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| Image: David Anderson for Hot Rum Cow |
WEST’s Petra Wetzel on keeping it simple, taking on lager’s big boys and leaving a legacy
The 19th-century Templeton building is an unexpected, yet welcome sight in the large, open expanse of Glasgow Green, the city’s oldest park. It is an imposing, hulking building, which was modelled on the Doge’s palace in Venice to appease local residents of a factory being built on their doorstep. Step through its doors, and it feels as if I’ve just landed bang smack in the centre of not Venice, but Munich. I’m greeted by the strong waft of beer and the low hum of chatter in a spacious, Bavarian-style beer hall, complete with acres of dark wood, an impressive array of taps and steins of frothy lager. If it wasn’t for the Glaswegian accents giving it away, you might think this was the Hofbräuhaus.
“Why not have a really good pint of lager?” Wetzel asks me in her soft Glaswegian lilt that occasionally betrays her German roots. “It might cost you 30p, 50p or even £1 more, but it’s a brilliant pint of lager, rather than cheap and nasty nonsense. A lot of breweries have cottoned on to the fact that people really like lager. I think that is why the resurgence in lager has occurred. The big boys are now jumping on the bandwagon of craft. Do they take consumers for complete and utter fools? When big breweries all of a sudden say they have a craft lager, ‘Bollocks to that,’ I say. It just doesn’t wash. You can go to a brewery that’s 100 times bigger than us, but there are fewer people working in it. That’s just pressing buttons; that’s not brewing. You just become a factory.”
Although WEST is housed in a former factory, Wetzel says you won’t find mass-produced lager here. It’s strictly premium, brewed according to the centuries-old German Purity Law (or Reinheitsgebot). The law specified that only barley, hops, yeast and water were permitted in the brewing of beer, and was introduced to safeguard standards.
This was a feature I wrote for Issue 5 of the awards-winning drinks magazine, Hot Rum Cow. Read the rest of the feature at www.hotrumcow.co.uk/west-brewing-glasgow-beer/
