As part of the brewing project, we developed some very exciting collaborations. One of these with Warminster Maltings, who made malt for the experiment. Bere barley was shipped to Warminster from Orkney and then malted using traditional floor malting techniques before being delivered to the brewers at the Weald and Downland Museum. Warminster’s pride themselves on using authentic historic methods and the malt produced was as close as we could get to a sixteenth-century equivalent.

• Read about this exciting collaboration

We are delighted to announce a new partnership with Good Food Ireland, an innovative company that strives to promote Ireland’s unique culinary heritage at home and abroad. As part of this collaboration, we will be sharing our progress through the Good Food Ireland platform. This presents a unique opportunity to make new research in Irish food history available to a wide range of interests.

• Read the first installment

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.

We are delighted to announce that Dr Charlie Taverner has joined the FoodCult team. Charlie is a social historian of early modern Europe, with expertise in food and cities. He completed his PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, and held the Economic History Society’s Anniversary Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research until 2021. Charlie will work specifically on Workpackage 1: Food Microhistories, exploring diet through household accounts. He brings a wealth of expertise and energy to the project and we are delighted to welcome him onboard.