Breath of fresh air

This is the view from our window that had frost patterns on Jan 17. It's not often our neighbours, the brewery, switch on the top-floor lights. Paired with the dying light of the day, it was attention-grabbing, leading to camera grabbing. The top floor is the 7th storey of the tower. Not all the lights are on, and the array of windows go around all four sides of the building. They are designed to open quite widely, for a breeze to pass through freely, regardless of its direction. The room contains a large, flat, metal (copper, if I remember correctly) tank, less than 50cm deep, that almost fills the entire floor, leaving a narrow gangway all around it to access the windows

The tray was designed to speed up the cooling of the wort, which was pumped in after it had been boiled with the malt barley to extract the sugars, and before it flowed back down the tower into a fermenting vessel. The open windows allowed cool air to flow over the liquid. For many years, the tray continued in use for one, and only one, of the brewery's products: its signature beer, "Old Hooky". This endeared it to the local aficionados and old men with beards (I speak with authority), but not to supermarket buyers and other commercial customers, who were unimpressed by the variation in taste and quality that was provoked by exposing the wort to whatever wild yeast happened to be passing by at the critical moment in the brewing process

Brewing has become a precisely controlled, science-driven activity. The brewery holds its selected lines of yeasts in off-site cryogenic storage, and refreshes them regularly to maintain a consistent behaviour from the fermentation. The caprice of the traditional process does not sit well with this philosophy. The digital thermometer and refrigeration pipes now hold universal sway. Old Hooky remains reliably good, and reliably invariable. Nostalgia is confined to those on the brewery tour, and old men staring into the bottom of a Sunday night glass