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…
We are pleased to announce that we will be presenting preliminary results from the project at two forthcoming conferences.
27th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists
The conference takes place online and in Kiel, Germany. Meriel will present a paper on the emerging evidence for plant remains in the Mapping Diet database. This will focus on cereals and fruits to highlight the challenges and benefits of an interdisciplinary approach, key gaps in knowledge, and how the FoodCult project is addressing these issues.
Some of these preliminary results will also appear in a forthcoming publication:
McClatchie, Flavin and O’Carroll, “Unearthing a new food culture: fruits in early modern Ireland” in Valamoti et. al. eds. Cooking with Plants in Ancient Europe and Beyond: interdisciplinary approaches to the Archaeology of Plant Foods (Sidestone Press, forthcoming 2021)
4th Annual National Monuments Service archaeology conference: “Nexus: People and Places Through Time”
On the 18th October, Susan will present the preliminary results from the Brewing project which is due to run from 1st-19th September. The paper will focus on the interdisciplinary methods used by the team to recreate sixteenth-century beer, our findings with regards to the brewing process, and the quality of the end product, in nutritional terms.
On Tuesday March 23rd 2021, Susan will join food historians Allen J Grieco and Peter Scholliers in a panel discussion on ‘Food and Drink Cultures Through the Ages’. The discussion will be moderated by Beat Kümin, Professor of Early Modern European History and GRP thematic lead for ‘Food Cultures’ at the University of Warwick.
On January 8th, Dr Meriel McClatchie will discuss ‘Investigating ancient foodways through environmental archaeology’ with The Royal Society of Antiquities of Ireland. Meriel’s paper will feature some interesting new findings in relation to fruit consumption in early modern Ireland, as revealed by the FoodCult database. It will also explore the benefits of interdisciplinary research for historians and archaeologists.
•Join and register here
On the 6th and 7th of March 2020, the team undertook a test brewing at the Weald and Downland Museum. The museum is collaborating with the project and will host the official experiment in October 2020. The weekend was an opportunity for our brewer, Marc Meltonville, to test drive the brewing equipment which has been recreated by artisan coopers and coppersmiths to sixteenth-century specifications. We are now busily preparing for October, the experiment will be repeated using heritage grains, malted and milled using early modern methods. The entire experiment will be filmed by StoryLab at Anglia Ruskin University, under the direction of Dr Shreepali Patel. The StoryLab film will allow us to share our methods and results with the public.
• Learn more about the Weald and Downland Museum
• Learn more about StoryLab at Anglia Ruskin
• Learn more about the Destilarias Eau.de.Vie, the producers of our copperwork