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The earliest memory in my life which I still vividly retain, transports me back to the age of 3 in 1949 and a trip round Ind Coope and Allsop's Brewery in Burton on Trent. This was the very place where my Grandfather worked in a clerical job back in the 1920's and 30's. I never knew him. But my mother told me he was given a bottle of beer every day free for the whole of his working life in the administration of Ind Coope's.

Looking back on the experience of this visit, it's a wonder I have such a love for beer, since the experience half a century ago was really quite traumatic. There was nothing wrong with the smell of the place though, that was unique. The whole town smelled of that lovely brewing malt process or is it the hops that pervades the air? Strange how it never smells of actual beer itself but only of the process of making it.

The visit was meant to be "entertainment" for my brother and I but he was better able to appreciate it, as he was 5 years old. The main novel fascination was the bottling plant where thousands of little brown bottles bobbed along, each with a label and a good proportion of them sporting the distinctive and very artistic design of "Double Diamond".

They marched past in rows like hundreds of tin soldiers and seemed to wobble and jostle as if "alive". They turned corners, went round in circles, climbed to different levels and came down from higher places like some giant Scalectrix toy. No cans in those days, they were not to be introduced until "Long Life" beer came on the market I think.

The second part of our visit to this factory involved going into a fairly quiet workshop where there was a giant furnace. I have no idea if this was a "malt boiler" or something requiring a level of fire that seemed as powerful as a boiler on a steam locomotive. The guy in charge asked my parents to stay put and he'd open the furnace and we could see what was happening inside.

He then proceeded with great ceremony to heave open a large door facing us and we could see the roaring and terrifying fires of hell - but the added value to this entertainment was that he invited my elder brother to push a button that brought forth automatic stoking. This was the bit that traumatised me. A mass of coal was released into it as some kind of "dispenser-stoker".

It was like an avalanche of tons of coal down into the fire box. To me it felt like they were giving some huge organic monster its lunch to give it strength for the next half a day. I didn't want to see them do it in another furnace nearby and declined their offer to be the one to press the next button!

I was being held aloft by my father in order to better see this "event". I think I preferred to be put down on the floor and get the hell out of there as fast as possible!

We moved on to look at something more peaceful and that was a mysterious process whereby barrels would disappear up into the sky - to who knows where? Off to join Father Christmas or God maybe? It was an endless loop of lift platforms and some conveyer would be dispensing a single barrel at a time, gently rolling barrel after barrel into the platform box with perfect timing as it fed the factory with newly made barrels.

The process repeated every time a platform came past. This made a daisy-chain of barrels all going up to heaven. When they got so high that to me they might as well have been the sky, they turned away and dissolved into the ether. I was mystified by this. I had no idea why barrels had to go up to God, but perhaps the quality of this nectar was worthy of it. I dreamed about the image for many years. It was kind of spooky.

My parents seemed to gravitate towards entertaining us with things that were loud enough to damage your hearing, and since my mother was to suffer deafness later in life and both her parents were deaf - it was rather an inappropriate activity to be doing. She felt a sense of attachment to Ind Coope's and this was most likely because her father was from Hilton and the Brentnall's probably had a tradition of being in the brewing trade. Nobody in the factory was ever seen wearing hearing defenders in those days. I wonder how many of them retired stone deaf?

Certainly the risk must have been awful particularly to those working in the next stage of this visit which took us into the "Couperage" shop. Here barrels were being made from scratch. Men wielding big mallets in a dark kind of workshop. My parents were interested in the process but unable to communicate much to each other or to me, since nobody could hear themselves speak in there.

I do remember distinctly the the man nearest to us constructing a large barrel, being paraded rather like a monkey as he finished this amazing object for our benefit. With great skill he placed metal straps around it; a jigsaw puzzle that would baffle anyone not trained to do it

He decided to give us a memento and handed to my father a tapered wooden peg. There were seemingly thousands of them flying all over the place and littering the floor almost like wood shavings. But it was a well formed almost sculpture-like peg.

I must have thought it was a nice to be able to take something away with us as a gift even though it had little use for a three year old kid. I supposed that someone banged them into a hole during the construction. Perhaps if I had hung on to it, it would be worth something today?

I think I was much too young to appreciate the finer points of this visit. It was not until many years later that the full benefit of Science and Technology could "soak in" as a proper entertainment for us when we made visits to London's Science Museum. Here we could interact as we misbehaved, winding handles round making exhibits do furious things in glass cases!

Later when I was two years under age to drink in pubs I found myself regularly walking past the modern Benskins Brewery in Watford where the familiar sight of those bottles belting past on the other side of windows brought back memories. A friend and I would drop into The Green Man, pub very close to the old brewery and pretend we were 18. We'd order a pint of "Brown and Mild", which suited our youthful and rather sweet taste in beer.

In those days we thought a Shandy was misbehaving - it was our kicks then. Today the nearest taste to Brown and Mild is a Newcastle Brown. But I did once find a bottle of Newcastle Light on sale, about ten years ago which has never appeared again. It was nice. Strange how such things crop up. I also found a Single Gloucester Cheese on sale in Salisbury but the shop burned down and I've never seen one since.

Maybe that's a new quest for me. Try to find a Double Diamond, A Newcastle Light and a Single Gloucester Cheese. What was it Joni Mitchell sang? "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got till its gone" "They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot"