PAUL CORBETT, CHARLES FARAM

Welcome to another edition of our Charles Farams catch ups. We’re doing Five Minutes with Faram’s
today and I’m very pleased to be joined by Darren Batten of Palmer’s Brewery. Good morning Darren.

DARREN BATTEN PALMERS BREWERY
Good morning, how are you?

PAUL

I’m very well thanks, how are you?

DARREN

Yeah, very good.

PAUL

Thanks
for joining us today. For those people who are listening who don’t know you. Could you just
give us a bit of a brief about yourself and what you do at the brewery?

DARREN

Right, I’m head
brewing director at Palmers Brewery. I joined as a biology graduate 29 years ago became head brewer
15 years ago.

I’m qualified through the IBD and he was fortunate to become head for somebody
else’s family business.

I started stacking pallets and now I’m a director and head brewer,and run a brewery in my everyday life.

PAUL

Fantastic, that’s great. So you’ve seen it right from the
bottom up, all the jobs you’ve done there, and everything is covered by you.

DARREN

Yeah pretty much.

I’ve pretty much done every job in the brewery over the 29 years.

You know I still was washing casks yesterday on the cask washer because we had one of our team off, and I spent two hours on a cask washer knocking out casks and washing casks.

So I think as a head brewer you just muck in where you need to. Needs must, you get stuck in don’t you.

PAUL

Yeah, excellent.
Thanks again for joining us for the Five minutes with Faram’s. We’ve got some questions that we
always ask people and I’ll run through the questions with you Darren.

So the first one, is always the difficult one to ask. What’s your favourite hop?

DARREN

Yeah, well I’m probably pretty traditional in the hops I’ve used in the brewery. I have much less experience of different hops so I’m gonna be like most people and say Citra is a fantastic hop. The reason being is that we brewed just our own brands for many many years, and five or six years ago we decided that we would do some seasonals. I picked Citra as an aroma hop in a beer. It was my first ever creation,
my first ever seasonal was totally my own work it was a beer called Commerce which we launched.

It was an absolute storm. Citra just gives you that massive aroma and fantastic, light flavouring in a summer seasonal.

Now I put it into one of my cask beers. So Citra is pretty much a firm favourite
because of the history.

PAUL

Yeah absolutely. So, your main hops in your traditional beers are Goldings are they?

DARREN

Yeah Goldings we use as bittering and then we use Styrian Goldings as an aroma hop.

We use a bit of First Gold, and then a few more different hops for the seasonals nowadays.

PAUL
Fantastic, and another very difficult one to answer is what’s your favourite beer?

DARREN

I really should say Tally Ho because it’s my own beer and it’s fantastic and it wins so many awards, but
I’m going to say something like Jaipur IPA. I just think it’s such a different flavour and it’s you know Robert Thomas brews that beer and he’s become quite a big brand now. I just really
enjoy it. We don’t really get it down South in the pubs. So if I find it in a pub I think, God a pint of that really does go down well.

I know it’s strong, I know it’s not a session beer, but
I just think it’s one of those beers that is just so different and I really do like it.

It is a very nice beer isn’t it, very drinkable for a higher gravity beer. It’s a bit too sessionable really
isn’t it.

PAUL

Yeah very much so yeah. Excellent, and what’s your favourite food and beer pairing?

DARREN
I was going to say a packet of crisps and a pickled egg in a pub because I’m really a pub drinker, but I think fish and chips in a nice pub with a pint of a nice Citra hopped pale ale or a
craft keg.

I just think you can’t beat that, and I think it’s about location. I think it’s where
you are,

I think drinking in a nice pub garden in the sunshine. We’ve got some lovely coastal pubs,
and fish and chips with a nice pile of Dorset pale is probably what makes me feel happiest.

Yeah, there’s nothing like looking out over the sea while you’re drinking a pint with some fish
and chips. It’s quite a nice, unique experience in the UK.

PAUL

Absolutely. What’s your favourite beer
destination?

DARREN

In the UK I’m probably going to say, there’s a there’s a pub in Croyde called The Thatch
and it sells a lot of St Austell. It’s a free house and I’ve got a VW camper and we often end
up in Croyde Bay with my wife. We do a bit of bodyboarding and at the end of the day you get into The Thatch and you have a pint of a Tribute or a pint of Proper Job. Sat in our garden, it’s just the best place to drink beer in the UK.

I’ll also was in Sydney a few years ago and
I stayed in the place of the Lord Nelson Brewery Hotel and this was probably about 10 years ago, and it was one of those places that was brewing English styles well before the craft revolution.

I stayed in the hotel because I knew it was a brewery. It’s a brew pub and it’s in the rocks in Sydney and it is just the most beautiful setting, it looks across Sydney, and I actually went and mashed in with the brewer one morning when I was staying there and gave him
a Palmer’s tankered, a ceramic 1794 tankered and he said well you’re older than most of Australia.

And that’s one of those places in the world that I really really like.

PAUL
Fantastic , I think we sometimes forget the history that we have in the UK, and certainly
I remember the first time I went out to the West Coast looking at hops, probably 20 years ago now
and realised that Seattle was only founded about the same time as some of the colleges in Cambridge
and Oxford.

You just think to yourself, wow what the world must have been like at that time. It’s absolutely incredible, but the brewery was obviously established well before that as well.

I think it’s 1860 something like that Seattle was first discovered, so it’s sort of similar for Palmer’s but much earlier.

DARREN

Yeah we were 1794.

PAUL

Amazing amazing, what about your favourite pub in
the UK? You’ve already answered that one because that came as a favourite beer destination as well,
so that’s all good.

DARREN

I think I often say that your local pub is probably your
favourite pub because you spend so much time in it. I live in a little village on the coast, and we’ve got The Three Horseshoes in my village and it’s one of the best food pubs around and it does fantastic beer, there’s a whole range. Not because I live in the village, in fact my former
head brewer Adrian also lives in the village, so they’ve got two brewers living in the village.

In fact they’ve got Jason from Liberation lives in the village as well, so we’re quite discerning in
our beer tastes.

So they keep fantastic ale. The other one is The Pandora Inn on the Fowey Estuary.

It’s a St Austell pub, don’t know if you’ve been there.

PAUL

Yep, I’ve not been to that pub yet.

DARREN
The Pandora is another fantastic setting and you can get there by boat and you can sit on the jetty
and have a pint. Beautiful.

Another one I really love if I’m over in the east is The Anchor at Walberswick. It’s a fantastic food place, you know drinking a pint of of Adnams, sat there
in that pub is another fantastic place.

We’re very fortunate, we do travel around to other people’s breweries so we tend to go into the flagship pubs of these breweries, which is which is very
fortunate and we tend to drink a few pints.

There are some special experiences traveling around and visiting different brewers. I know I’m very privileged to be able to do that as well and we
get to go to some fantastic pubs.

I think when I retire eventually, I don’t know when that will be,
but I think my ambition will be just go around all these different pubs again and go and try them all
out while I’m in retirement, that’d be quite a good fun I think. Maybe take a train or a taxi!

PAUL
What’s the one item in the brewery you couldn’t live without?

DARREN
I was going to say my PC because nowadays a brewer’s job is very much about legislation,
looking after everything, and keeping good records. But I’m gonna say we have a set of imperial spanners, ring spanners in the brew house. All of our sluices have different sizes
nuts on and they’re all 100 years old and to try and find a spanner to undo these nuts when you’re skimming the yeast. There is one set of ring spanners that sits in a place and it has to be put back there, so that set of spanners is crucial, especially on a weekend when you’re in a
rush.

You’ve got to skim the beer and somebody’s not put the spanner you need back, that’s the one thing that, so those spanners are pretty crucial to my my happy weekends in the brewhouse.

PAUL
A good answer, very good answer. What’s your favourite song, album, artist or music to play during a brew day? Or do you not have music on?

DARREN

No, we do. We have a battle between a bit of Radio
Two, sometimes a bit of Radio One.

I’ve got one lad whose 22 in the brew house and he tends to flick it Radio One or local radio.

Personally I like a bit of 80s music, the vintage that we are.

A song that always comes to mind is ‘Gold‘, we do a beer called Dorset Gold, so Spandeau Ballet’s
Gold is what we tend to hum to ourselves.

Somebody always comes up with the words gold, and everybody starts singing this song.

Actually Tony Hadley, the lead singer of Spandeau Ballet, we used to do a beer for a posh restaurant, he was there at the do and I spent an evening
drinking with Tony Hadley.

I was like a star struck teenager. I was like oh my god, you were in Spandeau Ballet!

So, probably that 90s era, 80s era of music, that’s my vintage and you know there’s a lot of music coming back nowadays.

PAUL

Absolutely, that’s a great answer.

If you weren’t in the brewing industry what would you be doing?

DARREN

I guess I would probably be working in a pub or hospitality. I grew up working in a pub from the age of 11, stocking the bar, collecting pots, being the pot man. Working behind the bar as I was a student
and really I think that’s probably what attracted me really to brewing.

I spent a year living in
Kent when I was in in my degree and discovered Sheperd Neame beers as a real ale when I was a
student, and then came back to work in a pub. So I would probably find myself in hospitality doing
something.

You know my ideal world probably a ski chalet or something, being a chalet manager or
that sort of thing.

I sort of fell into brewing, but coming from a working pub background.

PAUL

Very good, I think we’re very lucky with pubs aren’t we?

DARREN

We have such great atmospheres and once you’ve got hooked into that and realise the benefits that it can bring to people it’s just wonderful to be
around that sort of gathering isn’t it really in a local pub. There’s nothing better.
You never know who’s going to walk in, we’ll get to in a minute but where your next job’s coming
from because it could be a customer and your pubs gonna be your future boss.

They’re a wonderful
place to meet different people from all social classes, all walks of life, even Tony Hadley eventually.

It’s amazing the people you see in your village pub.

I live in a village where
Billy Bragg lives. Again, that era, so you can often see Billy wandering to the pub for a pint.

So you know it’s just Billy to us, but people say oh my God he’s quite famous you know.

PAUL

Incredible, who is your biggest inspiration in brewing?

DARREN

I’m gonna say a very good friend of yours and mine,
Roger Ryman.

Roger always had time for other brewers and he packaged for me for many years.

If I had a question in brewing, Roger would be my first point of call. His knowledge of brewing,
his technical ability as a brewer and even though I was a brewer about the same time as Roger in
a very small brewery compared to Roger’s.

Meteor had climbed to fame at St Austell,
he would always pick up the phone always answer an email and I think he was an inspiration to many
many brewers and a great friend and sadly missed.

PAUL

Yeah well said, really really nice guy Roger and
very well said. What got you into brewing? I think you sort of covered that earlier on.

DARREN
Yeah I was a biology graduate working in a pub. I was COSSH and health and safety trained
because I spent a year at 89/90 working for Shell Research in a lab. Came back to the village,
worked behind the bar and Adrian Wood lived in the village, drank in my pub and he was Head Brewer for
Palmer’s at the time.

Somebody left and nobody’d written anything down for years and they wanted somebody that could understand what they were doing and maybe write some instructions. So my
stacking pallets was really watching what the bottling line did and worked out why and how it filled stuff.

So I spent some time running that area and very quickly became production manager etc and the rest is history really.

So Adrian Woods sat in a bar saying do you want a job, me saying no not really and my Dad saying ooh I think you ought to really.

PAUL
That’s funny.

DARREN

Yeah it’s funny how these things happen isn’t it. It’s just amazing how that all clicks into place, these things sometimes just work like that.

PAUL

Really good,
and what’s your favourite beer festival?

DARREN

I’m gonna have to say Tuckers Maltings because I’ve been on the committee for probably the last 10 years or more, you know just because it’s a big festival in the South West and we get all you guys down to judge on the Thursday and there’s some great pubs, but we’ll end up in the cider bar, drinking cider when we really don’t want to.

It’s a great festival and I think it’s changing a bit as the Maltings has closed and moved into a
marquee but I think the people make a festival and I think it just has a great following. 

You get a great load of Southwest brewers there and people from the industry so that’s probably one of my
favourites.

The other one, there’s a festival at the Bank’s Arms on the Isle of Purbeck,
so Pippa runs that and it’s in August each year.

The Bank’s Arms looks across Paul Harbour
so it looks at sandbanks and it’s just the most iconic setting.

She does a load of beer swaps,puts on 50 beers and you get about 2000 people sat on a piece of grass opposite the pub.

I’ve taken the camper up there a couple of times and helped people behind the bar and you know people at the end of the evening cycle down the two miles to the sandbanks ferry to get back to Pool at the end of the festival, all drunk on bikes it’s just an amazing beer festival but it’s more of a social for the the people of sandbanks in the surrounding area.

PAUL

Sounds brilliant. I haven’t been to that one sounds like an awesome one to look up.

DARREN

So hopefully we’ll get back to beer festivals again
soon with the way things are progressing. Fingers crossed. We’ve missed our beer festival for sure.

Yeah definitely there’s a lot been postponed until 2022 you know, we’ve made a different decision not to hold it this year we’ll be bigger better and you know back to how it should be.

We don’t want to do it with less people, with restrictions so we’ll move it to April 2022 and we’ll all end up there again.

PAUL

Well done, it’s a great festival it’s one of
the first I went to actually when I started working at Faram’s 30 years ago. How long has the festival been going because I went to one of the first one or two.

22 or 23 years-ish. Yeah it goes back a long way. I remember sponsoring it in the very early days with John and Jenny Aries down there and they very kindly gave me a reference so that I could judge at the Great American Beer Festival one year. They asked for references whether
you could judge there and John and Jenny very kindly help me out with that which was great.

But yeah, a great festival there. What’s your favourite interest or hobby outside brewing?

DARREN
I have a VW California campervan, which I stick the bikes on the back and my
wife and I go off to all sorts of places and take the camper and go cycling. I’m a mountain biker so I cycle most weekends. I’ll get out and do 25, 30 miles on a Sunday.

I’m a big sports fan, of all sorts of sport. I tell my wife I shouldn’t have Sky sports because I would just watch it all the time, so I don’t have Sky sports, but I’ll always watch sport.

In the winter I love to ski. I’ve skied a lot over the years as a youngster, and more recently I’ve got a couple of friends with chalets in the alps and it’s very fortunate if you’ve got mates that do well for themselves and buy themselves nice five-bedroom chalets and invite you out for a couple of weeks skiing.

PAUL

Can’t be bad.

DARREN

Yeah, I like to ski with the boys. I’ve just got back into
playing a bit of golf. I’ve just bought myself a new set of golf clubs in lock down. I played a lot of golf as a youngster and I’m just starting to swing the old irons again and and getting
back into a little bit of golf on the weekends, probably more to keep fit after giving up cricket and football and things like that.

I just need something to get me out and staying fit.

PAUL

Yeah
gotta stay fit. That’s good stuff, and what was the last beer you brewed?

DARREN
Well, we’re brewing IPA this morning, but yesterday we brewed Dorset Gold. So,
at the moment just trying to get back into brewing our range of beers, so I mashed in this morning at
eight o’clock on a small brew of Dorset Gold. With only gardens open we’re trying to brew some small brews to keep the East going and praying for fine weather and getting cask ale back in pubs.

PAUL

Absolutely, and did you sing to yourself while you were
brewing Gold.?

PAUL

I can’t get it out of my mind!

DARREN

It’s one of those songs that you just hum to yourself
as you’re mashing in so that everybody else hums along.

PAUL

You’ve got me singing it in my head!

Fuggles or Goldings?

DARREN

Obviously Goldings, it’s been the store of our recipes for a hundred years or more.

We’ve been buying Goldings and yeah it’s just a bittering hop that we use in everything pretty much.

Occasionally in the seasonals we will change the bittering hop but we know that Goldings
is gonna give us consistent performances. The yields and the alphas are pretty good every year,
you get what you paid for. It’s good English Goldings.

We always rub them
with you and then pick the best ones so we’re committed to Goldings recipes somewhat.

We even put English Goldings on our beer mats, so yeah we’re really committed to it. It’s a good variety definitely.

PAUL

What’s next for the brewery? What are you up to next then what can we look forward to?

DARREN
A bit of a time of change, because John Palmer, MD, his daughter Emily has just joined the board and she’s going to be coming as MD. So we’re going to have a new, young forward-thinking MD.

Her background is a biology degree, so she’s a scientist by background and then she was in finance with Ross Charles for a few years.

She’s recently got married and moved back to West Dorset and she’s about to take over the company, and John will become our executive chairman and Emily will come in as a young, fresh mind into a family business.

She’s the fifth generation of Palmer’s in the business.

PAUL

Fantastic, so exciting times really.

DARREN

So he’s starting to
ask a few questions and find out what we do, and listen to a few answers and see what we can and can’t do.

I think she’ll embrace the digital era, will do a lot more online stuff.

I’ve done a few meet the zooms already and things like that so here we are. I think we have to, as a
traditional company.

People think, they’ve been around for 227 years they’re old fashioned but we can’t sit there and go we’ve been here for ages we’ve got our own pubs we’ll do our own thing, we’ve got to move with the times we’ve got to develop brands, produce seasonals, make sure our own core brands are great.

We launched a craft keg a couple of years ago, as a launcher. We bought
750 brand new kegs for ourselves, don’t rent anything let’s get on with and do it properly.

We decided to try and keep up with the brewing market and what our customers want.

I think the market has always changed. There’s one thing I’ve learned in the industry you can never sit still, you’re always going to be looking at new things, what’s going on, what’s changing and people’s
ideas about going out to drink.

The younger generation don’t tend to drink quite as much on a night.

You and I will probably go out and have six or eight pints quite easily without
worrying about it too much and now people tend to drink a little bit less, or higher gravity
and more people are drinking at home.

Things are always changing aren’t they.

I’m very much a pub drinker and I’ve grown up working in pubs and I could probably drink as much free beer as I wanted at home in bottles, but I’d rather go and buy beer in my local pub because I think it’s
about the social aspects of drinking, remembering where you had that pint is really important.

I tend to drink wine at home with my wife but I think we’re changing. Actually we do go out and play skittles, I’ll have six or seven pints but I tend to just drink weaker beers because we have to mash in the mornings.

Us brewers, we have to get up early.

Yeah well a good 3.8-4 percent beer is
perfect if you’re having a bit of a bit of volume. It just spreads the load a bit doesn’t it?

It doesn’t help my skittles if I drink a strong beer. I just can’t hit anything by the end of the night.

Your viewers may not be aware of long island skittles, it’s very much a West Country game,
but it’s taken quite seriously. It’s been going for 105 years and I’m a captain on the
side in that team.

I have played skittles on many occasions
in my younger days. I haven’t played lately actually but it’s great fun,
and a few beers and good camaraderie makes a great evening out great fun. Yeah it gets people
in the pub on winter’s nights when they’ve got 12 drinking men that will play skittles.

It’s good for pubs as well.

PAUL

Good fun, absolutely great fun. Well that’s great Darren, it’s always great to catch up with you and thanks very much for spending some time.

It’s probably a bit more
than five minutes, but that’s good.

It’s good to get your views and a very interesting chat.

Hopefully everybody will catch up with us again next time on Five Minutes with Farams.

We’ll be doing a lot more throughout the season, in the hop yards and meeting other brewers as well,

so thanks again Darren for joining us and we’ll catch up and see you soon.

DARREN

Thanks for inviting me.