Prince of Porter

The drinks business: The Beer Academy – is that a bit like Fame Academy? Rupert Ponsonby: It’s a fame academy for beers, demonstrating their diversity and their “star appeal”. It also allows the eternally effervescent little cherubs to strut their stuff.

db: If you were a beer, what would you be?   RP: I reckon I’d be a dark, spiced porter (the slightly vinous forerunner to stouts); blowsy, sensuous and with a big bubbling head.

db: Describe your perfect beer-drinking situation RP: Cor, I have so many of them! But partnering them with different foods is probably my perfect occasion – such as marrying raspberry beer with foie gras, or wheat beer with crab, or a high abv almost rum-like old ale with Stilton cheese.

db: Yum. It’s barbecue season, are you a sausage or a steak man? RP: Ideally both, but sausages have more character and pizzazz.

db: Do you have any top tips for outdoor cookery? RP: Ask someone else to do it, then sit up-wind in a comfy lair with the one you love.

db: Rosé wine – refreshing summer tipple or girlie pink nonsense? RP: Madly underrated. It needs more intellectual value attached to it. If Picasso can have a blue period, it’s about time the UK experienced a pink one! Only consumer snobbery and winemaker derision has held it back.

db: When exactly is Pimms o’clock? RP: Whenever many people, of many ages, with many tastes, need to be made happy.

db: When and where did you learn to swim? RP: You know, I have always felt at home in water, and I feel most calm when standing in the middle of a Scottish river dressed in rubbers attempting to catch a fish. I attribute this to my time in the womb, and my breaststroke was first learnt well before I was born.

db: You’re a good swimmer then, can you swim butterfly? RP: Yes, but the impression is more of a drowning moth.

db: Can you ride a horse? RP: I hurtle like winged Icarus over every obstacle, but my quadruped seldom follows.

db: What’s the most annoying thing that’s happened to you recently? RP: My sow, Truffle, a hairy, sisal coloured Kune Kune from New Zealand has lost all her piglets. She is sad and I am distraught.

db: I didn’t know you kept pigs? RP: I do! Boudicca who is my other pig has just had four babies, two of whom are orange and two of whom are black and white – they’re beautiful. If you say to them “Sit!” they do sit, and then if you give them an apple they chew it sitting down but as soon as they’ve finished eating they stand up to ask for more.

db: Who’s your favourite person? RP: My wife, followed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Bonnie Prince Charlie and Queen Boadicea.

db: I never leave home without my…… RP: Eternal optimism, my half-filled glass.