Martin Fone's Blog, page 128

Brewdog Lone Wolf Original Gin

The last time I got uproariously drunk was on Brewdog’s Punk IPA, appropriately enough at the 100 Club. Ever since I have had a healthy respect for them as a business and also for their products and there is a lot to be admired. They began life with an interesting business model, inviting subscribers in a form of crowdsourcing initiative entitled Equity for Punks.

Their growth has been inexorable, allowing them to establish their own state-of-the-art distillery on a green field site north of Aberdeen in Ellon. In an industry that emits carbon, it is Scotland’s first carbon negative distillery, their boast being that for every tonne of carbon they produce, they take two tonnes out of the atmosphere. In 2020 they purchased a 9,308-acre plot of land in the Scottish Highlands and have plans to embark upon one of the largest reforestation projects in the UK to date.   

Brewdog’s company profile is one of fierce independence and defiance, disrupters aiming to reshape the world of brewing. Their ales helped to fashion the craft ale explosion and, taking the opportunity to exploit the opportunities created by the ginaissance, are aiming to make their own splash in the spirit’s market. Everything is done from scratch, allowing Brewdog’s Distillery, under Steven Kersley, to take complete control of their destiny and product.         

The distillery is the home to what may be the tallest column still in the UK, standing at just under sixty feet tall. It is in this three-headed bubble still and columns that the base spirit is created using a mix of wheat and barley (a 50/50 mix) and the distillery’s own special yeast, before the botanicals are added to the spirit and distilled in a smaller 400-litre Arnold Holstein still.

As is to be expected, they are picky as to the botanicals they use. They rejected thirty-nine types of juniper before settling on a berry from Tuscany which, together with Scots pine, provides the baseline for the botanicals. The other botanicals deployed are grapefruit peel, lemon peel, pink peppercorn, orris root, angelica, mace, cardamom, lemongrass, Kaffir lime, almonds, coriander, and lavender.    

The bottle is made from clear glass, rounded with a conical shoulder and a shortish neck leading t a cork stopper. The design of the label is crisp and clean, the front label is shaped like a shield with a white background with copper coloured lettering and a silver square tipped at a jaunty angle. The labelling on the rear of the bottle follows the same crisp, clean style and, unusually for gins, is particularly informative.  

On removing the stopper, the aroma is a heady mix of juniper with piney and citric overtones. In the glass the spirit is clear but louches when a mixer is added. In the mouth it is creamy and oily, the immediate hit is one of juniper and hot spices. The juniper is no wallflower and is constantly discernible as the other flavours, first the citrus, lemongrass, and lime, and then the more delicate flavours from the coriander, peppercorns, and mace move in and out of the flavour spectrum.

It is a well-balanced, very drinkable gin which, with an ABV of 40%, is strong enough to bite but not savage you. It is highly recommended.

Until the next time, cheers!

Death On The Way

A review of Death on the Way by Freeman Wills Crofts

You know what you are going to get when you open a book penned by Freeman Wills Crofts. It will be a carefully plotted, well-worked mystery, but there will be periods of longeur as Inspector French explores every possibility before the solution, often ingenious, is revealed. In this, the ninth in Crofts’ Inspector French series, originally published in 1932 and reissued by Collins Crime Club to celebrate the centenary of the publication of his first novel, The Cask, in 1920, the story is not as heavy-going as some that I have read, but my overall impression was that of mild disappointment.   

There are several reasons why I felt a bit deflated as I reached the end. Although the mystery has moments of ingenuity, and it was clever to intertwine fraud with murder, the bones of the fraud, the falsifying of quantities of material excavated as the Southern Railway Company widens the Redchurch to Whitness line in Dorset, was a little too technical and, dare I say it, dull to get too many juices flowing. Crofts was an engineer by training and clearly knew his stuff. For this reader it was sufficient to know in broad terms rather than tedious detail how it was pulled off.

Two deaths amongst the engineers, both seemingly suicides, bring the worthy French into the story. He realises that they are, in fact, murders staged to look like suicide, one involving the coshing of Ackerely before he is left on the railway track to be run over, and the poisoning of Carey before he is hung. Seemingly cast-iron alibis and the lack of any immediately obvious motive makes his task difficult, but it is hard not to conclude that French makes a meal of this case. It is far from his greatest case.

Like a dog with a bone, he will pursue every snippet of a clue to its very end, but this case has him foxed as he repeatedly follows the wrong trail. To make matters worse, when he plucks up the courage to arrest a culprit, he makes a hash of it by feeling the collar of the wrong person. His blushes are only spared by the separate investigations of a clever young woman who is convinced of the innocence of her beau. French missed the killer clue, the distinctive typeface of a portable typewriter, for the rather lame excuse that it was not there to examine when he called round.

Also known as Double Death, the book does have some redeeming features. Crofts’ technical knowledge is peerless and his plain, straightforward prose simplifies and makes comprehensible what is a technical and complex subject. There are fascinating insights to be learned about railway engineering and the operation of a train line. The description of what it was like to ride on the plate of a steam engine is one of the book’s highlights, second only to discovery and reclamation of the bicycle from the sea. The conchologist is one of the few characters who come to life and injects some much-needed levity into a book whose overall tone is that of gloom.

Crofts also understands the dynamics of office life, its petty jealousies and rivalries, its tedium, and the reality that promotion is only achievable by waiting for dead men’s shoes. What is fascinating is how the employees embrace what would have been the cutting edge of technology at the time, such as a planimeter and comptometer. There is love interest, unusually for a Crofts novel, and for once the principal female, Brenda Vane, is not only one of most interesting characters but also the brightest.

In this book Crofts is alive to the impact of what we would now know as PTSD on veterans from the First World War and the pressures caused by having to scrape by on barely enough to live, an increasingly common aspect of life in the 1930s. And unusually fir the genre, the person with the weakest alibi is not the culprit.

There are redeeming features in this book if you are prepared to search for them.

Rope’s End, Rogue’s End

A review of Rope’s End, Rogue’s End by E C R Lorac

Edith Caroline Rivett, who wrote prolifically under the pseudonyms of E C R Lorac and Carol Carnac, is fast becoming one of my favourite writers of the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction. Rope’s End, Rogue’s End, originally published in 1942, features Lorac’s go-to police detective, Inspector Robert MacDonald and is an excellent piece of writing which sustains the sense of tension and danger until the end.

Missing is Lorac’s profound sense of place and love of the English countryside but she replaces it with an element of Gothic, a country house, Wulfstane Manor, at first blush a seemingly unpromising and unoriginal place to stage a murder mystery, that is broody, gloomy, falling into disrepair, and with a profound sense of doom and malice in its eery atmosphere. It is a rabbit warren of unused rooms, winding staircases, cellars, not forgetting its twenty-eight ground floor entrances, offering every opportunity for a determined murderer to plot the victim’s demise and hope to get away with it.

Living at the Manor are twins, Veronica and Martin Mallowood. They were bequeathed the house on their father’s death, much to the chagrin of their elder brothers, Paul and Basil who have made fortunes in the City, and the more studied indifference of Richard who has spent his life as a traveller and explorer. Veronica is struggling to make ends meet and Paul tries to pressurise her into letting him occupy part of the house in return for taking care of the maintenance costs. Veronica, who hates Pual, is determined to resist.

In their different ways all the Mallowoods are deeply unpleasant, unloveable characters and the divisions in their relationships are deeper than the Rift Valley. The family have a gathering, a rarity in itself, to say farewell to Paul who is going into semi-retirement and travelling. He takes his formal goodbyes after dinner, but the following morning is waved off by Richard and seen departing by Martin.

Later that morning a shot is heard in the playroom and when the locked door is broken down, the mutilated body of Basil is found, having shot himself, or so it seems. At the precise moment that the body is being discovered a police officer arrives with a warrant for Basil’s arrest for embezzlement. Was it suicide and, if not, how was the murder committed? Was the body really that of Basil’s, why was Veronica convinced initially that it was Martin in the room? What had Martin seen that caused him to disappear from the house and why did Veronica give him such an unconvincing alibi?

The worthy MacDonald, brought in to investigate, does not buy the suicide theory. As he digs into the backgrounds of the Mallowoods he discovers a trail of embezzlement, false identities and double lives. Angling for a lead he finds a fishing rod in Martin’s room, the importance of which most readers will immediately realise but the method in which the person in the playroom met their death is highly ingenious and the precise mechanics of it would elude most.

With such a small list of possible suspects, Lorac does a fine job in maintaining the air of mystery with the finger of suspicion vacillating between the characters before the secret passages and hidden rooms reveal their deadly secret and whodunit. I found myself thinking it was one and then another and the question of the victim’s identity had not really entered my mind until late on.

My only cavils are with MacDonald himself and this reprint . He is a dry old stick, who gets on with the grind of following up the clues wherever they take him. He does not really have a character of his own, Lorac quite content to use him as a plot device and to concentrate her impressive literary firepower on the odious Mallowoods and their gloomy pile. And such a fine story deserves a better edition than the current one available on Amazon. I know Lorac novels are hard to find and the emphasis, rightly, should be on bringing more back to life, but an edition that has fewer typos than this one would be greatly welcomed. There is more than enough to guess about with the story!

A Slice Of Victoria Sponge

A nation of cake lovers, the British spend over £1.3 billion on them a year and, in 2018/19, consumed on average 151 grams of cakes, buns, and pastries per person per week. The enforced changes to our daily routines over the last two years are likely to have seen these figures rise. Such is our obsession with the soft, sweet foodstuff that it has spawned an unlikely televisual hit in The Great British Bake Off (GBBO), now in its twelfth season, after initially airing August 17, 2010.

Firmly established amongst the nation’s favourites is the Victoria sponge, or the Victoria sandwich cake, a two-layer, sponge-like, airy cake with a layer of jam and, for the indulgent, cream in the middle and a dusting of icing sugar on the top. The lodestone of the recipe is the weight of the eggs in their shells which determines the proportions of the butter, sugar, and flour to be used.

Deceptively simple as the recipe may be, it is a real art to make the perfect Victoria sponge, so much so that it is seen as the yardstick for judging a baker’s acumen. The Women’s Institute have elevated it to an art form, where marks can be gained or lost depending upon the texture of the cake and the type of jam. Following suit, the GBBO has made one of its supreme challenges the production of the perfect Victoria sponge, where contestants seek to avoid such faux pas as a soggy bottom.

The origins of the sponge cake, so called because its texture is akin to that of the sea-dwelling sponge, can be traced back to at least the 15th century. At the court of the Duchy of Savoy, a confection like a sponge finger, a low-density, dry, egg-based, sweet sponge cake biscuit shaped like a large digit, known as a Savoiardi, was produced to mark the visit of the French king. So tasty was it that it was adopted as the court’s official biscuit.

The earliest British recipe appeared in Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife (1615), although he called it biscuit bread. The ingredients included a pound of fine flour, a pound of sugar, eight eggs, four yolks, as well as half an ounce of aniseeds and a similar quantity of coriander seeds. Making it was not for the faint-hearted as Markham warned that “will take very near an hour’s beating”, to perfect the mixture.

There is some controversy as to what the result looked like when it had been baked. Some commentators suggested that it would be very dense in texture, while others thought it would be more akin to a biscuit. One enterprising blogger went to the trouble of following the recipe and found that in texture it was slightly denser than a pound cake but with a similar sort of flavour. Perhaps that settles the argument.

Custard has a long culinary history, popular in the Middle Ages when baked in pastry, although, according to the 14th century collection of English recipes, The Forme of Cury, it was also used as a binding for meat and fish. Elizabeth Bird was very partial to it, but one of its principal ingredients, eggs, upset her delicate digestive system. Fortunately, she was married to Alfred, a chemist who in 1837 had set up a shop underneath the old Market Hall in Birmingham’s Bull Street.

A dutiful husband, Alfred challenged himself to develop an egg-free custard, so that his wife could indulge her passion. He found, after many failed attempts, that adding cornflour to the milky mixture when warmed would thicken it sufficiently to give it a custard-like texture. This new form of custard was tried out at a dinner party and pronounced a success. Delighted with the feedback, Alfred set up a company in 1843, Alfred Bird and Sons, to produce his custard powder on a commercial basis. To this day his name is synonymous the world over with custard.

Next time we will look at how another of Elizabeth’s allergies gave rise to the Victoria sponge. If you enjoyed this, check out More Curious Questions, available now.

Sporting Event Of The Week (29)

This Shrove Tuesday saw the welcome return of an event that has stood the course of time since 1455, the Olney Pancake Race. Open to female residents of the Northamptonshire town, numbers restricted to a maximum of 25, and wearing headscarves, aprons, and t-shirt, and carrying a frying pan, the race is run over 415 yards. Competitors have to toss their pancake at the start and the end of the race.

It is said that the event’s origin lies with a local Olney woman who ran out of her house, dressed in apron and scarf, tossing a pancake in a pan to stop it from burning as she had heard the church bell toll alerting the faithful to the imminent start of a service. This year’s winner was Katie Godof, the third time she has triumphed, with a time of 1 minute 10.83 seconds.

Since 1950, there has been an international aspect to the race, with competitors from Liberal in Kansas joining in the fun. The ladies from Liberal hold the pan handle in this competition, winning 36 times to the Olney ladies’ 26. Curiously, the 1980 contest was declared null and void as a news van had inconsiderately a new van had blocked the finishing line. True to form, Whitney Hay from Liberal finished first with a time of one minute 7.54 seconds.    

It is good to see some traditions surviving.

Island Of The Week (3)

One of four islands that make up the Pitcairn Islands, Henderson’s main claim to fame is that it is “the world’s most polluted island”, the currents of the Pacific Ocean dumping masses of debris on to it each day.

The remote, uninhabited island has now another claim to fame – it is not where it was thought to be. Charts of the area were created by the Royal Navy in 1937 using photographs taken from the air, but there is now an exercise underway to check and update charts regarding British Overseas Territories around the world.  

Sailors use radar and GPS satellites to get new images of an area and superimpose them over the existing charts. Members of the crew of HMS Spey were surprised to find that the radar overlay was a mile away from the island of Henderson, leading to the inevitable conclusion that the island was plotted in the wrong position.

It does not seem to have mattered as no one noticed for so long, but it is best to get these things just right. It might just be better to follow the trail of rubbish and debris to find out exactly where Henderson Island is.

Eighteen Of The Gang

When someone is looking particularly well turned out, they are described as dressed to the nines. James Ware, in his Passing English of a Victorian Era, gives an intriguing explanation of the phrase’s origins. The original plural of eye was “eyen” which gave way over time to “eyes”. The meaning of eyen disappeared in the mists of time and to make the phrase comprehensible eyem was replaced by a rhyming equivalent, nines.

One of the keys to survival as a cabbie is knowing all the tricks of the trade. One was to pick up a duffer fare. Shortly before the theatres closed and their clientele disgorged on to the streets, the police would close the Strand to cabs, seriously limiting their ability to have first pickings of the lucrative after-theatre trade. The crafty cabbie would pick up someone, either an accomplice or someone off the street, and drive them to the Strand gratis. Having let their duffer fare out, the cabbie was then in a prime spot to pick up the theatre goers.     

To dun was to worry someone for money, usually a task allotted to a bailiff. Ware notes that the term gained currency in the reign of Henry VII and was a reference to a highly successful and notorious bailiff, John Dun, who operated in Lincoln. So successful was he in reclaiming debts that his name was used proverbially to describe the process.

Viper Barrel-Aged Gin

One of the advantages that distillers who specialise in gin have over those who concentrate on whisky is that of time. It is a relatively simple process, leaving aside the tricky bit of getting the mix of botanicals to produce an acceptable drink, and the period between staring the distillation and having a finished product can be numbered in a handful of days, if not hours, compared with the years that whiskies have to be laid down in barrels to mature. The pressure to differentiate your product in the frenzied marketplace spawned by the ginaissance has led to a new type of gin, matured in a barrel. On the face of it, it seems a tad counterintuitive to give up the immediacy of bringing your product to market for the benefit of infusing your carefully curated distillation with the flavours drawn from a wooden barrel.

However, for what may be called the taste archaeologist, someone keen to sample the tastes of yesteryear, a quirk perhaps analogous to the renaissance of vinyl records as the perfect antidote to the blandness of streaming, there is sound reasoning behind this latest trend in gin distillation. Well into the 20th century wooden casks were the most common means for the storage of spirits including gin. In the late 18th century Citadelle Reserve Gin was smuggled into England from France, supposedly by Royal order, in wooden casks and recipe books from the Savoy in the early 20th century show advertisements for barrel-aged gin. Wooden casks were only phased midway through the century.

A distillery that has added a barrel-aged gin into their range is Viper, based in Cerne Abbas in Dorset. The origin of their name is a delightful tale that marketeers love. As they were preparing their plot to grow some of the botanicals they intended to use, they discovered a viper in the long grass, and decided to use the name. At least they were able to justify the strapline, “a gin with a bite”.    

Viper Barrel-Aged Gin has been aged in a finely grained Allier oak cask, famed in their spiritual home in central France for the subtlety and elegance in which the convey spicy flavours and aromas, ideal for a juniper-led gin. The cask used is an exact replica of the barrels en route to South Africa when the MSC Napoli beached on the Dorset coast in 2007 and was previously conditioned with the finest Cider Brandy from the Somerset Cider Brandy Company. The barrel gives a distinctive smoky, oaky flavour to the spirit.

The base spirit is made from English wheat grain and ten botanicals are used, although, sadly their identities are not revealed save for the assurance that they have been “carefully selected” and sourced, wherever possible, locally.  

The bottle is shaped like a slightly overweight wine bottle with a rounded shoulder and a short neck with an artificial cork stopper. The labels, at front and back, use a chocolatey brown background with a typeface reminiscent of that used in 19th century posters with jagged edges and lettering in a muted silver. My bottle is from batch no 001.

The first thing that struck me was the spirit’s colour – a pale green. On the nose it is distinctively piney and smoky and in the glass is an exceptionally smooth and well-balanced drink with juniper and apple to the fore. The aftertaste is long and lingering. This is a gin with a difference and certainly has a bite with an ABV of 5%. I loved it and as it only comes in a 50cl bottle I will be savouring every drop. It is well worth seeking out and I will be intrigued to sample Vapour’s other gins. If this is the standard for barrel-aged gins, then it may be a trend that will be around for many a year.

Until the next time, cheers!

Darkling Death

A review of Darkling Death by Francis Vivian

This is the tenth and final book in Francis Vivian’s Inspector Knollis series, originally published in 1956 and reissued by Dean Street Press, and it is a bit of an oddity. Vivian’s books always struck me as worthy, workmanlike with the occasional flash of brilliance, but Darkling Death is a disappointment, as much interested in exploring the nature of time, existence, and relationships as developing an intriguing mystery for his police detective, Gordon Knollis, to unravel.

The culprit for all this is Brother Ignatius, a peripatetic priest of the Nestorian order, whom we first met in The Ladies of Locksley. The opening scene is on a train where Ignatius shares a carriage with a writer, Brandreth Grayson, who has lost his money in a publishing venture by staying loyal to his partner. They are both on their way to a village in Norfolk, Grayson to face the music with his odious brother-in-law, Herbert Moston, and to salvage what is left of his marriage and be reunited with his daughter, while the priest is visiting an elderly member of his flock.

On the journey they start pontificating on the meaning of existence, a wide-ranging discussion that drags in the teachings of Ouspenskii amongst others. I could not quite work out whether this was Vivian’s homage to G K Chesterton or whether he was intending to take off the Catholic philosopher. Either way, he failed in his objective, and it made for a heavy, barely digestible opening to the novel.

No sooner has Grayson got to the village than he is involved in a violent argument with his brother-in-law which ends in a fight. Moston comes off second best and worse is to follow. As Grayson leaves the property, he hears two shots and believes he heard the voice, possibly of a woman, bidding him Good Evening. Instead of going directly back to his lodgings in the village pub, Grayson goes for a walk, quite where he cannot recall, and by the time he gets back, the local policeman has informed the regulars that Moston has been shot and is unlikely to survive.

Grayson makes an unfortunate gaff by revealing, all too readily, that he had a fight with Moston in the Gun Room and he finds himself the number one suspect. In their own way the principal regulars of the pub try to protect him, but his prospects look bleak just at the time that his fortunes seem to be turning round, with his agent finalising a lucrative deal for the filming rights of some of his books.

In truth, there is little in the way of detecting in this story and Knollis is very much sidelined. Brother Ignatius holds the key to the mystery, but to the frustration of all concerned, is bound by the conventions of the confessional and can only assist by hints and nods. The identity of the culprit is not hard to deduce as there is really only one person with a motive strong enough to do away with the odious Moston, although Vivian does his best with a fairly weak plot to throw in a red herring or two.

I was hoping that the series would end on a high, but I was left with the feeling that Vivian had done with Knollis, after producing books on a yearly basis there was a three year gap between The Ladies of Locksley and this one. Sadly, though, it never recovered from its stodgy beginning. This is definitely one for the completist and not one from which to begin your exploration of what had been up to this point a highly enjoyable series.

Vivian did go on to publish another work of detective fiction, Dead Opposite The Church, which is a stand-alone story. I will look it up in the hope that it is a more satisfying read.         

The Thursday Murder Club

A review of The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

If you are looking to write a modern-day cosy murder mystery, where do you set it when country houses that host weekend parties are few and far between and the design of railway carriages rules out the impossible murder? Richard Osman’s solution is to set his engaging mystery in a retirement village, no stranger to death for sure as the residents see out their final years in some luxury before shuffling off this mortal coil.

Four of the residents have formed a club that meets every Thursday in the Jigsaw Room, in a slot between Art History and Conversational French, to pore over files of old, unsolved murder cases purloined from the archives of the local police forces by Penny. Penny, a former police officer, is now hors de combat, her appointment with the grim reaper imminent, and her place has been taken by Joyce, whose thoughts and observations in the form of a journal, are interlaced by Osman into the narrative. Elizabeth is the ring leader, a tour de force in her own right, who gets things done and she is ably assisted by Ron, a former union agitator, and Ibrahim, a rather fastidious Egyptian psychiatrist. They have great fun, a welcome relief to struggling with a crossword puzzle or completing a Sudoko puzzle.

Their cosy world is disturbed when a real murder darkens their door. Plans are afoot to extend the village development and first the developer’s sidekick, Tony Curran, is bludgeoned to death in his own kitchen. The sleuthing quartet have seen Curran in a heated discussion with developer, Ian Ventham, shortly before his death. Then Ventham is involved in a scuffle with protestors who are trying to prevent the destruction of the graveyard of the former Convent on the site, during which he is given a lethal injection. This manna from heaven is too good an opportunity for the four amateur sleuths to pass up.

One of the book’s key strengths is Osman’s ability to bring his characters to life. He takes the time to introduce his protagonists and for the reader to understand how they tick. As a result, the narrative potters along, moving almost distractedly from one perspective to another, from one scene to another, in short bursts of action, as if consciously aping the actions and thought processes of its septuagenarian protagonists.

The quartet strike up an unlikely relationship with a young policewoman, Donna de Freitas, whom they first met giving security advice but then for whom they finesse a place on the murder investigation, providing a valuable source of intelligence. If the murders of Curran and Ventham were not enough, another body is unearthed in the convent’s graveyard. This is a tale of drug cartels, illicit love, unwanted pregnancies, the brutal realities of a world that hardly penetrates the twee surroundings of Cooper’s Chase.  

In truth, the plot depends too much on coincidences for my taste and while the attentive reader can determine who the culprits are, Osman does not entirely play fair with his cluing, key pieces rather slipped into the narrative at the last minute. There are also enough loose ends to convince that this will be the start of a series, even if I did not have The Man Who Died Twice jostling for pole position in my TBR pile.  

However, it would be churlish to judge this book against the standards of The Detection Club. This should be read as it is presented, a cosy, entertaining, at times, enthralling piece of detective fiction. It has no pretentions to be other than what it is and, for that, it is a hugely enjoyable read, well worth investing a few hours of your time on.