Friday 20 March 2015

Iain Turnbull 1949-2015

I first met Iain Turnbull at an Edinburgh and SE Scotland CAMRA beer festival at Meadowbank in the late 1990s. He was there with his colleagues from Restalrig Village Brewery, promoting the new venture and enjoying the beer. They seemed to be an amiable bunch and we got chatting. Several brewery visits and many pints later, I found myself as his assistant at the brewery where he constantly astonished me by his ability to estimate the temperature of wort by looking at it, and being able to convert between systems of measurement in his head - part natural talent; part decades of experience. He had first arrived in Edinburgh as a brewing student at Heriot Watt in the 1960s, but never graduated because he got a job with a major brewery and learned first hand from some of the greats of that period. At Courage, he seems to have ended up as the last brewer at many a brewery, and developed a healthy disrespect for accountancy-led brewing.

One of my favourite of his many stories comes from his time at, I think, Bristol, where the UK version of Fosters was made. At this time, the gyle numbers were a letter-number-letter sequence that between them indicated the date and some other information about the product. One day in September, there was a commotion in the loading area. The draymen were refusing to take the latest batch of Fosters out for delivery. The head brewer, accompanied by Iain, went down to find out what the fuss was about and were shown the number on the kegs: K9P. "Dog piss? Sounds about right! Send it out!" Alas the draymen were not swayed by the Head Brewer's argument and the beer eventually went out as batch K8aP. But K9P was later recycled by Iain as a beer name at least twice.

His time at breweries closed by Courage was supplemented by time at breweries closed by other companies. When not brewing, he was selling cement and did a stint running a pub. After Restalrig went pear-shaped (having the business management side done by someone who, despite extensive experience, had an alcohol problem so serious it killed him not long after, was part of the problem), Iain, David Murray and I set up Fisherrow Brewery, which lasted a couple of years until David's sudden and untimely death from an hereditary heart problem.

In the time since then, he worked in a number of smaller breweries, and did a six month stint in Nigeria helping to restart a large lager brewery there. He ran a business sourcing and building plant for small breweries.

And in 2009 he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer.

His response was a big two fingers to that, and with the help of other brewers he produced a series of brews in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support. My last time brewing with him was for one of his Brewer's Swansong brews at Tryst Brewery in Falkirk. But he pointedly failed to die and there were a good number of fundraising brews including a revival of Fisherrow favourite, Portobello Porter. But, cancer sucks, and does not play well with other conditions. He spent an increasing amount of time in hospital after a stroke and a bladder condition that necessitated brutal surgery. And he was never the same. He always was an awkward, stubborn bugger, with an off-colour sense of humour that never quite stepped over the line. He delighted in making life difficult for jobsworth bureaucrats, often by having read the relevant legislation or regulations. He was, for a couple of years, the official "Token Heterosexual" at Pride Scotia events. But illness took the pleasure out of life. We were concerned when he didn't fill in some forms in a way designed to create headaches for bureaucrats; when the humour stopped and antipathy took its place. It was obvious living was now a chore.

The last time I saw Iain was at the New Year, where we shared bottles of early 1970s Courage Russian Imperial Stout that he had brewed back in the day. He was very frail. This morning, we learned that we will have to retrieve the special beer he made a few years ago for his own funeral so it can serve its intended purpose.

Monday 16 March 2015

So what makes a beer Lesbian?

If you follow me on Untappd, or Twitter, you will find I will occasionally describe a beer using fractions of a Lesbian as a unit. The scale is quite simple. Something rating zero on the scale is the sort of beer that marketing folk think will appeal to women. A rating of 1 Lesbian means it's Titanic Chocolate and Vanilla Stout. But beer does not generally have a sexuality, so there is, as you might imagine, a story behind this. Well, two actually.

The first tale goes back to 1986, and the ILGA World Conference in Copenhagen. A friend, John, was there, and it was held in some kind of Trade Union Centre, known for having the biggest statue of Lenin outside the Soviet Union, or something like that. And there was a bar filled mostly with lagers. So John tentatively asked "Do you have any Wiibroe Stout?"

"You drink that stuff?"

"Yes."

"Okay. I will get you some if you promise to drink it all".

And so a case was procured, and John started on it. And a woman approached him and asked what he was drinking. So he told her. And she went and bought some for herself, and told her friends about it. And soon, a large number of women, and John, had demolished the case, and the bar manager had to go get another. And another.

And so fast forward a couple of decades and a bit, and John and I were drinking in the Regent. And they had Titanic Chocolate and Vanilla Stout on cask. It was extremely nice. Several women, attracted by the word "chocolate" on the pump clip no doubt (this is about the only stereotype of lesbians with any basis in the real world!) tried it, and soon the cask was empty. And so a term was born.

Thinking about it, there has been a terrible history of marketing beer to women, often with good intentions, and CAMRA has been particularly bad at it. I'll gloss over the Ninkasi Goddess of Beer campaign - the model actually liked beer and had to keep having her glass refilled at the press briefing. But not long after, there was the terrible FemALE promotion which happened at a time when Paula Waters was Chair. She had strong opinions on the way beer is marketed:

Paula Waters said most adverts for beer were biased towards male drinkers: "When is the last time you saw any press or TV advert for beer which is meant to attract women?

"At best they are inoffensively aimed at men and at worst they are downright patronising to women."

Pity then, the campaigns they came up with were downright patronising to women even though Paula Waters herself said it was about encouraging women to try real ale, and find one they like. The whole thing was about light, fluffy beers; fruity beers; all those ridiculous stereotypes about women being delicate little flowers. Yet CAMRA was full of women, each with their individual tastes and often drinking a range of beers depending on their mood, the weather and what was on that day. Our own brewery (two male, one female brewer) had brewed a beer that was strictly to our tastes and it was a rich, dark, luscious porter (later revived as part of Head Brewer Iain Turnbull's "Brewer's Swansong" series).

But obviously, all these women drinking beers that defied the stereotype, there must be something about them then. Nudge nudge, wink wink.

And so, to me at least (and I did help coin the term), a "Lesbian Stout" is a beer that sticks two fingers up at these irritating campaigns that think women, by definition, must like only the sort of beer that's great for drinking on a hot summer's day while lounging by a river.

Note: the author of this piece is an active member of LAGRAD.