Christopher Gray talks about the Cotswold Brewing Company

Throughout my adult life I have been disposed to admire those inclined to organise what the common man is pleased to call — invariably where a lack of organisation is concerned — “a p***-up in a brewery”. In my happy experience it has generally been the brewers themselves who can be relied upon to organise one best.

A bus-borne bender at Hook Norton’s famous Victorian tower brewery remains in my memory a full 40 years after it was undertaken, with fellow members of the National Union of Journalists. Hooky, of course, still prospers today, unlike those other centres for conviviality that were Morrell’s of Oxford, Morland’s of Abingdon and Brakspear’s of Henley. The first of these, with its ever-open — or, rather, ever-easy-to-have-opened — tasting room above the Castle Mill Stream, seems a particularly grievous loss.

Other breweries have arrived on the scene to replace those that have departed. One of the more unusual of these is the Cotswold Brewing Company, which started life in 2005 on a farm in Foscot, near Chipping Norton, and is now in larger premises in a glorious setting near Bourton-on-the-Water.

Unusual, because its speciality is producing lager, which was generally considered anathema to the real ale aficionados who are principally catered for by the new wave of smaller breweries. Still is to many of them, indeed.

My introduction to the company (besides that arising from an acquaintance with its products) came some months ago at the Jam Factory, in Oxford. Its boss Andrew Norton has been stocking the range of Cotswold beers from the word go (although he was not quite the first customer, that distinction going to Archie Orr-Ewing, of the King’s Head, in Bledington, who figured in this column recently as the supplier of lunch for David Cameron and Francois Hollande at his other pub, the Swan Inn, at Swinbrook).

The Jam Factory was the venue for the launch of the latest Cotswold product, its IPA, created by the new brewer James Boatright. During a jolly dinner laid on for guests there I met the company’s founder Rick Keene, who pressed upon me an invitation to visit the brewery. Not, of course, that very much pressing was necessary.

The date eventually fixed on was last Thursday. With the likelihood of much beer consumption in prospect, travel by car was obviously ruled out. Though floods had wiped out large parts of the local rail network, the line connecting Oxford with Kingham, the closest point for Bourton-on-the-Water, was happily unaffacted. There at the station waiting to greet Rosemarie and me was Cotswold’s public relations supremo Tania Corbett and Rick’s wife Emma, the managing director of the business, with the youngest of the Keenes’ quartet of daughters, Sybil, strapped into the car seat behind her.

Even before meeting Emma, I knew we were going to get on, for it was she, with a fondness for gin, my favoured tipple, who inspired Cotswold to branch out into the spirits trade. They make both mother’s ruin and vodka (though not in Gloucestershire). Emma’s preference for lager over ale, incidentally, partly explains the decision to go down this road too.

At the brewery, a delicious smell of hops permeated the air, for brewer James was busy at the mash tun supervising the boiling of a new batch of lager, some 4,000 pints of it, I was told.

After a cogent explanation of the brewing process from Rick — well rehearsed for the many groups who visit — we lost no time in getting stuck in to some samples. All Cotswold’s products were available for tasting. My favourite, without a doubt, was the Cotswold Wheat Beer, a cloudy beer in a style long popular in Germany. Even before Rick mentioned it, I noted overtones of banana in its flavour, not something usually associated with beer.

I was also very taken with the dark stout, whose nutty taste took me back to the dawn of my drinking days in the early 1960s when stout shandy was the prescribed tipple for a ten-year-old. This was made with Jumbo Stout — the name suddenly came back to me — from long-gone brewery, Phipps, whose Northampton town centre premises were transformed into a giant lager plant. The fiendishly strong (and horribly sweet) Carlsberg Special Brew has been made there since the 1950s, having first been brewed for Winston Churchill’s 1950 visit to Denmark. Beer buffs have long been hoping for a lager that offers its potency (nine per cent alcohol, almost wine strength) in a brew that is actually drinkable. Perhaps Rick and James could come up with something . . .