‘Can this be right?’ Beer writing colleague Tim Hampson and I are inching our way down a tight country lane.

The road has narrowed markedly since we left the beaten track. It bends and then it dips. No, it more than dips. This is a one-in-five hill.

We begin to doubt that there is actually a brewery down here in this wild and green Devon valley. But then a puff of steam and a whiff of malt and hops confirm that we are, after all, on the right road.

Family Friendly

This is Otter Brewery. A family-owned, family-run, family-welcoming business that exudes everything that is great – and somewhat eccentric – about craft brewing.

Mary Ann McCaig strolls out to meet us as Tim carefully manoeuvres his car to avoid the tractor making a delivery to the brewhouse. Mary Ann and her husband, David, set up the business in 1990, but brewing is in the blood.

David (pictured above) was formerly a brewer with Whitbread. He met his wife, the daughter of a fellow brewer, at an industry dance. Some years later, a redundancy cheque saw the McCaigs repair to Devon where they ran a B&B and served cream teas.

Then they sold up and bought a smallholding in this secluded valley, where a barn held the promise of being the right sort of place to house a brewery.

Sitting in that barn, chatting to the McCaigs and their son, Patrick, who is part of the team, it’s soon very clear that brewing is not just an occupation: it’s a way of life.

The brewery has now moved out of here, leaving this as a staff room-cum-hospitality area, but it’s not gone far. After steadily growing in size from five barrels up to 30 barrels, it needed more room to breathe.

Not another vessel could be shoe-horned in, so now, just the other side of the McCaigs’ farmhouse, stands a spanking new 80-barrel brewhouse, designed to look like an old Devon barn.

Damn, Fine Beer

‘A monument to stainless steel,’ is how David, almost apologetically, describes the interior but it’s practical, efficient and produces damn, fine beer – from the copper-coloured Otter Bitter at 3.6%, with its pleasant malt accent, and the golden Otter Bright at 4.3%, with its crisp, fruity bitterness, to the fruity and malty Otter Ale at 4.5 and the sweetish, but seriously satisfying, Otter Head at 5.8.

Most of the beer is sold in cask form but some is bottled. US readers may have stumbled across one called Hoppy Otter, an IPA flavoured with American hops, that the family seems strangely reluctant to sell in Britain, even though Tim and I try to persuade them that it would go down a storm.

It’s not just the new brewhouse that has drawn us to this quiet part of the West Country. It’s also the investment the business has made in ecological matters.

Much has been printed, rightly, about the new eco-depot constructed by Adnams in Suffolk, but Otter, too, has now flaunted its green credentials by building a new eco-cellar next to the brewhouse.

Adventurous and Admirable

It’s an adventurous and admirable project, and not just because more than £1 million has been invested in it. The new building sits on two levels.

The top floor has been reserved for cask washing. Sounds echo all too easily around this valley and taking the noisiest part of the brewing cycle indoors shows respect for the neighbours.

The floor below is lit by solar tubes carrying sunlight from the outside. This is where the filled casks are stored and vans loaded for delivery – again keeping everything as quiet and streamlined as possible – with the natural coolness of the underground site doing away with the need for electronic chillers.

The roof of the building is covered in sedum, which not only adds to the insulation, but is green in every sense. Rainwater from here is captured for cleaning – just part of the good conservation practice that the McCaigs sign up to.

Spent grains go to local farms, exhausted hops are taken by gardeners and waste beer and yeast are greedily swallowed up by Devon pigs. Even the water goes through an eco-cycle – taken from a local spring, used in brewing, then passed as effluent into the site’s own, naturally-filtering willow beds (pictured) from which clean water drains into the River Otter.

Tim and I are impressed with everything: the investment, the equipment, the most hospitable of welcomes and, not least, the quality of the beer.

All we need to do now is to negotiate the one-in-five hill and find our way back onto the motorway, which is almost as tricky as getting here in the first place.

‘This can’t be right, can it?’.