14th May 2020 | Beer, Beer Writing, Books, Craft - An Argument, Craft Beer
I'm writing and self-publishing a book in 13 weeks and sharing the experience for anyone doing or thinking of doing the same. This week: a major milestone, and my experience of combining drinking and writing.
If it looks a little thin, that's because (a) it's printed double-sided, and (b) it's a bit thin – compared to my previous books.
Final word count, Tuesday night: 53,572
I FINISHED THE FIRST DRAFT!
Ten days later than scheduled when I started, I reached the delicious moment of printing out the first iteration of the book. There's still a long way to go: I reckon 8,000 to 10,000 of those words need to come out. There's a lot of repetition, and a lot of digressions, some of which help, and some that don't.
Even though most editors I work with now work online using Microsoft Word's 'Track changes' tools, I like to start with a physical copy. A few weeks ago I talked about Stephen King's book, On Writing. One of my favourite bits is his advice on what to do when you finally reach this point. He suggests a total change of pace – "Go fishing, go kayaking, do a jigsaw puzzle."
Jigsaw puzzle it is then. I spent most of yesterday putting together a painting of Padstow Harbour.
But here's the best part:
"How long you let your book rest – sort of like bread dough between kneadings – is entirely up to you, but I think it should be a minimum of six weeks. During this time your manuscript will be safely shut away in a desk drawer, ageing and (one hopes) mellowing."
I don't have six weeks. I'll be leaving it for about four days. But it's a lovely image, with wonderful results:
"If you've never done it before, you'll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange and often exhilarating experience. It's yours, you'll recognise it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It's always easier to kill someone else's darlings than it is to kill your own."
That phrase is King's analogy for the hardest bit you will face if you write something book length: there will be a sentence or paragraph that you love, the best thing you've written. And it won't belong in this book and you must cut it out. But that's still to come…
To get to this point, I had to play with the famous quote in the title above. Like most great snappy quotes, it was never said by the person to whom it is commonly attributed. Ernest Hemingway was, if anything, a vocal opponent of trying to do good work while drunk.
But Hemingway wasn't a drinks writer.
I'm not necessarily recommending writing drunk, but I thought it might be worth sharing my experiments and experience with it.
I normally write completely sober, in the mornings. But when I'm travelling, or covering beer events, my note-taking usually happens when I'm not. I wrote many of the notes for Three Sheets to the Wind while living up to the book's title. It's hilarious to go back through those old notebooks and see how my handwriting deteriorates as the day wears on:
Notes written in Dublin, around opening time.
Notes in the same notebook from Madrid, written around 2am.
The thing is, if you can decipher the writing, there's some good stuff there. This went on to become one of my favourite passages in the book, because I managed to capture the giddy joy of closing down a bar in a strange city at 3am. Often, when we wake the next morning after a boozy night and can vaguely remember laughing till we were fit to burst, we know we had a good time but we assume whatever we are laughing at can't really have been that funny – it was just because we were drunk. My experience of trying to record drunken nights revealed to me that when we are drunk, often we really are funnier – a lot of these notes made it into the final book, and it is without doubt the funniest of all my books.
That's writing while drunk, as in, capturing the experience of drinking. But what about writing up your final draft? What about drinking as an accompaniment to writing, rather than the notes above, which are writing as an accompaniment to drinking?
The first thing to note is that the quote in the title falls into the common trap of treating drunk/sober as binary, when they are in fact two points tethering either end of a scale.
Think of inebriation as a graph, with the x axis as time and the y axis as some measure of how drunk you are. The path of inebriation follows a curve. One reason I've always loved beer is that it provides a gentler, more manageable curve than wine or spirits. I find that between one and three pints in, there's a buzz of inebriation that seems to make the blood flow quicker and opens the synapses. Ideas flow more quickly, inspiration comes more easily. But I'm not drunk. Any more than three pints, and my typing becomes clumsy and my flow starts to become disjointed. It's harder to focus. I rarely go beyond this point.
On Monday night, I did.
I hadn't been happy with that day's work. I was in bed with my eyes wide open, and I decided to get back up and do an experiment. I drank spirits and took the time to write very carefully and slowly, allowing the ideas to come but spending longer clearing up my typing than getting it down in the first place. I wrote till 4.30am.
The next morning, the few paragraphs I had were not nearly as good as I thought they had been when I wrote them. The flash of inspiration I thought I'd had was not nearly as bright as I'd believed. But there was something there, something that I hadn't been able to reach while sober. More than that, I was in a different place in relation to the book than I had been the day before. Something from the night before had stayed with me. I wrote for the next ten hours straight, finished the first draft, and the last paragraphs I wrote are better than anything else in the book at the moment. Just as I had found my voice, I'd finished. But we still have the edit to go.
Apart from unlocking the inspiration I needed to finish, sometime around 4am I also had the idea to write this blog post. I'll finish by transcribing the notes I left for myself, written in wonky capitals to ensure they would still be legible:
WRITE SOBER – IS THIS WORD WORKING HARD ENOUGH? IS THERE A BETTER WORD?
EDIT DRUNK – THERE IS NO EDIT DRUNK.
WRITE DRUNK – IS THIS WORD PLAYFUL ENOUGH? MIGHT THIS OTHER WORD TAKE ME SOMEWHERE I DIDN'T EXPECT?
EDIT SOBER – (I think I'm referring to the output of writing drunk here) RESULTS MIGHT BE BETTER THAN YOU THINK.
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20th December 2019 | Bass Ale, Beer, Beer tasting, Hops & Glory
Happy Birthday Ratcliff Ale – tasting pretty good at 150 years old.
I got invited to a birthday party in Burton-on-Trent that was quite unlike any other – a mass tasting of six legendary beers known as the 'Bass Corkers'.
On 16th December 1869, Ratcliff Ale was mashed in at Bass, Ratcliff & Gretton in Burton-on-Trent to celebrate the birth of a son to the Ratcliff family. It was a fairly common tradition in brewing families for such beers to be brewed ready for when these scions reached their majority at the age of 21. The story I heard was that young Master Ratcliff never made it that far, so the beer was never opened.
On 16th December 2019, I'm in Burton to drink some Ratcliff Ale on its 150th birthday, along with five other variations on these beers designed for ageing, know to connoisseurs and collectors as the 'Bass Corkers'.
Bass fan and Burton beer historian Ian Webster, ably assisted by passionate fellow Burtonian beer collector Gary Summerfield, wanted to commemorate Ratclliff Ale's anniversary, and put an appeal around Burton. Burton responded, with people donating scores of bottles – a total of 75 beers are opened for tonight's audience of 100 or so people. This is an incredible act given that some of these bottles trade on EBay for £300 or more. I thought I knew these beers well, but I'm astonished to find there are pint bottles and quart bottles, with the occasional ultra-rare magnum.
The way these strong ales were made was to boil the wort for twelve hours, reducing the liquid to create a very high concentration of fermentable sugars. This led to an alcohol content of around 12% ABV which, aided by heavy hopping rates, vastly reduced the chances of microbial spoilage as they aged, according to Burton Brewer and Chairman of the National Brewery Heritage Trust, Dr Harry White. Harry explains the difference between the effects of microbiological spoilage – infection that means the beer goes 'off' – and the effects of ageing, which is all about oxidation.
Oxidation as 'a complex series of interactions' that begin with whatever oxygen is left in the bottle when it is sealed. There's always some, and a bottle-conditioned beer needs it to start its slow, secondary fermentation. The yeast mops up the oxygen during this process, but then, when there's nothing left for it to eat, it dies. When beer is a few years old it can taste stale, papery, or wet doggy. But there's not a straight line into old age and decrepitude – other reactions continue to happen, and various different aspects of the beer come and go in a process John Keeling, when he was head brewer at Fuller's, likened to sine waves, during vertical tastings of Fuller's Vintage Ale. Those tastings were truly memorable – but even the most venerable Vintage Ale – from 1997 – is fifteen years younger than the most youthful Bass Corker, which is…
Prince's Ale, 1982
Starting with the youngest first, the idea is you get some kind of progression. This 37-year-old, brewed to commemorate the birth of Prince William, tastes more like a three-year-old barley wine. There's chocolate and caramel on the nose, some fruity notes reminiscent of ruby port, and no hint of papery oxidation at all. It tastes different rather than old, with a hint of meaty umami character, some acidity, but mainly a warming, welcoming fusion of malt character, alcohol and microflora.
Princess Ale, 1978
This has a much paler caramel colour than its younger sibling. It's much lighter on the nose, toffeeish, with hints of spice and incense. On the palate it's lighter again, with a bitterness that's curiously tannic rather than hoppy. Overall, it tastes old and woody – not as engaging as the beer four years younger, but just as drinkable. Maybe it's something to do with Princess Anne having mashed the beer in, given that she doesn't like beer.
Jubilee Strong Ale, 1977
This is much darker again, chocolate-coloured. There's a little tartness on the nose, which reminds me of Rodenbach, and a bit of smokiness. On the palate, it's sweet, sour and bitter – I swear there's still a bit of hop character to it – and something that is not directly derived from hops, barley, Burton water OR Bass ale yeast.
I'm on a tasting panel with Roger Protz and a selection of former Burton Brewers. My old friend Steve Wellington – another former brewer and the man who recreated A 19th century Burton IPA for the voyage to India I recounted in Hops & Glory – is in the audience. Steve once told me that when you taste aged beers, you get a different reaction from professional brewers than you do if you assemble a broader panel of taste experts – and so it proves with this beer. The brewers up here speak of mild infection, of something getting into the bottle that shouldn't be there. Whereas I'm thinking that Brettanomyces means 'British fungus', so named because it was originally associated not with Belgian sours, but vatted strong British ales. This beer reminds me that Rodenbach – one of the finest sour beers in the world – took its original inspiration from none other than Greene King.
Why was there a jump of fifty years between this beer and the previous (or rather, subsequent) one? I don't know. The war was an obvious factor, but why was there not one for the Queen's coronation? I can vaguely remember her Silver Jubilee and the incredible wave of patriotism that came with it. It was also around the same time that a large stash of the 1902 Kings Ale was discovered in Bass's cellars, so maybe that inspired the idea for the start of the second wave of corkers that ran from 1977 to 1982.
But now we're on to the end of the first wave, mashed in by Edward, Prince of Wales, who went on to become king for a few months before abdicating to marry an American divorcee. It had the shortest brew length of all the corkers, and is therefore the rarest. Apparently, it was still on sale in 1945, for £5 a bottle. or over £200 today – one for people who moan about 'modern over-priced craft beers' to think about.
Well, if I had a spare £200, I'd pay that for a bottle today. The nose is of dried fruit – dates, prunes, figs and currants – with a hint of church incense again. The fruity character is intense, combining the complex sweetness of dried fruit with the sourness of overripe fruit. Then there's an umami meatiness that some of my colleagues on the panel describe as marmite.
I'm not so sure.
There's a moment of panic whenever you're trying to taste something with the aim of identifying that taste and communicating it to others. It's the moment when your taste buds and olfactory bulb all flash with sensation and send blind signals deep into your cerebral cortex, and your brain seeks to contextualise what you're experiencing versus your established knowledge and memory. When you're primed to expect a particular flavour – when you know what you're drinking and what it's meant to taste like, or when someone asks you to look out for a particular flavour note – the brain usually identifies it straight away, or thinks it does. 'Marmite' is a common flavour note for aged beers, and if you know this, you can detect it and tick it off – flavour successfully identified. But if you didn't know this, I'm not sure Marmite is what you'd pull out here. I'm conscious that I've already used it as a flavour note myself, but Marmite is a shortcut, an easy port of call, similar to when we categorise and tick off the complexity of lambic beers with the term 'horse blanket'. It often stops us from probing further. This is spicier yet subtler than Marmite, the meatiness just one component of something broader.
King's Ale, 1902
The danger with the Bass corkers is you can never be quite sure how well the contents stand up. If the wax seal around cork has broken, it's probably not worth it, as the beer will have been assaulted by oxygen over the years. So you look for the wax seal – but how do you know it wasn't broken, and then resealed by someone decades later? When it comes to the Kings Ale, brewed by Lord Bass's mate Edward VII, there's an easy way to tell: the original bottlings came with a lead seal, and that's what we've opened tonight.
I opened a bottle of Kings Ale in 2009, to celebrate winning Beer Writer of the Year for the first time. There's a blurry video of it on YouTube somewhere. My bottle didn't have a lead seal. It poured with the look and consistency of gravy and tasted like of cork, marmite – for real this time – and death.
Tonight's is… better than that. There's a big waft of balsamic vinegar on the nose, and a surprisingly yeasty element. Umami here is not marmite, but porcini mushrooms. There's chocolate, acidity and fruit on the palate. It tastes like an older, raggedier version of the Prince's Ale, which makes sense. But still, it's far from unpleasant.
Ratcliff Ale, 1869
These bottles were originally sealed with red wax, so if your wax is black – like one of mine at home is – that means the contents may not be good. This one smells really clean, and pours bright and clear, like Madeira. The now-familiar incense is there, and it smells like Christmas cake. There's bitterness and acidity, coffee and spice, alcohol heat, Madeira wine, and elements I simply don't have the vocabulary for. It tastes like nothing else.
By the end, I'm surprised how much I'm feeling the effects of drinking a flight of 12% ABV beers. I've often heard that the alcohol decays and loses its potency in beers like this. My intense desire for sleep, and the spidery handwriting in my notebook, suggest otherwise.
I've tasted beers that are alive and vibrant, and I've had beers that taste dead and decayed. The beers we've tasted tonight are somewhere between, having visited both poles before embarking on their own, unique journeys. There's far more here than the effects of oxygen-driven ageing: these beers are complex processes. Tate two different bottles of the same beer, and their character can be quite different. It reminds me of the 'generative music' experiments created by Brian Eno, where a few simple elements are fed into a randomising system to create something that is ever changing, never quite repeating. Here, tiny differences in the microflora in each bottle can lead to ever-widening variations over time, magnified by the conditions in which each individual bottle matures – temperature, humidity, whether it's stored upright or on its side, and so on.
Will there be more Bass corkers? Could there be? Well, the Queen's Ale for Brenda's 50th Jubilee was bottled in 500ml with a crown cap, but is still well worth seeking out. Apart from that, around ten years ago, Steve Wellington invited me to brew a new batch of Bass No.1 Barley Wine – the original recipe for Ratcliff Ale. We loaded an incredible amount of malt into the mash tun and left it for its 12-hour boil. A curry and a few hours' sleep later, we were back in the brewery and running off a thick, dark wort that looked and smelled amazing. A few weeks later, Steve, almost tearful, informed me that it had been so long since the Bass yeast had had to contend with such a mighty wort, it simply hadn't been up to the task. Fermentation hadn't taken place, and the batch had had to be poured away.
And that's not the only problem.
In the complex world of corporate beer trademarks and ownership, the archive of Bass recipes is now owned by a different company from the people who own the Bass brand. Anheuser Busch-Inbev continue to commit many travesties with Bass, but ABI has more than one face and more than one set of opinions. Mike Siegel of Goose Island is genuinely passionate about recreating old beers from the past, as evidenced by his recent collaboration with Ron Pattinson and Wimbledon Brewery's Derek Prentice, the wonderful Obidiah Poundage. Mike recently asked Molson Coors – owners of the Bass archive – if he could gain access to old Bass recipes with a view to reviving something akin to these legendary corkers, and was given a pretty categoric and final refusal.
Earlier tonight, Harry White made a heartfelt plea to the audience for the archives to be used much more.
Come on guys, it's Christmas – let's join the dots. And could whoever currently owns the famous Bass yeast get it to some kind of yeast gym in the New Year?
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4th April 2019 | Books, Cheese, Pie Fidelity
My new book, Pie Fidelity: In Defence of British Food, is finally published today after two-and-a-half-years' hard work. To celebrate, here's another off-cut that didn't quite make the main text. One of the main themes of the book is that we don't celebrate our food culture in the UK as much as other nations celebrate theirs. When I started researching the book, I realised I'd first written about this back in 2010, when I did a bit of research into European Protected Designations of Origin (PDOs) – the regulations that stipulate where and how something must be made if you want to give it a particular name, such as champagne, cognac or Cumberland sausage. I found the differing stories of Wensleydale and Roquefort to be quite staggering in what they reveal. The Roquefort part below is intact on the book, but I went on to write at length about cheddar, so there was no room for my nine year-old story of Wensleydale. Here it is then, in its original form.
'The term culture … includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people; Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list …'
TS Eliot,Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 1948
One of France's most celebrated cheeses is produced in Roquefort-sur-Soulzon in the south of the country. The town's cheesy fame allegedly dates back to Pliny the Elder, who supposedly lauded it in his CE79 work, the Natural History.
Pliny was certainly a fan of cheese generally, writing, 'It is a remarkable circumstance, that the barbarous nations which subsist on milk have been for so many ages either ignorant of the merits of cheese, or else have totally disregarded it'. But what fans of Roquefort don't tell you is that Pliny's mention was ambiguous, and not exactly complementary. In a chapter where he details all the fine cheeses available in Rome, 'where the various good things of all nations are to be judged of by comparison', he says, 'Goats also produce a cheese which has been of late held in the highest esteem, its flavour being heightened by smoking it. The cheese of this kind which is made at Rome is considered preferable to any other; for that which is made in Gaul has a strong taste, like that of medicine'.
What we now understand to be Roquefort cheese is not smoked, and is not made from goat's milk. When Pliny says this cheese was made in Gaul, that could mean anywhere in a region that today encompasses France, Luxembourg, Belgium, most of Switzerland, Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the west bank of the Rhine. And anyway, Pliny didn't like it that much because it tasted of medicine. This could mean he's referring to the chemical hit of a ripe blue cheese, but even if that's the case, it's doubtful Roquefort cheese was unique in this. But never mind all that: if you're marketing a food icon, when the legend becomes fact, we invariably print the legend.
Prehistoric cheese-making colanders have allegedly been discovered near the town of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, and what is undeniable is that it has the perfect conditions to make great cheese. The region is honeycombed with caves formed by faults in the mountain cliffs, and these faults channel a gentle flow of air into the caves that creates a fairly constant temperature of between eight and twelve degrees and keeps the humidity high. These are perfect conditions for the growth of a mould known as Penicillium roqueforti. This mould, plus reliable access to salt from the Mediterranean, led to the evolution the soft, blue, salty, cave-aged cheese we now know as Roquefort.
The cheese was popularised by local Benedictine monks from the 11thcentury, and soon other monasteries in the area were buying caves to make their own. In 1411, Charles VI granted the town of Roquefort a monopoly for the ripening of the cheese in these caves – the first ever appellation d'origine– meaning only producers in the town could use its name. In 1961, a landmark ruling decreed that while similar maturation methods could be used across southern France, only those whose ripening occurred in the natural caves of Mont Combalou were permitted to bear the name Roquefort. On top of that, the milk must be whole and raw, the sheep it comes from must be Lacuane dairy sheep, and they must be fed on pasture.
Today, much of the economic activity in the region centres on the production and distribution of the cheese. A visitor's centre run by the Roquefort Caves Society illustrates the process of making Roquefort cheese, gives a guided tour of the caves, and offers guests free samples and a chance to buy cheese. Despite still only being produced locally, Roquefort is enjoyed around the world and considered one of the best blue cheeses ever made.
It's a great story, a fantastic cheese, and a symbol of how food and drink can come to define a region, or even a nation. Now let's compare that story to one of Britain's most famous cheeses.
French monks also seemingly brought the art of cheese making to Wensleydale, in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales, when they settled in the region around 1150. The cheese they made was originally blue and made from sheep's milk, allegedly because Norman nobles wanted a local equivalent to Roquefort. When Henry VIII dissolved their monastery at Jervaulx in 1540, the monks passed on the art of Wensleydale cheese making to the wives of the local farmers who had supplied their milk. In 1897, local merchant Edward Chapman became the first commercial Wensleydale cheesemaker when he opened a creamery in the village of Hawes.
Wensleydale is now made mostly from cow's milk with a little sheep's milk added for flavour. The Hawes creamery in Wensleydale still makes a blue cheese among others, but since the 1930s the cheese we now think of as Wensleydale has been white and hard. It has an open, welcoming aspect to it, a crumbly texture, with a mild, clean, flavour that has faint hints of lemon and honey. It gets these characteristics from the local milk, delivered fresh to the creamery within a few hours of milking, from cows grazed on rich, wildflower meadows down in the valleys, and heather moorlands further up the slopes. The cultures used to make the cheese go through a unique and complex system that combines mother cultures of different levels of maturity.
Through the twentieth century, Wensleydale gained a reputation as one of the best British cheeses, and a hallmark of what is great about British culture. In his essay 'In Defence of English Cooking', Orwell wrote, 'I fancy Stilton is the best cheese of its type in the world, with Wensleydale not far behind', while TS Eliot proclaimed Wensleydale 'the Mozart of cheese'.
Wensleydale is therefore comparable to Roquefort in many ways. They taste quite different: Roquefort is rich and salty and creamy and probably not to everyone's tastes, while Wensleydale is straightforward and friendly and perhaps a little plain for cheese aficionados. But both are famous cheeses acknowledged as some of the best in their style. Apart from flavour, they differ in one more important aspect: while Roquefort was the first ever cheese to be given a protected designation of origin, Wensleydale was never given any kind of protection or formal acknowledgement at all until it was almost too late.
During and after the Second World War, with milk production commandeered by the government, the Wensleydale creamery in Hawes began to struggle. In 1966, it was sold to the Milk Marketing Board, which in 1980 separated off its milk processing division to become Dairy Crest, which in turn floated on the Stock Exchange in 1996. By the time of its flotation, Dairy Crest was a business with a broad portfolio of dairy-based products, with little place for historical tradition and local terroirin its brand marketing save for imagery and loose claims that focus-grouped well. In May 1992, the corporation closed down the Wensleydale Creamery with the loss of 59 jobs, and announced their intention to transfer production of Wensleydale cheese out of Yorkshire and into a factory in Lancashire. They were both just cheese factories after all, so why would that matter? And it's not as if there was any kind of historical rivalry between the two counties that meant the move might upset people.
As it turned out, there was quite a lot of resistance to the move, and six months later a management buy-out succeeded in bringing Wensleydale back home, hiring eleven former members of staff to ensure the cheese was on sale again by Christmas. But sales refused to pick up, and Wensleydale continued to struggle.
Film-maker Nick Park had no idea of any of this when he made his animated films A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers(1993) and A Close Shave(1995), featuring cheese-loving Wallace and his resourceful dog Gromit. In the third film, Wallace falls in love with Wendolene Ramsbottom, a shopkeeper. But at the end of the film, with evil robot dogs vanquished and sheep saved, Wendolene reveals that she doesn't like cheese. "Not even Wensleydale?" cries Wallace. No, it brings her out in a rash. The relationship is doomed, and Wendolene leaves.
Park only chose the word 'Wensleydale' because he thought it would be funny to animate Wallace's mouth saying it, as he put it, 'nice and toothy'. But this whim had a dramatic effect. Demand began to pick up, and the creamery asked for and was given permission to launch a tie-in cheese using the characters' names and likenesses. Sales soared. Wensleydale opened a new creamery in 2015, modernised but still using traditional techniques and local milk, and it now employs over 200 people. Oh, and 'Yorkshire Wensleydale' successfully acquired a European Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) in 2013. It requires the regional qualifier that 'Aveyron Roquefort' does not, because our historic disinterest in denominations of origin means that Wensleydale – like cheddar – has become too generic to enforce. This PGI is not quite as stringent as the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) that Roquefort has held since 1925, but it's a start.
Like the difference between Champagne and Bass Ale, the differing fortunes of these two wonderful cheeses illustrates a wider gulf in how the British and French care for and view their food and drink. (I find it telling that, as I write this, whenever I type 'Roquefort', my 'UK English' spellcheck function is fine with it, but flags up a red, wavy line under every 'Wensleydale'.) The European system of geographic protection for foods came into operation in 1993. This means that within the area in which the scheme operates (and in countries with mutual agreements) regionally produced food and drink is protected from competitors passing themselves off as the same thing. At the time of writing in 2018, Britain has a total of 65 products with protected status. France has 217, Italy 267, and Portugal 125. Breaking that down, Britain has 16 protected cheeses, the French 52, the Italians 47. To be fair, this is a slight improvement from 2010, when France had more cheeses enjoying protected status than Britain had for all its products together.
But now, that might not count for anything. The rules that protect Britain's iconic foods are part of the European Union's regulatory framework. When Britain leaves the EU, Wensleydale, Melton Mowbray Pork Pies, Stornoway Black Pudding, Cumberland black sausage and Cornish pasties will all lose the European-wide protection that means no one else can falsely claim theirs to be the real thing.
Pie Fidelity is published by Particular Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
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