Beer Travels with Adrian Tierney-Jones

There is a glorious dichotomy about beer. On one hand it is an agricultural product, and we can imagine fields of golden barley swaying in a gentle breeze and serried rows of lime-green hops in regimented lines somewhere in rural England. On the other hand, the process in which beer is made is firmly industrial, whatever the size of the brewery. Water is heated, temperatures maintained, air compressors hiss and sigh and the clanging of stainless kegs and casks reverberates around with the finality of the last trump.

I believe there is a similar bisection when it comes to considering St Mars of the Desert. The brewery is located in the Attercliffe area of Sheffield, which is classed as an industrial suburb. On the Monday morning I travelled there from the city centre, first of all walking alongside a canal I passed former factories which now dealt with such mysteries (to me at least) scrap metal recycling and precision grinding, before walking along a network of roads where more units dealt with motor spares, tyres and alloys. This is a post-industrial area that still maintains its industrial soul.

So, you can imagine my thoughts when I ask Dann Paquette, who co-founded the brewery with Martha Holley-Paquette, how they would describe (or pigeon-hole in his words) their beers, he replies, ‘rustic continental ales and lagers’.

He goes to explain his reasoning.

‘For me rustic is like there are sharp edges to the beer. There is more bitterness than there should be and you can still detect the personality of the people making it. It is not for a market, it is made by people who know what they want to do, with a brewery that tells them what it allows them to do.’

Holley-Paquette adds that their first choice for starting a brewery was definitely rustic, a small-holding in a village on the outskirts of the city. ‘We wanted to be like brewing hermits,’ she says, ‘but you cannot be a brewing hermit, you’d go out of business.’

Sheffield is one of the greatest cities in the UK for beers and brewing. As well as St Mars of the Desert (whose tap-room has just reopened at weekends after a winter break), there is Kelham Island Brewery, Triple Point and Abbeydale, while pubs and bars such as the Sheffield Tap, the Bath Hotel, the Rutland Arms and the Hop Hideout bottle-shop and Tap at Kommune are essential staging posts on your journey.

This is indeed a city in which you guide yourself around by its pubs, very much being a case of turn left at the Red Lion, cross the road by the Roebuck and continue past the Royal Oak and you will arrive at your destination (another pub – Ed). It is a city made for walking without purpose for you will always come to a good pub, where the beer gallops out of the glass with the carefree certainty of the favourite at the Gold Cup.

So it comes as no surprise that Dann and Martha chose Sheffield in which to perfect their imperfect (in the best possible way) ales and lagers. In my latest book, United Kingdom of Beer, out at the end of the month (and you just knew I had to shoehorn it in somehow), I include their complex barley wine Our Finest Regards, a sleek and sensuous beer in its rich malt character, and Jack D’Or, first brewed at the couple’s American brewery Pretty Things. According to Holley-Paquette, ‘it was an attempt to make the perfect beer: simple, hoppy, bitter, complex, but very drinkable. We were inspired by Belgian saisons, definitely something like Dupont but also XX Bitter and Taras Boulba’.

I had dived straight into a hedonistically inclined glass of Jack D’Or on the Friday evening at Indie Beer Feast, a great event over two days organised by the indomitable Jules Gray,  When I talked to them at the brewery on the Monday I discovered that the normal rules about making regular beers did not apply.

Paquette said that each time it was brewed it was not close to the previous one, while Holley-Paquette added, ‘my feeling about Jack D’or in this brewery is that we are still finding his place in the actual geometry of the tanks and the way the brewing is and obviously it couldn’t be more different to the way we brewed it in America because of the size of the brewery. We are beginning to get there now and we tasted the latest batch we’re about to release and we thought it was really good but we both agree we want to change it for the better next time’.

To travel without purpose is good for the soul, but then so is setting the dials for the heart of the Attercliffe industrial suburb and finding out what makes St Mars of the Desert so special and hoping that one day you will turn up and find they have made the perfect (or imperfect) Jack D’Or.

Adrian Tierney-Jones