A brewery tale

For twenty-five years, from 1930 to 1955, my father worked for the Wrekin Brewery in Wellington in the County of Salop, which is why one of my earliest memories is sitting with him at our big farmhouse table gamely tucking in to bread and cheese and a glass of mild ale. All this in the evening, all this when I was about 6 or 7.
When I was 14 or so, my father got me a summer job at the brewery, where I learned a lot about the brewing business and the people who do the brewing. One of my favourite characters was Walter, whose job was bung-sniffing. That is to say, after the wooden barrels had been steam-cleaned, it was his task to stick his nose - and a tapering beauty of a proboscis it was - into the bunghole of the barrel to assure himself that it was "sweet", to use his word. I never knew his surname, but it should have been Tapir.
I spent some time perched on the rafters of the racking room applying antifungal paint to the ceiling. The racking room is where the beer finally enters huge vats before being "racked", that is, put into the barrels. Above me a ceiling, below me a sea of beer.
Which brings me to the point of this post. They told me solemnly to be careful up there in the rafters because of something that had happened years before, when a man doing the same work had fallen into the vat of beer and drowned. They told me that when his widow came to collect his body, she was understandably distraught. When she asked "Did he suffer?", the Head Brewer replied "We don't know, ma'am, but he got out three times to have a pee".
That's what they told me, and when you are 14, you must believe what your elders tell you.