No, it’s not the underside of a
wooden conveyor belt with giant wooden rollers; it’s a barrel of beer! A whole
row of them in fact! Not pub-sized ones, but proper hogsheads that are ready to
be rolled off to another part of the brewery for bottling. Very few pubs could
get through one of these before the fermentation expires. Butt the traditional
aroma of wood certainly adds to the flavour of the beer, and it can be stored
here for around two weeks to gain full maturity. Wood isn’t the best shape to
hold together, and I’m amazed at how leakproof these barrels are. I would have
thought that the easiest way to make a barrel would be to scoop out the inside
of a tree. Instead we have straight-cut pieces of timber that are bound
together tightly by a metal frame work. It’s not an easy thing to achieve;
especially when they used to be built by hand. I wonder if they still are.
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