THE ALE-CONNER'S BOOK

Being Thirty-One Years of Tasting the Ale of This Parish on Its Behalf, Set Down by the Only Instrument Available, Which Is a Man, and Which Wears Out.

Kept by Corvin Stannard, Ale-Conner, elected annually by acclamation and unopposed for thirty-one years, no wage, considerable liability, and one free half of everything he condemns.

THE OFFICE, FOR THOSE WHO THINK IT IS A JOKE

The Ale-Conner tastes the ale and says whether it will do.

That is the whole office. It sounds like the best job in the realm and every man in this parish has told me so, usually at about the fourth pint, usually with an elbow. I have stopped explaining. I am going to explain here, once, in my own book, and then I shall go back to the elbows.

I taste the bad ale. Not the good. Nobody calls the Conner for good ale. I am called when a brew has gone wrong, or is suspected, or when a landlord and a customer disagree, and my job is to put a quantity of something genuinely unpleasant into my mouth, on purpose, in front of witnesses, and then say a word that costs somebody a barrel.

Thirty-one years of that. The parish reckons I have had the best of it. The parish is at liberty to reckon what it likes; the parish has not tasted the Michaelmas barrel at the Turnip & Lantern in the year of the flood, and I have, and it is in this book, and I would ask the reader to notice that the entry is short.

Each entry: The Brew · The Complaint · The Finding · The Ruling. And where it matters — and it matters more than anything else in this book — the state of the instrument, the instrument being me.

1 · THE PRINCIPLE OF THE THING

The Complaint. That my judgement is only my opinion.

The Finding. It is. That is precisely what it is, and I have never once claimed otherwise, and the man who says it as though he has caught me out has merely stated the office.

There is no gauge for ale. Trapp has an instrument at the Murk Gate and it reads the rain whether he is in a good temper or not; Clank has brass for everything; the chain at the Committee is true to a sixteenth. I have a mouth. That is the entire apparatus of this office and it has been for six hundred years, and it is subjective, and it is the best available, and those two things are both true and the parish has to live with it.

The Ruling. What makes it work is not that I am right. It is that I am consistent, and that I am one man, and that everybody has agreed to abide by me. A parish with three ale-conners would have three standards and a permanent war. A parish with one has a standard — not a correct one, a shared one, which for every practical purpose in this realm is worth more.

The dry finding: where a thing cannot be measured, the useful question is not "who is right" but "whose judgement will we all agree to abide by" — and the answer wants to be one person, consistent, unpaid, and easy to shout at.

2 · THE TURNIP & LANTERN, MICHAELMAS, THE FLOOD YEAR

The Complaint. The whole taproom.

The Finding. Condemned.

The Ruling. Condemned.

(The instrument was three days recovering and this entry is as long as it is going to get.)

3 · THE LANDLORD WHO WAS RIGHT

The Complaint. A customer at the Muddy Boot swore his pint was sour. The landlord swore it was not. Both were regarded in this parish as honest men, which is what made it worth an entry.

The Finding. The ale was sound. I tasted the barrel, and the customer's pint, and then — this is the part that took the afternoon — the customer's pot, which had been washed in a bucket that had had something else in it.

The Ruling. For the landlord. And I want the rest of it down, because the ruling is not the useful part: the customer was not lying. His pint was sour. It was sour in his hand, in his mouth, on his evening. He was reporting his experience accurately and the fault was in a bucket eleven feet away that neither man could see.

The dry finding: nine complaints in ten in this office are two honest people describing two different true things, and the trade is not in deciding who lies. It is in finding the bucket.

4 · THE NEW BREWSTER AT MUCKLECOMBE

The Complaint. None. She sent for me herself, before she opened, and asked me to condemn her if I needed to.

The Finding. It was, on that first tasting, not good. Thin, and hurried, and she knew it before I had swallowed; I saw her face.

The Ruling. I did not condemn it, because nobody had bought any, and there is no rule that says the Conner may not simply say "not yet." I told her what I thought it wanted. She did not agree with me about the water and she was right and I was wrong, and she told me so eleven months later, cheerfully, and poured me the proof.

Hers is now the best ale in this parish and it is not close, and every third man in here will tell you it has always been so, which is what this realm does with a beginning.

The dry finding: the whole use of a standard is not the condemning. It is that somebody with no stake and a bad palate for flattery will come and taste your work before it costs you anything, if you ask — and almost nobody asks, and the ones who ask are almost always the ones who go on to be good.

5 · ON BEING SHOUTED AT

The Complaint. Mine, for once.

The Finding. I have been shouted at, over thirty-one years, by: eleven landlords, four brewsters, one curate, a Committee man who was not entitled to an opinion, and — memorably, at length, in the road — a woman whose husband's barrel I had condemned and whose winter I had accordingly made a good deal harder. She was not wrong to. I had done exactly what she said I had done. The ale was still bad.

The Ruling. The office is unpaid and unappealable and the man who holds it must be shoutable-at, or the parish has no way of disagreeing with the standard except by ignoring it, and a standard that is ignored is worse than none.

The dry finding: an unpaid office survives on being allowed to be shouted at. Take that away — give the Conner a wage and a title and a man on the door — and you have not protected him. You have removed the only appeal anybody had.

6 · THE STATE OF THE INSTRUMENT

(This entry is added to each year. It is the reason this book exists and the reason it is going to a younger man in the spring.)

Year one. Sound. Could pick the Peatdike water blindfold from three others and did, twice, for a bet.

Year eleven. Sound. Bitter is going first; I notice I want it stronger to read the same.

Year nineteen. I have started keeping the sound barrels in this book as well as the bad, which I did not do before, so that I have something true to measure myself against. It is not vanity. It is a control, and Clank told me the word for it, in a corridor, and did not laugh at me, which I did not expect.

Year twenty-six. I got one wrong. A barrel at the Halfway Stone: I passed it and it was off and the parish knew before I did. Nobody said much. That was worse.

Year thirty-one. I can still find a fault. I can no longer reliably find a small one, and the small ones are the whole art, and a Conner who can only catch the ruined barrels is a man being paid nothing to confirm what the taproom already knows.

The Ruling on myself. The instrument is worn. It has been worn for about four years and I have been telling myself otherwise for three of them.

So: I have written to the vestry to say that I shall stand down in the spring, and I have said why, and I have put the year-by-year in this book so that whoever comes next can see what wearing out looks like from the inside and will recognise it earlier than I did — which is the only genuinely useful thing in thirty-one years of this office, and it is not about ale at all.

THE CONNER'S CLOSING NOTE

They will elect somebody by acclamation in the spring, at the vestry, with the old laughter, the way they do it — and whoever it is will be told for the rest of their life that they have the best job in the realm.

Let them. It is a good joke and it is worth a great deal to an office that has no wage.

But leave this book on the shelf where they can reach it, and turn it to the last entry, because there is one sentence in thirty-one years I would want a new Conner to have on the first morning, and it is not about brewing:

You are the instrument. Instruments wear. Write down the state of yourself, honestly, every year, in the same book as the work — because everybody in this parish will tell you when the ale is bad, and not one of them will ever be able to tell you when it is you.

— C. Stannard, Ale-Conner, for the last year, at the Muddy Boot, with a small one in front of him, which he has paid for.