Neil Morrissey's Risky Business Neil Morrissey & Richard Fox - Men Brewing Badly?

Date Published:

24/10/2008

4Food meets the crazy twosome behind Channel 4’s new show, Neil Morrissey’s Risky Business

Where exactly were you when you came up with the idea?

Neil: [to Richard] It was at your house in France.

Richard: We were sat on the veranda in my little house in France when we decided. It was before that really, when we decided what beer we wanted; but the whole idea came together probably on my veranda.
It was cemented then. We'd sit in a pub, right up to that; getting food and getting beer and just banging on about it. Going: "We can do better than this; why do they do it this way"!

Neil: And going, "how does that work with this?" And sort of, you know, testing out all sorts of ideas… I mean there are beers that we go out and buy, but nothing that spectacular. So we thought we’d have a go at it ourselves.

Had you ever shared a bath before the show? [reference to episode 1]

Neil: Not before the programme, no we hadn't actually. Even though we've shared a bath, I've still never seen his willy.

Were you naked or did you have pants on?

Neil: No, we had pants on. We had to get naked when we got out the bath, but I didn't look.

Richard: They put protective sheets around us; there's no way we're ever gonna see each others' willies!

Neil: I don't want to see his willy; if it's anything like his hairstyle there, what's it gonna be like in the downstairs area?

Richard: I've got a centre parting actually.

Neil: Oh really, it wouldn’t surprise me. It sort of goes down this long. His hair on his thingy…There were small families of villagers living down there.

Richard: Is this relevant?!

You seem to know a lot about it by the sounds of things...

Neil: Yeah, I don't talk to him, I just talk to the villagers who live down there.

Richard: He’s just fantasising actually.

Neil: Yeah. I'm sure I've seen people climbing, scaling the inside of his leg.

Richard: Shall we move on…

You've been through a lot. Are you still tight; really good friends?

Neil: What do you mean by tight? Cheeky bitch.

Richard: He's actually not tight.

Neil: Of course we're very friendly otherwise we wouldn't be able to do business together. We find each other really good sounding boards for each other, it really works well. You know, whenever he comes up with an idea I tell him it's shit and we move on.

Richard: Actually, on a serious note I think it's got a lot better.

Neil: It has.

Richard: There are obviously so many different facets to this business and so many people involved. This whole thing started from me and him sitting down together and having a completely shared vision.

Neil: Yeah, having a shared passion. That becomes sort of diluted as so many different people get involved with stuff, but still when we sit down together having a few beers on our own, we just completely share the same ideas.

Richard: We come up with great ideas.

Neil: Neither of us knew how the other one was gonna perform under pressure, and then we didn't quite know the kind of pressure we were gonna come under, certainly with such a massive undertaking, i.e. TV programme, developing beer, selling beer, getting it into a market - and that includes everything from manufacture, organisation, distribution, the distribution network, where it needs to go etc... There are a lot of things that had kind of got under our radar, so that relationship going forward was great, because neither of us tends to panic under pressure, and we still enjoy each other's company. We've also learnt a lot about the trade itself and how it works and we believe that we got the dream team together in order to get that. Everything from promotion to manufacture and distribution organised, which was good forethought actually. When you're going for something which is a national product, you've got to put people under pressure, and it's about how you put people under pressure. I feel we've both managed fairly well.

Neil: Also, I think when you feel things running away with you and there are so many different people involved, the brilliant thing is that we can actually just sit down together and completely agree and bring everything back again to our original philosophy.

Richard: When all around you lose their head…

Did people have doubts? The guy from the Black Sheep breweries wasn't sure in the show - did you win him round?

Neil: He wasn’t sure, but then you know, poor fellow's had his little palms crossed before with the old bad devil hasn’t he, when Theakstones closed down. No, he was lovely, he was fantastic.

Has he tried the beer yet?

Neil: I don't know if he has. At the end of the day people give you advice everywhere you go. The main thing is that we absolutely believed in what we're doing and we’re absolutely solid on that; we'll take on board what people say. Actually, both of us have the ability to go, both to each other and other people, "Well, you're right there", but we've also got the confidence to stick with it. It's like the whole concept of the blonde ale; we both agreed that that was the way forward, but people went "I don't know about blonde ale", but we stuck with it and that consequently has proved to have been a really good thing.

Was it important to you to be producing a British ale? Was it important re your emphasis on beer and food matching?

Neil: Yeah, because there’s not many places you can go to. There are some places in North America where the have the real ale, the top fermented ale; that’s one of the only places I know in the whole world though. Everyone else does the lager technique, which is bottom cold fermented. It takes an awful lot longer, but the British ale style has been with us forever, it’s never really gone away, it’s always really been in the pub. Its popularity was diminishing, because it was always developed as a product that goes with food from the local area. In terms of what we’re trying to do, it’s not trying to advance forwards and be the great new thing of the future, we’ve actually taken it back 200 years to the provenance of ales, and you could only have brewed your own ales in your own area using food from your own area. In fact, that works so well with the carbon footprint attitude and the echo attitude of trying to brew it in your own area. Of course it’s not possible when so many thousands of people want your beer; we have to brew it in Burton-on-Trent and South Wales. We’re very aware of the fact that in our pub with our micro-brew, we make all our own ale. We have a few guest ales in, but that’s the whole idea, moving it backward a couple of hundred years rather than moving it forwards.

Richard: That was the age-old concept anyway, I mean the generic lagers just took over the industry. You’re not going to drink a pint of fizzy lager with some great food, but now if you look at the way the British food industry’s gone and the way that we eat out, we’ve now got farmers' markets flying up all over the place. Provenance, regionality and seasonality are absolutely key to the way we eat.

Neil: People don’t just want choice; they want to know where it’s from.

Richard: And also every nation or even climatic region; food and drink grows up together. So if you’re having food in the South of France, southern French cuisine, you’re gonna have a southern French wine with it. If you’re eating food in Northern Europe that doesn’t grow vines, you’re gonna have the beverage that naturally goes without food, which is beer.

Neil: If you’re born in Antarctica, you’re never gonna eat and you’ll die sober!

Richard: You never saw belly pork on menus ten years ago, and now it’s on the menus of Michelin star pubs and restaurants in this country. Well, you know, great English belly pork slow cooked in beer is always gonna accompany that better than wine is.

Neil: Mussels cooked in our blonde ale.