I brew twenty litres at a time in a kitchen on the northern edge of Šiauliai and ferment it in a cellar under the garage. Every batch is written down — gravity, temperature, timing, result — so the good ones can be repeated and the bad ones are not repeated by accident.

Copper Kettle is a kettle, a kitchen and a cold garage on the northern edge of Šiauliai. I brew twenty litres at a time, mostly ales and the kind of farmhouse beer that used to be made here for harvest, and I have kept a written record of every batch since the spring of 2021. There is no brewery, no taproom and nothing for sale. There is a notebook with a scorch mark on the cover and a shelf of bottles in the cellar that works out more often than it used to.

The log exists because I have a poor memory for numbers and an excellent memory for how a beer tasted, which is the wrong way round. Written down, a batch becomes comparable: this mash held sixty-six degrees for an hour, that one drifted to sixty-one while I answered the door, and one of the two finished four points lower. I record what I measured, what I guessed, and where the two got confused, because the guesses are where the interesting failures usually begin.

All of it is local to one flat, one garage and one climate. The cellar sits at eight degrees in February and eighteen by late August, the barley comes from a farm forty minutes west, and the hops climb a wire behind the garage where they get morning sun and nothing after that. Somebody brewing with a temperature-controlled fridge would read my fermentation notes and be misled by them. I name no farms, no shops and none of the neighbours who drink the results.