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By the time you head to work in the morning, the chances are every brewer in the country has mashed in and is wondering where his next cup of tea is coming from.

Brewdays can take anything from five to twelve hours, and then there’s a lot of cleaning up to do, so it starts absurdly early. Brewing collaboration beers or filming on location usually means we get the first train of the day, but it’s always worth it. The steamy aroma of a mash is, without doubt, my favourite smell in the world. It’s somewhere between a great cask bitter and a cookie fresh from the oven. However long you’ve been a brewer, especially on winter days, you can’t help but lean over the tun and breathe in the delicious, warming steam.

Mashing is the process of extracting flavour and sugar from the malt and introducing water to the beer. Hot water and malt are added to a mash tun – a giant vat with a filter plate at the bottom of it. There, it’s held at the best temperatures for enzymes to break down the starch into sugar, stirred most of the time by hand or machine.

The mash may sound like a giant porridge, but it’s where a huge part of a beer’s character comes from. It’s not just affecting the flavour, aroma and colour that we talked about in the last chapter, either – it controls the mouthfeel of the beer, too, and nailing that is very tricky indeed.