6 July 2019
Beer & Berries
Beer & Berries is one of the highlights of the Summer Festival at Hospitalfield. The free event has been hosted annually since 2017 with great success. It’s mid-summer and Angus will be awash with fruit and produce grown thanks to the wonderful fertile coastal soils. Beer & Berries is a perfect opportunity to celebrate the fantastically rich food and drink culture that we are so lucky to have across Angus and Tayside. Visitors to Beer & Berries are invited to buy the produce and to meet the producers, growers and local suppliers of the best beer and berries in Scotland – and to enjoy lots of delicious food prepared on the BBQ by Hospitalfield’s Chef Manager Simon Brown.
Stallholders include the following fantastic local producers, with many more to follow:
Beer & Berries Jam Competition
The Jam Competition returns this year and we are asking you to join in and present a jar of jam that you think will stand out and win. We are delighted to have Martin Grant, Managing Director of Mackays Jam and our very own Hospitalfield Chef Manager Simon Brown tasting the jams and coming up with a winner. The creator of the winning jam will receive a ‘behind the scenes’ tour of the Mackays jam factory as their prize, a great insight in to jam production at an ambitious scale. There is also a Mackays hamper for the runner up. Mackays is no usual jam producer but a traditional factory making excellent jam in small batches using copper bottomed pans and using berries from the best local Scottish fruit farms. We are really delighted that this important local employer continues their involvement in Hospitalfield’s Beer & Berries day.
Please enter your your jam for the competition by completing the form available for download below and bringing it along to Hospitalfield with your entry by the deadline of 5pm on Wednesday 3 July 2019
Beer & Berries Jam Competition Form 2019
Image courtesy of Meander Artist in Residence Sarah Rose.
FEAST Talks & Events for Beer & Berries
This year, Beer & Berries will include a programme of talks, workshops and events. Laura Mansfield who runs the online journal FEAST has developed a programme of talks on contemporary and sustainable approaches to craft brewing – from field to grain to glass:
1.00pm – 1.45pm: Farmerama Abby Rose co-founder of Farmerama an award-winning podcast sharing the voices of smaller-scale farmers across the globe will be talking about their ongoing project #Ourfield where 60 people have invested in a field of grain in Hertfordshire making collective decisions on the farming and use of the final crop. They are setting up a blueprint for further OurFields.
1.45pm – 2.30pm: New Heritage Barley: Sarah DeVos from New Heritage Barley will be talking about her work in promoting/reviving heritage strains of cereal for the craft brewing industry and the positive environmental impacts of using heritage grains.
3.00pm – 3.45pm: Grow Beer: We will have a representative from Grow Beer – a “patchwork farm” initiative where people grow hops in their back gardens, balconies and allotments for the local craft brewing industry that could inspire the first Scottish branch of the project in Angus.
3.45pm – 4.30pm: Kirsty Black, Arbikie Highland Estate: Arbikie Highland Estate is a family owned farm perched on the east coast of Angus, with a unique ‘farm to bottle’ approach that means the crops and botanicals grown during the year on the farm are used as key ingredients in the spirits produced by Arbikie Distillery. Kirsty Black is one of their award-winning distillers. Kirsty and her colleague Christian Perez complete every step of spirit production at one of Scotland’s newest distilleries; from receiving in the grain and potatoes from the farm, all the way through to filling the spirit into bottles. Kirsty was recently awarded Young Scientist of the Year Scotland Award First Prize by the Institute of Food Science and Technology for her studies of legumes crops. In this talk, Kirsty will offer a fascinating insight into the realities of building and running a brand new distillery and producing award winning spirits.
‘House of Ferment’ Kvass Workshop with Karen Guthrie
12.30pm – 1.30pm & 2.30pm – 3.30pm
Karen Guthrie leads an introduction to kvass, a delicious non-alcoholic fermented ‘beer’, traditionally a homemade beverage most commonly found across eastern Europe and Russia. Often including flavourings of fruits, herbs and spices, kvass is in its simplest from made from old bread. The result is a delicious fizzy drink, low in sugar and – like other lacto-fermented foods such as yoghurt – very healthy and gut-friendly. Learn how to make this simple drink at home with everyday ingredients such as leftover bread, and take away your own kvass-in-progress to ferment at home. Karen Guthrie is a Scottish artist and film-maker based in the Lake District in Cumbria.Her ongoing projects include “House of Ferment” (a collaborative installation with Grizedale Arts) commissioned by Science Gallery London, which has toured internationally and is presently on show in the V&A Museum in ‘Food: Bigger Than The Plate’.
