In July, Susan travelled to Orkney with Shreepali Patel, Marques Hardin, Jamie Comer, Fabrizio Galeazzi, director and film crew from StoryLab at Anglia Ruskin, to film the first scenes from our forthcoming documentary on sixteenth-century brewing. Here we learned about bere, an ancient landrace barley, that our research shows was used for brewing in early modern Ireland.
We were delighted to meet Peter Martin and John Wishart at the Agronomy Institute in Kirkwall, Orkney who gave us a wonderful introduction to the conservation of this ancient crop.
We also had an opportunity to meet Lewis and Matthew at Swannay Brewery, who allowed us to observe and film the brewing process at a modern craft brewery. This was a great opportunity to learn about some of the challenges of brewing with bere, and to think about how the craft brewing process has (and has not) evolved since the early modern period.