Breakfast in Brighton by Nigel Richardson x Low Five, Vienna Pale by Hand Brew Co
Sunday Morning by The Velvet Underground starts to play as Jess pumps through my order of Low Five. The afternoon late summer sun shines low in the sky, dazzling the room and catching the gold in the glass. Jack, the brewer, marches through the pub with a sack of spent grain straight from the mash tun, cutting through the chatter of regulars in the room at 4pm on a Thursday.
Breakfast in Brighton is a tough book to categorise, as I read it in The Hand in Hand (my own take on Richardsons local, The Grosvenor Arms) the other pub goers spot it in my hands and occasionally they’ll stop and ask “what’s it like”?
One of them has been given it and never opened it, another has always meant to read it, another recognises the cover and wants a review. “It’s sort of like a hybrid of Tales of the City and On The Road, set in Brighton, with some possible actual history and some journalism and a couple of art hunts… and a fair bit of tarot” is the best I’ve got.
I found Breakfast in Brighton in a Hove charity shop for £1 and tucked in that night. It’s an endearing sort of literary-essay mixtape dedicated to a summer of love between the author and the city of Brighton and all the weirdness, grit, grime, sparkle and magic that involves. Bouts of fantasy, occasional obsessions and a touch of hero worship mingle in dark bars with historical tidbits and unusual perspectives, often times resulting in Oz-like moments where the curtain falls back and the magic is revealed to be all rust, out-of-order signs and cigarette smoke. I think the strength and beauty of this book (and the experience of Brighton in reality) lies in the fact that it is at these moments that I fall a little harder for the city than when it is all shiny dazzle and mystery. It’s a feeling akin to the charm of watching a kids theatrical production with awkward acting and forgotten lines and painted sets and the tough heart-bursting love and pride and goodwill you feel when the second-tree-on-the-left is from your clan. Perfectly imperfect.
It’s Brighton & Hove Beer Week at the moment so it feels like a good time to pull this book out of my Summer Reads for a reactive pairing. When it came to finding the beer to drink with it, this one was more a case of finding the place to drink the beer, because Breakfast in Brighton is a book about place and time, and beer is also very much about those things. I mean, it is about a great many things, but these things are some of those things and they are important things that are often left aside in beer chat.
I’m sitting on a stool at the bar of The Hand in Hand. This is my own version of The Grosvenor Arms, Richardsons Brunswick local where he spends a great deal of his summer. It’s local, eccentric, free of ties, brews its own beer and is the kind of magical place where time stands still and strangers share their life stories. Jen, the landlady, conducts the orchestra of chaos: artists and musicians and poets and locals from all walks of life are whipped up into a frenzy of community camaraderie that I always thought only existed in fiction set in the past.
The Hand has been our touchstone since arriving in Brighton, a place where people are beginning to know our faces, then names, then numbers.
Pubs like this are the refuge of outsiders, they are a place where you can fast track your claim on a place. I’m a local now.
This is, I think, why the pub is so important to Richardson in his book, it’s not just a source for anecdotes and eccentrics, it’s his ticket to belonging. He couldn’t have written this book as a true local, but he also couldn’t have written this book without putting in his hours on that bar stool.
Low Five is a great pairing for this mood of a book, because it’s exactly like a summer romance of a beer. Pulled from the cask, brewed on site in the tiny ancient brewery hidden in the pubs attic, it starts soft, sweet and subtle before escalating into something quite diverting.
At 3.8% you may not even realise you’re drinking a beer, that you are entering into a contract with your body where you’re going to let go a little by the end of the glass. That, just like Richardson and his adventures, you will be a different person when you’re finished than you were when you started.
Jacks Vienna Pale pours perfectly clear and I’m struck by the clean crisp nose - a slight grassy sharpness like sun-baked gardens at the end of summer. That first sip is so easy, it actually FEELS light, innocent. The delicate head grips the glass as the level drops, lacing mysterious shapes onto its contours and setting my imagination loose. A beer this easy is a pleasure to drink, especially in a place like The Hand and I find myself relaxing into it, drinking fast, leaning into my neighbours conversations picking up on a thread here and there, having to reread whole paragraphs. The beer and Brighton are working their magic.
The complexity intensifies as I work my way down the glass, a bracing bitterness starts to tingle at the back of my mouth, down the sides of my tongue, building sip by sip into a lingering crescendo that is balancing those sweet caramel malty notes in an elegant duet that invites another taste.
The pumps pull as the pages turn and, as the minutes tick by and the summer slides to an end, we all evolve. Richardsons adventures in Brighton sees questions answered with more questions until his journalistic caterpillar evolves into a raconteur butterfly and he flies away a changed man full of stories - much better than answers.
Glass finished I regretfully set it on the bar and walk home along the seafront, head full of thoughts and mouth full of flavour.
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