KEEPING THE BEER FLOWING

Biere du Compté is the toast of anyone who’s ridden Transvesubienne and when a freak storm destroyed its Alpine brewery, urgent help was needed...

- Kieren Page

The Vésubie Valley is a geographical anomaly. If you start drawing straight lines across the map you might be fooled into thinking it is quite close to Nice. You would be wrong. Somehow the valleys and mountains twist and turn to make the route in and out long and torturous. Each year riders make the pilgrimage there for the Trans-Vésubienne, a hellishly tough, big-mountain XC race that links the high peaks of the Vésubie to the beach below.

My main memory of that race, beyond the suffering, is always the cold beer at the end. You see, it’s not just any beer. It is called Biere du Comté. Brewed in Saint Martin, the finish line for the prologue, it takes its unique flavour from the water running down off the mountains. Yet it is that same water that brought disaster to the brewery and the community around it last year.

On 2 October, 2020, Master brewer Laurent Fredj went to work like any morning. Sure, there had been weather warnings, but up here in the mountains they are used to harsh weather. As he says: “here, when it rains, it really rains.” As the rain beat down on the metal roof, his small team busied themselves with the latest batch, getting ready to bottle the beer. But by lunchtime he was starting to worry a little; this was a big storm, bigger than normal.

Gathering his men, he advised them to take a moment to move their cars to higher ground. As the afternoon began, the noise changed. It mounted, getting more urgent, more worrying. It was a Friday and they would knock off at half-past-three anyway, so he sent his team home and locked the doors. The waters were rising higher and higher and he left with a head full of worry about how bad the damage would be, how long it would take to dry everything out, how much production time he would lose.

BIBLICAL DELUGE