Halcyon Days
Simon Rogers (1975)
One of the benefits bestowed upon us for our third year was the opportunity to influence our room allocation. Four of us decided to attempt to get a Cripps corridor together which could then essentially become a flat (albeit with one unfortunate fresher having to share it).
Thus began our experiment in self-sufficiency. It started with frustration over College catering arrangements so, to supplement the two rings in the gyp room, we found a Baby Belling oven and grill at a jumble sale, chained it to the worktop and, armed with Step by Step Cookery by the recently late Marguerite Patten, started our culinary adventure from absolute zero. Cooking in turns for the group, it became, of course, highly competitive and after many basic disasters ended with candle-lit dinners on the roof of Cripps building. I have no idea how we got tables up there, or how we got away with it.
The more serious enterprise, which brought massive economic benefits, however, was brewing. Another jumble sale visit and we had an old Burco Boiler, the sort used for boiling up the wash in the post war years. This was a perfect mash tun.
Buying-in drums of malt, bags of hops and supplemental grains enabled us to brew 10 gallons a week – the fermenting buckets fitting perfectly in a Cripps wardrobe. Sunday night was brewing night, involving both bottling the previous week’s effort (a bitter, mild or, our signature brew, a porter) and mashing the current week’s brew. It became a very sociable affair as can be imagined.
Lemonade bottles from the bar were perfect for conditioning and I clearly remember cycling to a soft drinks plant on the Newmarket Road, hoping to persuade them to let us have a job lot of new screwtops. They indulged my request before explaining that the tops are actually moulded to the individual bottles from sheet metal!
The resultant brews were shared out and taken down to the bar in jugs bought for the purpose, saving us ever having to pay money over the counter, and making us very popular.
Brewing is a pretty invasively pungent activity and results in large volumes of spent hops, yeast, etc, all of which had to be disposed of. Again, I marvel at the tolerance of the authorities concerned and our fortune in having the most forgiving Bedder in Cambridge.
