When I first referred to Jeremy Clarkson as “The Greatest Living Englishman”, it started off as a nod to his unflinching honesty when it came to everything he looked at, such as his (non-)review of some Vauxhall car model back in the 1990s: “If they’re not going to bother to make an interesting car, I’m not going to bother to review it.”
That caused Big Business (in this case, Vauxhall’s then-parent company General Motors) to go apeshit, because that’s not the way car reviewers are supposed to behave.
It’s that same unflinching honesty that he displayed in his first bumbling efforts at farming which turned his Clarkson’s Farm TV show into a runaway smash hit, and along the way almost single-handedly changed the way the British regard both food and the farmers who produce it.
So when he turned that same agricultural ignorance towards brewing beer — simply because he had a barn full of unsold barley which he needed to sell — one might think that it was just another celebrity using their name to sell a product.
In this case, one would be not only wrong, but spectacularly wrong. And if you want to see a case study in marketing that, in hindsight, never had a chance of failing, then I implore you to watch this video.
Time and time again, “the experts” believed that Clarkson was making a mistake, and every single time he proved them not only wrong, but spectacularly wrong.
He turned a few thousand pounds’ worth of unsold barley into a £75 million company, and in the process, changed the way British people think about farming, about beer and about the people who farm and the people who brew beer.
And he did it all with his usual unflinching honesty and openness, which gave the lie to the usual corporate veneer of respectability and care for both their employees and their customers.
Which is why he truly is the Greatest Living Englishman.
I can’t wait to try it the next time I go over to Britishland.
You may not have to wait. Hawkstone is looking at exporting as it’s next opportunity. And ,of couse all the experts say it can’t be done. the breweries are too small. They told Gunness that as well 100 years ago.