Fitz in the Community - Ep.5 - Dartmoor

This week Fitz travels to Darts Farm to Speak to master butcher Alistair David, then off to talk with Jim Morris about his increadible way he gives back to his community then finally dropping by Dartmoor Brewery for a masterclass in brewing.

This will be the last podcast this year so we wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy new year, tune in next year to discover more increadible things about the Devon community through he amazing people that make Devon, Devon.

Listen to the podcast here or on Spoifut, Amazon music or Google play or you can read the full transcript below.

0:00:06 - Fitz
Hello there, Fitz in the community, once again out in the community. As you can hear, I've come to Exeter today, to Darts Farm, for one reason and for one reason only, and that's to talk to an old friend of mine, a master butcher called Alistair David. Now, it's fine building up for Christmas, but at some point you've got to take a look at what has been left over, and there are literally in my fridge a dozen plates. What can be eaten, what can't be eaten, what can you do with it? Actually, I must admit my wife, a couple of days ago we had a Sunday roast and she souped everything, everything the ham, the chicken, the potatoes, the green beans, the profiteroles, the napkins, everything went into the soup. It was absolutely fantastic. Not going to criticise, look, let's go and find out from Alistair how Christmas has gone and what we can do with the leftovers.

0:01:03 - Alistair David
The support we put back into the farming community through how busy we are is fantastic. I'm so proud every year. What we have here is showcase for our farming community and our customers love it.

0:01:17 - Fitz
It's fair to say that you draw down from all of Devon, or did you say the West Country full stop?

0:01:23 - Alistair David
Yeah. So take, for instance, some of our award winning lambs this year. They came from Rob Dart. He's a fantastic farmer. He would supply us with, in the region, well over a thousand lambs throughout the year, loving what he's doing and sharing that with us.

0:01:40 - Fitz
By the term lamb I'm thinking a little tiny cute thing, but a lamb can go to a year, is it?

0:01:47 - Alistair David
So once they get weaned off their mothers, later in the year they become hogget. So we're on hogget right now. So through January and February we'll be on hogget and then we'll move over to spring lamb as Easter starts to approach. Is it fair to?

0:02:00 - Fitz
say that, when it comes to our community of Devon, farming is essential to keep this county going.

0:02:06 - Alistair David
It's what keeps the fields looking so good. Without the farmers, we wouldn't have the world that we have.

0:02:12 - Fitz
And yes, they do keep the West Country beautiful my wife, as I must admit, she absolutely souped a Sunday lunch a couple of days ago. It was fantastic. There was gammon, there was chicken, there was the sprouts, there were the green beans, the napkins, the profiteroles, everything went in this soup.

0:02:29 - Alistair David
Well, I must say, you are looking well.

0:02:34 - Fitz
Very shiny goat wet nose. But can you keep turkey? Can you keep gammon? Can you keep ham? Can you reheat?

0:02:42 - Alistair David
things, yeah. So look, we've got the leftovers. Say to turkey, we'll just keep it simple. Say, we've got a turkey breast leftover from Christmas. You've bought a nice three kilo piece. You've eaten a kilo or so for Christmas, then you've had some cold cuts. You're left with that last kilo. You can either slice it up and then put, say, half a dozen slices in each packet and pop that in your freezer for being able to get out and reheat to have another Sunday roast. When you've cooked it then you can pop it in the freezer and then when you have it out you can reheat it again. Or if you've cooked it, you can then reheat it as well. I wouldn't do it a third time on anything, but cooking something in brackets twice is fine.

0:03:22 - Fitz
So just look ahead for spring. Should we survive your cooking tips? What is around for spring? What would you suggest that people look for? Obviously with economy in mind, but also ease of access.

0:03:37 - Alistair David
There's no such thing as a bad meal as long as you've got friends or family around you or loved ones of any sort. Food and meal time for me is coming together of the family. And what with the past dare I use the C word the Covid? It all took us all a real valuable lesson about just being together, and that's what food really does is bring people together. One of my favourite meals, one of our massive sharing rump steaks now these would be over a kilo and you cook it as a whole piece and then you have your best Sunday carving board and you rest that steak on the carving board and then you cut it into thin slivers, season and then you pop that in the middle of the table and you let everybody help themselves. And that for me, is like a coming together of the family.

0:04:30 - Fitz
It's actually very French. I grew up in parts of France and everything stopped for a couple of hours and the family came together and ate, and that was wonderful.

0:04:39 - Alistair David
It's when you get to know each other and get to be able to share what you've been up to Hang on.

0:04:44 - Fitz
I've just spotted this in the window of the butcher's wild boar chops yeah you're very well actually.

0:04:52 - Alistair David
So we were introducing over at Dark Swarming. We've had a bit of a refit, I'll put it like that, and it's given us the capacity to be able to offer some artisan pieces. So the wild boar is one of those that's selling well. We also do 40 day dry aged larder trimmed pork chops.

0:05:12 - Fitz
I don't want to criticise the colour of the beef there, but is that normal?

0:05:17 - Alistair David
Yeah, so what you're looking at there fits in our dry aging locker is our four week dry aged wing ribs of sirloin and our prime ribs of beef. The beauty of this whole refit now is that we've got the opportunity to be able to showcase and share the story of what me and brother here at Darts are doing with visual. You can come into Darts now and you can see exactly the dry aging process going on.

0:05:44 - Fitz
Why does that benefit the meat?

0:05:46 - Alistair David
It gives it time to relax. You know, with time it becomes more tender, you know. Take you, for example. Tenderised over the years, haven't you? I've been dry for days, but no, we lock it away in our Himalayan rock salt dry aging rooms and give it chance to intensify increase in flavour. And also, when you cook these joints you won't get so much weight loss, because the weight loss has happened whilst it's been dry aging.

0:06:17 - Fitz
I could do it a bit of weight loss myself. You couldn't slam me in there, could you?

0:06:20 - Alistair David
We could pop you in there, but wear a coat. It's rather chilly.

0:06:24 - Fitz
Alastair, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. Have a great 2024, anything majorly planned in the world of the butchery?

0:06:32 - Alistair David
No, just keep doing it and just well, I love what I do, so it's really easy, and so does Brother and so does the whole team here at Darts. You know a massive thank you to our team at Darts for making mine and brother's job straightforward.

0:06:45 - Fitz
My thanks there to Alastair David from Darts Farm. Master Butcher, I'm keeping my voice down because I'm back out on Dartmoor and there's a field of sheep looking quite alarmed in front of me. Actually, it never ceases to amaze me just how quickly the urban sprawl of Plymouth gives way to Dartmoor, obviously preserved for future generations. And I'm looking out across Bickley at the moment, just outside the Royal Marine Barracks, towards the moor. The moor just shrouded in mist, and also the woodland around me looks like it's been recently cleaned and cleared. Most of the old mature trees are intact, but I think some of the pine trees have been taken down. Obviously somebody is looking after this area, this beautiful part of our community. Why am I here? Well, I'm going to head to the barracks at Bickley and speak to a former Royal Marine who's giving back so much to society.

0:07:44 - Jim Morris
I'm Jim Morris and I work for the RMA, the Royal Marines Charity.

0:07:47 - Fitz
Jim, you've just completed a cycle ride.

0:07:50 - Jim Morris
The ride was for a great cause. This year I was diagnosed with bowel cancer and I was lucky enough to be supported by a great team in the NHS and from start to finish. I can't grumble one bit about the treatment and I'm lucky to say now I'm completely free of the cancer. I've not got any follow-on treatment chemotherapy or radio therapy because a few life changes. I do use a toilet more than I used to before, but that's a small price to pay for what could have happened. So I'm quite happy with that.

But I've always been seeing a keen cyclist and I decided I wanted to pay a bit back for the fantastic treatment I've had and support from the Royal Marine's family, especially the Royal Marine Charity I worked for, and I've decided to ride 1664 miles. The number of 1664 is very important to all of us Royal Marines because that's the year we were formed, on the 28th of October. All on roads, no virtual rides, no rollers, just out in all weathers, mostly in the dark, to be honest, because it was riding to and from work, and rides at weekend with my cycling club, the Tavistock Realist Cycling Club. Completed it last week, last Sunday, and, with time to spare, got two or three weeks left to spare, so I was quite happy with that.

0:09:01 - Fitz
Do you get respect on the road? Because still still, you see some pretty narrow squeaks, if that's the proper way of putting it, as people do not give cyclists enough room.

0:09:13 - Jim Morris
Yeah, the 386 is pretty famous for that and I always avoid cycling down there if possible. But I'm lucky. I'm quite experienced cyclist, so I know how to behave on the road as well, and it is a two-way thing that cyclists follow the hybrid code. It sends everyone else there. Otherwise it does annoy drivers, but some do get a bit close. But you just have to be prepared for that.

0:09:32 - Fitz
You've lived on.

0:09:33 - Jim Morris
Dartmoor, haven't you? Yes, I've lived in Prince Town previously for five years up there and loved every minute of it. We had dogs at the time and we could just walk straight out onto the Moor from our home, which was really nice.

0:09:45 - Fitz
Winter can be tough. Did you see any of the really bad winters when you were up at Prince Town?

0:09:50 - Jim Morris
There was two winters where we were snowed in and I've got some great photos always show people that have just come back from Norway or something like that. We've had just as much snow here and the car we had like a foot of snow over the car to be dug out and the whole street got together digging the road out so we could get down and out of town. We were stuck there for a couple of days but some great pubs up there and it was all like a good family village event.

0:10:12 - Fitz
If you've got a decent pub in the village, nobody cares how deep the snow is right. Exactly right, especially for Royal Marines. Well, there was one particular incident. I was talking to an old friend of mine that lived at Prince Town. This is going back to, I think, to the 60s, when he had to navigate into Plymouth by the tops of the telegraph poles Tough winter.

0:10:32 - Jim Morris
There were lots of pictures in one of the pubs up there that snowed above some of the cars, so you know it was quite a lot fell that year. It was quite a famous year. I think it was in the 60s, I can't remember 60s or something.

0:10:42 - Fitz
I think 63, I was born in 62. Listen, we're at Bickley Barracks overlooking the moor at the moment. Been here long professionally.

0:10:50 - Jim Morris
I work here now for the charity which I'm lucky enough to have an office here in support of the call. But my first step through the gates was in 1978 when I just passed out of training and I joined L Company then. Since then, throughout my career I came back and forward and I served at every rank in a rifle company, in 4-2 Commando, from a Marine right through to a warrant officer as a company site major.

0:11:15 - Fitz
You mentioned bowel cancer. It's something which people don't talk about. Men do not talk about it. You know, certainly not going to bring up the subject over lunch, but should they. Should people talk more about this?

0:11:29 - Jim Morris
Yes, bowel cancer and all the other cancers that we can all get. I was probably lucky enough that I had a great team look after me, but if I hadn't done the bowel cancer screening test which comes through the post when you get to I think it's 57 now my first one used to be 60, but they've dropped the age to 57. I did that and it came back positive, and if I hadn't done the test, I'd had no symptoms. I wouldn't have known and the consequences could have been a lot worse. So I recommend everyone do that test. It's for male and female, so just do it.

0:12:05 - Fitz
I've had mine. It came through. I'm glad to say. It came back negative. But it's all part of our medical system which does catch cancer early.

0:12:16 - Jim Morris
I can't praise the NHS enough for the way they supported me.

0:12:24 - Fitz
Once again, my thanks there to Jim Morris MBE, former Royal Marine. He did mention he lived at Princeton for a while, which is where I am now, and I'm just looking towards the prison, which is almost yeah, it's vanished in the mist. I can just about see some of the roofs. If I turn around, there is Princeton Church and also, if I turn again, the Dartmoor Brewery, and an old friend of mine, Ian Cobham, has asked me to drop in so he can show me the process and show me around the brewery, which is absolutely fascinating. I can already smell hops malt, ian, one of the three, let's go and join him.

0:13:09 - Ian Cobham
This is the malt room, so this is where all the malted barley comes in, and then, effectively, in order to extract the sugar out of it, which is what we're after, it has to go through a mill and it gets crushed and then it gets piped in.

So when we mash in, which is basically the mixing of the crushed barley and hot water, it makes like a porridge and effectively allows a reaction to happen. I won't bore you with all the details, but effectively, what we need to do is we need that reaction to happen. It's an enzymatic reaction. It allows us access to the sugar and what we run off is a sugary liquid which is now called wort.

0:13:42 - Fitz
Right, hang on. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm looking at a sack, which is what about five foot tall by?

0:13:47 - Ian Cobham
That's a tonne, that's a tonne of malt? Yes, a tonne, but we've got a hoist, so we don't have to do that one by hand.

0:13:53 - Fitz
So hang on, what is malt, what does it look like, what is it?

0:13:57 - Ian Cobham
There's some malt there, barley seeds basically. So if you think of it this way, what we're trying to do is trying to get to the sugar that the barley plant would have used to grow the next barley. It's tricking the barley seed into thinking it's going to grow again and then arresting it so that that sugar is now accessible.

0:14:13 - Fitz
Same with whisky malt-whisky.

0:14:14 - Ian Cobham
Yeah, exactly that's what's called single malt.

0:14:16 - Fitz
You've got it Okay, lovely.

0:14:19 - Ian Cobham
Whisky is beer without any hops in it that's then fermented and then distilled twice in Asian oak.

0:14:25 - Fitz
One thing I did discover in Scotland whiskey is colourless. Yeah absolutely, yeah, absolutely. It tastes the colour from the barrel. Am I right in thinking that? Yeah, you got it?

0:14:32 - Ian Cobham
Yeah, tastes the colour from the barrel? Yeah, so. And then more unscrupulous people in the past have added caramel colour in right. It's the same process In whiskey you're trying to make a beer without any hops, in which you then ferment and distill twice. We're trying to make a beer with hops in right. So all these various steps that we do is getting basically at the carbohydrate which would have allowed the plant to grow again, right. And then we're after the starch. So in order to do that, there's a few things. So we buy it in molted for a start. The second thing is it goes through a mill and you crush it so you can actually access it and I can show you. I know there's a podcast so you won't be able to see, but I can show you.

0:15:09 - Fitz
Ian's just climbing a ladder to a huge hopper. No, no, we can't get up there.

0:15:14 - Ian Cobham
Right, so what do you get? A sort of flour, yeah, you get a flour, and then you also get chunks of white, which is the endosperm, the carbohydrate, right, and then you get the husk. Yeah, it's very important when you've got a traditional mash like we've got, because the husks act like a filter bed so you get clear wort off rather than really sticky, goopy, cloudy wort that doesn't really work very well in the rest of your processes.

0:15:38 - Fitz
Fascinating. Ian Didn't understand a word, but absolutely fascinating. All I got from that is does your wort work?

0:15:44 - Ian Cobham
Yeah, People call it wort and it's wort.

0:15:48 - Fitz
It's wort. It's a very dark more word. Huge vat of very warm beer at the moment, or is it beer?

0:15:56 - Ian Cobham
No, this isn't beer, this is a mash tun. So what I was saying before I'll show you. Just watch it over here. A little bit hot, right. So what we've done is we've taken the crushed barley, we've mixed it with some hot water, we've allowed the enzyme conversion to take place and we're starting to run off the sugary liquid called wort into the kettle.

Okay yeah, yeah, yeah, right. So what you're seeing. Now we're in the second stage of getting that wort out. We sparge it, we put hot water over the top. It goes like this goes through the filter bed and it pushes out all the sugar wort that we want.

0:16:29 - Fitz
What I'm looking at basically is a settlement tank.

0:16:32 - Ian Cobham
Yeah, effectively yeah.

0:16:33 - Fitz
Yeah, settlement tank Right.

0:16:35 - Ian Cobham
So it starts as porridge and then you add hot water on the top. You set the bed it's called setting the bed right, that's the first thing that you do and then you put a whole load of water on top in various stages, and you're basically pushing out the sugary liquid into the kettle. We'll just show you in a minute. Sparge Sparge is just putting hot water on top, comes through the spray balls, goes like that.

0:16:53 - Fitz
So we've had work and we've had sparge Lovely, he's making it up.

0:16:58 - Ian Cobham
So brewing is all about a whole load of reactions and there's certain processes you have to do to make these reactions happen, but it's a necessary part of the process. So what we do is we take the sugary liquid called wort, we stick it in the kettle, we boil it up, we add some hops so it becomes bitter. When people talk about, oh, I really like a bitter, that's why they were cool bitters, because they had hops in. If you didn't put hops in, if you like drinking a bit of a sugary mess, but the bitter gives it a nice backbone. So you put the bittering hops in. This is where it differs from whiskey.

In whiskey we would mash in, run the sugary liquid off and then, right at the last minute, just before it's called at flame out, when the boils over, you add aroma hops. The problem with hops is they're quite volatile, so the moment they hit heat they disappear. So you add them at the last minute to try and get the flavour out. So you've got a bittering hop and you've got a aroma hop, and they go in at different times. So that takes about an hour, and then what we have to do then is we have to separate out the protein which happens in the boil anyway, but we do more of it in the next vessel down, which is a whirlpool. I'll show you that if you like.

0:18:02 - Fitz
Okay, I'm fully aware. This is a working brewery. You've got people walking around behind me what's this?

0:18:07 - Ian Cobham
These are hops. They look like rabbit feed, but these are hops. Basically, they've taken the hot flower and they've just shredded the hot flower themselves and compressed them so that you can get straight to the hops. The beauty of this is because we don't use whole hops, we use pellets. We don't have to jump in and dig them out.

0:18:25 - Fitz
That's the smell.

0:18:26 - Ian Cobham
I like that smell.

0:18:27 - Fitz
That's a lovely smell there. I've got to admit this. I'm not that fond of beer. I know Ian and I have had this argument before.

0:18:34 - Ian Cobham
Beer is one long battle against protein, so you're trying to knock protein out, basically from the moment it's molted all the way to the moment it goes into the fermento, and all this does is it goes in tangentially, so it spins around and it separates out the solids, which is the protein, from the liquid, and then we run the liquid through a heat exchanger, so the liquids now, or the wort's, about 97-98 degrees. It goes through a heat exchanger with cold water going the other way, just normal water, no glycol, just normal water, and it knocks it down to about 18.

0:19:04 - Fitz
This, as you say, is the whirlpool. This is a huge vat, but behind there are towering vats. How tall are these? How big are these?

0:19:12 - Ian Cobham
Well, that's a 12 and a half thousand liter tank.

0:19:15 - Fitz
Of beer.

0:19:15 - Ian Cobham
Yeah, wow. So how many have you got here Six of the big ones and six of the 6,000 ones. So we've got six little ones and six big ones, sort of thing. So this brew kit is designed to do a 6,000 liter brew. So we've got six one brew tanks and six two brew tanks. If you see what I mean.

0:19:33 - Fitz
So how many bottles is that for one tank?

0:19:37 - Ian Cobham
Oh well, 6,000 liters, 12,000, or you're looking at 12,000 bottles. We do about two million to 2.2 million liters a year.

0:19:46 - Fitz
Wow, yeah, all over the world.

0:19:50 - Ian Cobham
Nope, mainly in the Southwest.

0:19:52 - Fitz
Really Doesn't travel.

0:19:53 - Ian Cobham
Yeah well, no, it can travel in bottle, we just don't export it at the moment. Bottling's a whole other industry. It's a high volume, small profit industry.

0:20:02 - Fitz
But it's not done. Here the bottling.

0:20:04 - Ian Cobham
No, the bottling. We don't have bottling process here, but we send it up the road to Buckham and they bottle it for us. Everything is brewed here, all the beer is made here. I can't stress that enough. It just gets bottled somewhere else, which means it goes up in a tanker and gets thrown through the machine into bottles.

0:20:21 - Fitz
It's a fascinating career, Ian. How did you get into it?

0:20:25 - Ian Cobham
Oh, I used to ride my bike around Burgundy drinking wine.

0:20:30 - Fitz
Drunk in charge of a Bites Mill pump. Brilliant, the warmth that's coming off these tanks as well.

0:20:37 - Ian Cobham
So what we do just to finish off the process. Now you've got cooled work going into fermento with our own yeast. We reuse our own yeast all the time, so it's a Dartmoor yeast, and the yeast has an incredible effect on the flavor of a beer. So let's take a popular one, beavertown Neck Oil. Right, something like Beavertown Neck Oil. If we use the yeast that they use and Dartmoor, it would taste totally different, and vice versa. The yeast has that much of an effect on the beer. So what about?

the water though the water does affect it, but you can adjust the water. There seems to be this sort of myth in the brewing well in the public actually, rather than the brewing world in the public that it's all about the water. But you'll find that the majority of large breweries are situated on industrial estates when the water is piped in and they adjust the water according to what salt make-up they want in the water to make the beer, because you can change the salt profile. It depends how you look at it. Like we have Dartmoor water. It comes from Dartmoor water but we adjust it the way we want it to get the right flavor.

0:21:42 - Fitz
It's a very famous beer that always claims it takes the water from the River Liffey. Have you seen the River Liffey? Fascinating world, fascinating.

0:21:51 - Ian Cobham
Fermentation takes about three days and we control that. So depending on what you do with your temperature, it affects your flavour. So if I fermented that at, say, 30 degrees rather than the 18 that I do, fermented that, it would taste vastly different because of the flavours that happen as a result of a hot fermentation versus a cooler fermentation, versus a cold fermentation. So I can make gel taste completely different tomorrow purely by changing the temperature. It's a bit like cooking in a way. You know, get something nailed. But the trick with brewing is, once you get it going, you've got to maintain that. It's all about quality and it's all about being the same. A slight change will change it all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've got to.

You know people buy your product because it's the same every time. So there's this thing isn't there, always handcrafted. It must be better. Why no? No, what you need is automation and valves that work and shut at the right time and water that goes on when you want it to, not when, oh God, that's gone wrong. Quick turn that on. But you know, I just never agree with that. If you lock the system down, it works.

0:22:56 - Fitz
I'm getting hints of strawberry nuts and oh, the airing cupboard.

0:22:59 - Ian Cobham
Yeah, exactly exactly If we brewed on Monday. Next Monday we'd be putting it into cask, so the beer itself, before it goes into cask, will be a week old. So our business is 90% cask beer. That's what we do, right, and we sell the pubs and we're very happy with that. And cask beer is a very British thing, isn't it like you don't really see cask beer anywhere else. I mean, people try a smattering of it here and there, but effectively it's a UK thing making cask ale, and you could describe it as a champagne or beer, because what it does is it does its secondary fermentation in cask. So, which is exactly what champagne does? You add a bit of yeast and sugar, boom, stick it in the cellar, turn it, yep, there you go. What should happen then is it should go into a pub and then it should be looked after and allowed to condition in the pub before it's tapped and then it's served. Perfectly, that's how it works.

0:23:50 - Fitz
Should should, ian. Your passion is infectious on this. The company is 30 years old. How long have you been brewing?

0:23:58 - Ian Cobham
well, I've been brewing since 2012,. Myself and I've been here since 2016.

0:24:04 - Fitz
I've got to say, like every other brewer, you have a perfect complexion because you're constantly walking through steam.

0:24:10 - Ian Cobham
I know, I know exactly. It's very expensive, you know. So we can brew all together. If we maxed out the tanks in one week we could get 108,000 litres brewed wow but as a rule we do about just over 2 million litres a year and in terms of 9 gallon cask that you would see going into a pub, we do about 40,000 of those it's incredible.

0:24:37 - Fitz
Can we see the end product malt everywhere, everything stacked, these huge sacks, the rotundas of malt just passing the barrels this is the cask washer.

0:24:52 - Ian Cobham
So effectively it cleans the casks and, if you think about it, it's a wee part, no thought of effort into making sure that our beer is right and it's sanitised and cleaned all the way along the way. So this is why, even though this is the last stage and some would consider it the most boring stage if your casks aren't clean, you've ruined your product. So all that effort gone. So these are all individually checked by eye, every single one, and we do 250, 260 a day they're just rolling off, as you can probably hear incredible absolutely incredible, all automated here's the bottle slot that you were talking about.

That's just come back from the bottles. So there you go. So we tend to do 5,500 cases as a run, so each tanker will net us 5,500, 6000 cases.

0:25:45 - Fitz
These are 8, by the way, 8 by 500 8 by 500 and there's literally 5 foot high sacks of bottles everywhere we've got there 2,4,6,8,10, 11 ton of malt in the corner the scale that this is built on is incredible, and then the peaks are quiet exactly so.

0:26:09 - Ian Cobham
This is the second warehouse that we built in 2016 and then it finished up in about 2017. But this has definitely helped us because this is where the beer goes to condition, so reframenting cask. So, if you think about it, we put it into cask at about 8 degrees and this is at 12, so it wakes up and the yeast finds the sugar, it reframents and then you've got a beer that's conditioning in here. So it will stay in here for a week, but it's got an 8 week shelf life. So if you don't broach the cask, it's good for 8 weeks.

And we know that we haven't picked that number out of the air. We know that because we've done all the tests and we taste the beer every single day, and everything we rack we taste the next day to make sure it's tip top. So we taste it before it gets in the cask to make sure it's bang on, and then we rack it, and then we taste it after it's been in the cask and then we do it very next day to make sure it's bang on before it even goes out the door. So are you the official?

0:27:00 - Fitz
taster as well.

0:27:03 - Ian Cobham
That's one of the roles, yeah, one of the many roles. It's quite funny. So Chris, who works with me he's the brewery ops manager he was saying to his doctor the other day the famous question the doctor goes, how much do you drink a week? And Chris went oh, I don't know what to say. He goes. But how about if I'm drinking all day long and the doctor's like I don't think I've come across that one? He goes, but I taste beer at 8 o'clock in the morning, doctor, and so do I.

0:27:25 - Fitz
Some doctors, I know, can't really answer that question either, not truthfully. Ian, thank you for this. This has been a lightning tour of an incredible place and you're here to stay, and you'll see the 30th birthday party oh absolutely, yeah, and hopefully the 40th.

0:27:41 - Ian Cobham
Yeah, absolutely.

0:27:42 - Fitz
Thank you very much for having me on and a very happy 30th birthday to Dartmoor Brewery in 2024. I mean it's just around the corner. My thanks to Ian and to Jim and to Alistair for making my community just that little bit more special. Fits in the community back very soon.