Chris Gooch Five Minutes with Faram – Teme Valley Brewery

Five Minutes with Faram Segement

Patrick Whittle   

From the breeding of hops to the brewing with them. Let’s catch up with Teme Valley Brewer Chris on this week’s Five Minutes with Faram. So Hello everyone. I’m at Teme Valley brewery today to do our Five Minutes with Faram segment. I’m here with Chris. Chris, if you could just introduce yourself, a little bit about where we are, a little bit about yourself, and then we’ll start for a segment.

Chris Gooch  

So I’m Chris Gooch from the Teme Valley brewery. We’re here at the Tolbot Knightwick, which is where the brewery is based, in the Teme Valley, which ought to be obvious, sometimes the river behaves. Sometimes it misbehaves. But love it or leave it, that’s what we work with.

Patrick Whittle  

There we go. So the first question in our Five Minutes with Faram chat is what’s your favourite hop.

Chris Gooch  

So as you’re going to find, I find it very hard to tie down favourites. But certainly, when I started brewing in 1997 one of our beers featured Northdown as the single hop for bitterness and aroma. And because Northdown are not grown in the Midlands anymore, and we only use hops from Herefordshire and Worcestershire. I haven’t used Northdown for brewing for probably 20 years. So the longer it goes, the more it becomes my favourite. It’s the thing I can’t use in the brewery, at the moment we’ve really enjoyed using Godiva™. So we changed one of our core beers over to Godiva™ about this time last year, and it won a silver at the SIBA competition in Ludlow. And we really enjoy the fact that we can make a traditional beer with elements of sort of new hop character. I love Sovereign. Sovereign is so versatile and useful. You know, it’s got a very broad character of aroma that almost matches every hop variety you can think of. So if you use it 50/50, with something like Cascade, you almost lift the elements of Cascade above what you would normally expect. So yeah, those three. Where would I stop?

Patrick Whittle   

So what’s your favourite beer? Either one from your brewery that you brew yourself or?

Chris Gooch  46:24 

I haven’t got favourite beer, we’re going to go back to this. So before I was a brewer, when I think the idea of working in the brewing industry really grabbed me. I used to drink in the barrels in Hereford when the Wye Valley brewery was there, and if I had somebody driving me, then I would drink Supreme in there, and because it was a higher alcohol than I would normally drink. So the fact that Supreme isn’t around anymore, again, just makes you wish it was, doesn’t it? And they brewed it as a one off and and that was very nice, but I do miss it. And similarly, when I started brewing the Cannon Royal Brewery at Ombersley, Jim Wonders used to brew a mild fruit, or is mild, and I really miss that. You know, that was a delightful beer, and I was always very happy to see it on. But if, if I got to pick on one locally that I’ve been drinking for at least 27 years, then it would be Town Crier from Hobsons. You know, there’s a lot of competition, obviously, and I enjoy beer from so many people, but if I’ve been consistently drinking that for 27 years, then it manages to consistently be a traditional British beer, which is what I like drinking and what I like making. And then going further afield, if there’s De Melon Land beer on offer, I will grab it, whatever it is. I think they’re probably the best brewery in the world. I’ve never not enjoyed one of their beer, and most of the time, I’ve been delighted. And as anyone who spoke to me in the last five years will know, the, I think it’s called High Tide, so the Ramsgate brewery, GAADS brewery, the Kentish triple, there will not be a better beer in the world than that. You know, it manages to be so many different things at once. So it’s very, very traditional, featuring Kent Goldings. It is also very definitely a characteristic sort of Belgian style beer, lowland style beer, but it’s sophisticated and it’s rewarding and it’s dangerous, easily, dangerously easy to put down the glass when it’s empty and think I can’t quite believe it was that good and pour another one, and it’s very strong. So, you know those, those are in my top ranked beers.

Patrick Whittle  

I don’t know, then if you’re going to be able to answer my next question, because there’s another favourite question, but what’s your favorite beer and food pairing?

Chris Gooch  49:13 

I literally say to people, drink your favourite beer with whatever you’re eating if you are buying wine in a restaurant, it costs 50 pound a bottle. You want the sommelier there to tell you why you’re going to enjoy it so much. But I think it’s always been an advantage. It’s changed recently, but you know, beer is available, beer is affordable, and if you are eating a meal, why would you wander around the fridge picking out something that’s going to be a perfect match. You know, it’s a little bit narcissistic to want your meal to be perfect. You just want it to be very, very good. So, yeah, what? You know, drink your favorite beer

Patrick Whittle  

With your favourite food basically? Yeah, yeah. No, definitely. I think that question as well is a bit it’s so well for me, it’s very seasonal. I find because I eat very different food to the winter and the summer, and therefore I feel you pair different foods with different beers and that sort of stuff. So it sort of it can vary quite a lot that one. But I’ve just realised all these questions start off with, what’s your favourite? Well, go again. What’s your favourite pub in the world?

Chris Gooch  

So it won’t surprise you, I was with the family in London about three years ago, and I promised to take them to the Frog and Firkin just off Porterbello Road, which, when I lived down on Ladbroke Grove was an absolute favourite. You know, they used to drank so many pints of Dog Bolter in there, and Dog Bolter is still brewed by the Ramsgate brewery, which, you know, I mentioned earlier, but sadly, the Elizabeth line has flattened it, so that isn’t there anymore. And that’s where, yeah, that’s where they filmed part of ‘With Nail’ and I so the family was looking forward to seeing that as well, so that’s gone. I was always very happy as an undergraduate drinking in The Swan in Liverpool. And if anybody’s going to Beer X, it’s worth a little trip to The Swan on Wood Street if you want to capture the essence of, let’s say a 1970s biker pub. It still has that same ambience, a little stickiness on the floor jukebox, where you can easily conjure up two hours worth a classic rock from the 70s and 80s, and nicely, they have decorated it, but they’ve retained the slightly yellow stain of nicotine, just so that it doesn’t change too much. The beer is a bit varied, but there’s no other pub like it Liverpool. So if I am at Beer X, you’ll probably find me there one evening, and the Square and compass, manages to be like a quintessential perfect pub, while being quite odd as well. And you have to go there to understand what I mean. But you know, the service is perfect, but it’s archaic, it comes from a hatch. The garden has got wildlife and domestic wildfowl wandering around it, and it’s in a perfect place by the coast. So yeah. So there you go. Three, two you can visit. One you can’t

Patrick Whittle  

lovely stuff, so bringing it back to the brewery now. So what would you say there’s one item in the brewery that you couldn’t live without?

Chris Gooch  

Our brewery is very much back to basics. So we’ve got one pump on the product side, one pump on the liquor side, one pump for cold water. There is no fat around the brewery. Everything is needed and required. You can always rely on a measuring jug. Since 1997 we’ve gone through two measuring jugs so they have legs. They don’t let you down, there’s nothing can go wrong with that little line on it, whereas everything else can find a way to trip you up. So yeah, if you find me in there clutching a jug and talking to it, you know, the day hasn’t gone the way it was planned.

Patrick Whittle   

It’s amazing, actually, when we ask that question, everyone says something really basic, like you’ll get, like, pen and paper, someone said, like, a big stirring stick to sort of aggravate the tanks and that sort of stuff we don’t get. We did have one person that said they talked about some high tech computer system and all that sort of stuff, but most of the time it is real basic.

Chris Gooch   

In our brewery, you could bring any Brewer from the last 600 years in and when they saw the mash tun, they would recognise the form and function of it, and they would know they were in a brewery, even though, for some of them, electric lights and heat exchangers and pumps and the method of heating would be completely different, but they would know, you know, from the mash tun onwards, what was supposed to happen in there. And it’s, it’s just as well, really, because as brewing equipment changes, the nature of beer changes no matter how hard you try. So if you do want to make traditional British beer, you’re pretty much stuck with, like, fairly basic equipment. You can finesse it, you can make it more efficient, but it’s always going to be pretty straightforward.

Patrick Whittle  54:00 

And also, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Isn’t it that long? If you’ve had your jug since, was it the 70s?

Chris Gooch  

So we’re on the third jug since 1997

Patrick Whittle  

Oh, there we go. If it’s not broke don’t fix it. Do you have a favourite song, artists, podcast?

Chris Gooch   

So in the new brewery, we don’t have a PBS certificate, so we don’t play music,anywhere in the workplace, in the old brewery, I think we did. I can remember playing Toots and the Maytals towels, Hell in love, Motorhead, the again, we’d be here all day, if I really told you, you know what kind of music I like.

Patrick Whittle  

Give us the whole playlist from A to Z

Chris Gooch  

In an emergency for really driving and compelling music, you can’t be Earthless Rhythms from a Cosmic Sky. So going to have to have a look on YouTube for that. You’ll see what I mean to dig you out of a hole.

Patrick Whittle   

I think some of these songs might be a bit before my time.

Chris Gooch  

I can’t imagine what you mean.

Patrick Whittle   

Yeah, if you weren’t in the brewing industry, what would you be doing? Or what did you do before?

Chris Gooch  

So I got this job because I went to work at Lulsley Court looking after sheep and cattle, and then spotted the brewing equipment at the farm before it was installed here. And said, because I’d done biochemistry University, I’d seen around a few breweries, so I ended up with both jobs at the same time. So for a while, I was looking after the sheep and cattle and brewing. And the only thing anybody thought was odd about that was when I did brewery tours, people wanted to know if I used different thermometers on the farm to in the brewery. But then the farm was sold and it was possible to go full time running the brewery, it’s hard to know if I, if I would, would have remained in farming the sort of turn of the century 2000 was a time of very low morale, and we’re almost back in the same place where, if you were working with livestock, it was very hard for anybody to really make money off it and and it’s demoralising. So I think I’d already thought about a change of direction. But I don’t, I don’t really know. I have no idea. You know, you never know what’s around the corner, really, I don’t want to go back to working with hops. So during lockdown, I worked at Stocks Farm up at Suckley tying hops, which is a brutal re entry to farming for anyone in his 50s. Don’t want to go back to that. So, yeah, if I wasn’t working in brewing now, I have no idea.

Patrick Whittle  

Well there we go. So what would you say your your biggest inspiration in brewing is, who your biggest inspiration in brewing is?

Chris Gooch  56:53 

So it’s people who’ve managed to continue brewing traditional British beer, retain their market and not jump with both feet onto any bandwagon along the way. And it’s not just, I’m not just talking about craft beer, but also kegging and things like that. So we’ve still got, you know, Donnington and Arkells. We’ve still got hook Norton, and if I start the list, I realise I’m going to upset people by not mentioning them. But we’ve got a lot of well established breweries, like Wye valley down the road who are firmly committed to cask, traditional cask beer, and they’ve never felt the need to do more than expand what they do, rather than shift focus. So, you know, I like making traditional British beer. I like drinking traditional British beer, and as long as I’m not the only one doing that, then everybody else will continue to be an inspiration.

Patrick Whittle   

So I guess you take a little bit of inspiration from lots of different people,

Chris Gooch  57:56 

Knowing that if you stick to your guns, and you absolutely commit yourselves to carrying on doing that, when all the voices around is saying, cash beer is dying. Nobody wants traditional British hops anymore. You know, you don’t have to pay attention to that you can keep on doing what you do well, and there will always be a market for it.

Patrick Whittle   

Yeah, I think so many people drink beer, isn’t there? There’s always going to be different segments of it, and that’s very obvious, but there’s no reason why. If one segments growing slightly that the other segment, it disappears completely. There’s many people like yourself that enjoy traditional beer, and well, if no one makes it, and no one’s going to be able to drink it.

Chris Gooch   

You only have to look at the relish with which you know brewers from other countries come to this country, and can’t wait to try, you know, to see how much it’s valued abroad, if not always, well valued here.

Patrick Whittle   

Yeah no, definitely. So have you got any favourite sort of beer festivals that you’ve been to, or when you’ve been to recently, or?

Chris Gooch  

So I work at so many it’s not always. It’s not always what I want to do with my spare time that I worked at the Worcester CAMRA beer festival for a lot of years. I don’t have time to do that anymore, but I do like the way it’s run and the way it’s presented. I went to the Zythos beer festival in Holland that was fantastic, that went by the blur, though, for a number of reasons, I don’t know. I’m not a natural big beer festival go where I don’t like the noise and the queues and things like that. So anyway, where a pub got 12 beers on, I’m very happy to do that.

Patrick Whittle 

That’s almost a beer festival to you.

Chris Gooch  

So especially if they made the effort to put it together, but we, you know, we run two beer festivals a year here, and I can see that people aren’t necessarily after novelty. They just want good beers all at the same time so they can have a choice. And then that’s, that’s, you know, that’s pretty much it for me. I don’t necessarily. So we want novelty, things I’ve never had before. I just want to be able to have a good choice on the day.

Patrick Whittle  

Yeah, variety is such a big thing, isn’t it? Keeps the palate alive, doesn’t it? So outside of brewing, do you have any sort of hobbies or interests?

Chris Gooch  

I mean around here, cycling, hill walking,

Patrick Whittle  

Well you’re in such a beautiful place for all of that.

Chris Gooch   

Yeah, since lockdown, Kate and I walked a lot of the Riverside paths around here. I do go to gigs. I go to gigs a lot. I wish the quality of beer was a bit better, although, if you go down to Bristol, you know, More Beer have done a terrific job of getting into gig venues, so you can usually rely on a nice beer when you get in there. I don’t have a lot of time for anything else, you know. I do quite a lot of volunteering when when I’m not at work. So hobbies are on hold until I get to retirement age, which, is not that far around the corner for me.

Patrick Whittle 

Lovely stuff. So just a few quick fire questions, just to sort of finish up the segment that we normally do. So what was the last beer that you brewed?

Chris Gooch   

Last beer that we brewed is is going to be called Man of Straw. It’s 3.9% so we’ve got Brambling cross in it, which you know, absolutely one of my favourites. It has got a characteristic aroma, but it varies from year to year, not in quality. The quality is always good, but just how that aromas expressed. So I’m looking forward to seeing, you know, just how that come across is comes across in the beer. So we’ve never brewed that one before. That’s a new recipe.

Patrick Whittle  

Oh, there we go. So how would you, how did you go about creating that recipe then?

Chris Gooch   

So if I’m honest, we look back at the last few seasonal beers we done and went, we haven’t done a pale beer under 4% for a long time. And then, and then you’ve got a pallet of malts you can use to come up with a pale beer. I know the way I want it to taste is refreshing and lightly bitter. So that sets all the parameters. And then the two of us put our heads together and just come up with what it’s going to come out.

Patrick Whittle  

Do you have a pilot kit at all, or is it the first time it’s a big batch?

Chris Gooch  

So we’ve got 27 years of brewing records to look back on, and Mark and I can look back on the 10 years of working together.

Patrick Whittle   

What  you plan does come out, yeah, in the in the brew, very nice. So Fuggles or Golding,

Chris Gooch   

We don’t use Fuggles anymore, because in the long run, unfortunately, you know, the future for Fuggles is, is uncertain. You know, it won’t. I’ve used Faram’s Fuggle, which is, which is very nice. And you know, when the time comes, we’ll use that, but, yeah, but I’ve dropped fuggle in favour of Sovereign, probably 12 years ago. I think so it’s Golding. Goldings all day.

Patrick Whittle 

Goldings the winner. And final question, what’s next for you in the industry and next for the brewery?

Chris Gooch   

Christ, I wish I knew the I know next week I’m on holiday. After that, it’s all, it’s all a bit gray. It’s gone beyond being dynamic, hasn’t it, in the last five years. It’s  become very unpredictable. There are a lot of people who aren’t brewing anymore, you would thought would be around for decades. So, yes, I don’t know maybe, maybe Brut IPAs will come back. Maybe you know, some of the things in the cycle and churn of innovation that have dropped by the wayside, maybe people will find ways of finessing them and making them more consistent and more appealing to everybody. The worrying thing is that, although beer prices have gone up, the amount of money people have to spend on beer is more or less standing, staying the same, so they’re drinking less and hopefully making decisions about how to enjoy that better. But no, it’s unreadable. It’s unknowable,

Patrick Whittle  

I guess. Yeah, like you said, it is. It’s a very open ended question that and you do find, you might find some trends 20 years ago, might come back in, might make flavours and change. We sort of all on a big circle, aren’t we, so sort of things that were popular maybe 20/25, years ago might start coming back in. So I guess you as a brewery, it’s sort of looking at those and seeing if you want to adapt and start brewing, but like you said, you like to be traditional.

Chris Gooch 

So exactly, brewers can be incredibly fickle. I don’t know. How the hop supply side of the industry really bares it. You know, where for years and years and years they demand one thing, everything is geared up to provide that, and then suddenly, overnight, they want something else. It just drives me nuts. I don’t know how hop growers cope with it. So let’s just hope for a bit of stability, a bit of getting our feet back on the ground and seeing where we go from there.

Patrick Whittle   

Lovely stuff. Well, that brings you to the end of our questions. So thank you very much.

Chris Gooch 

You’re welcome.