Newlin Grist Mill will host a special screening of our documentary Drunk? Adventures in Sixteenth-Century Brewing on 16th November at 6 pm. This will be followed by live Q&A with Marc Meltonville, FoodCult’s lead brewer.
We had a full house on Friday, European Researcher’s Night, for the launch of our brewing documentary. We are looking forward to sharing the film freely in the coming weeks. Our thanks to the Long Room Hub for hosting the event, and to all our guests for attending. Special thanks to Maurice Deasy from Canvas Brewing who came along to talk about traditional brewing from a contemporary perspective (and for allowing us all to taste his fantastic beers).
Announcing the launch and screening of a documentary on brewing beer from the sixteenth century. The film is directed by Prof Shreepali Patel, a Bafta winning film maker based at University of the Arts in London. It was produced in collaboration with Storylab at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. It follows the team of FoodCult researchers from the archive, through fields, the brewhouse, and finally the laboratory in our journey to recreate and understand early modern beer.
The Screening will take place at the Long Room Hub on Friday 29th September at 1830. It will be followed by discussion with the project PI, Dr Susan Flavin, the film’s director BAFTA winner Prof Shreepali Patel, renowned food and drinks historian, Marc Meltonville, and heritage brewer Maurice Deasy from Canvas Brewery, Co Tipperary.
The event forms part of Trinity’s European Researchers’ Night and the Trinity Arts and Humanities Research Festival.
Booking Only: Register Here
On 24th May, Susan gave a keynote lecture at the Posthumus Conference, hosted at the University of Antwerp. The conference theme was ‘food inequalities’ and the lecture focused on the the value of interdisciplinary research and practice based approaches to understanding diets in the past.
On 2nd February, Susan will present a talk on ‘Bere and Brewing History’ at the IBH seminar. The seminar is focussed on working with heritage barley, and the talk will share the FoodCult teams’s experience of recreating sixteenth century beer with bere.
On 6th January 2023 the FoodCult team presented a panel of 7 papers at the SHA annual conference in Lisbon. These papers represented individual ongoing workpackages, but also our efforts to integrate our approaches towards developing a deeper understanding of diet and food culture in Ireland.
Marc Meltonville, FoodCult’s ‘Brewer in Chief’, will present a paper featuring our recent research at the ‘Ale Through the Ages’ Conference at Williamsburg VA. The paper, ‘Beer & Roses, building a Tudor brewery’ reflects on the process of recreating historic beers and the challenges of authenticity. The conference runs from 11-13th November.
Delighted to announce the launch of a ‘Virtual Exhibition’ focused on the Brewing Project. This presents a photo-journalistic overview of the project in five chapters, exploring the background, ingredients, equipment, process and analysis.
On 16th October 2021, Susan presented some initial findings from the FoodCult Brewing Project at the National Monuments Service Nexus: People and Places Through Time Conference. The lecture is now available as an online podcast.
After almost three years of preparation, last week finally saw the completion of the brewing experiment at the Weald and Downland Museum. Four barrels of sixteenth-century beer are in the last stages of fermentation, having been brewed with carefully selected yeast, heritage grains, and period equipment. These will soon be moved to three different labs for analysis.
Prof John Morrissey at University College Cork, who researched and reconstituted the yeast will undertake analysis from a microbiological perspective. Prof Janet Montgomery at Durham University is examining the isotopes in the beer. She will measure the change in O-isotopes from cold water to beer. This will help better understand how oxygen isotopes are used to examine human mobility and migration. In addition, C,N and S-isotopes will be examined to better understand beer in dietary studies.
Finally, nutritional analysis is taking place at the School of Biosciences, Nottingham University, under the direction of Dr Stephen Lawrence. This will allow us to consider in great detail, the dietetic value of beer in early modern society.
The entire process has been filmed by Storylab at Anglia Ruskin University, under the direction of Dr Shreepali Patel. This film will show the immense interdisciplinary efforts involved in bringing this project to life, following the story all the way from the archive to the finished beer.
Results to follow soon…