIPA is Ogham Willow; dry-hopped with Galena and Amarillo and 100IBU, yet nowhere near as blustering as that suggests. The pick though – and it was hugely close – is Brigid Fire, a 6.3% smoked rye IPA, brewed with oak-smoked wheat, rye and that same Bière de Garde yeast.

Aside from range, the other thing that strikes you about Celt Experience is Tom himself. That particular yeast, he obtains in person by driving from Wales to northern France, borrowing cultures from the Brasserie Saint Germain, on the outskirts of Lens. He once cancelled a meet the brewer speech because one of the eight casks he’d supplied hadn’t turned out to his liking. According to an interview in Wales Online, this was how he left his old job: “One day in the office I was chatting, my line manager told me to keep the noise down, and I handed in my notice there and then.”

How many other breweries have their own bowling alley? Leave wild yeast traps dotted around the countryside? Name beers after ancient tribes the Romans attempted to subjugate through breeding out? Interview new staff by asking them to name their favourite trees?* Tom is one fascinating character, that’s for sure. Ideas tumble off him. Yet the one thing he wants, more than anything, is a greater degree of collaboration within the Welsh brewing industry; a heightened sense of community. A modern-day tribe of brewers? With his enthusiasm, I wouldn’t bet against it.

*That explains the notes I took, I think: – ‘Celtic resonance, bowling shoe size, foxes, tree’