field Guide 01: Wildcraft Homebrew - Homebrew as Community Currency
This month, we are launching a new series of Field Guides. These books are designed to be companions in the kitchen, in the garden and in the woods as we make our way through the seasons.
Our first in the series, Wildcraft Homebrew, is a collaboration between some of our favourite foragers and homebrewers. This beginner’s guide shows you how to ferment your own drinks using wild and domestic plants, along with ingredients you might already have in your cupboards at home. Using easy-to-follow recipes and helpful equipment lists, the Field Guide includes delicious homebrews like gorse wine, floral champagne, ginger beer, berry melomel, spruce tip soda and cyser.
With contributions from Jim Riach of Trossachs Biking and Bushcraft, Kerstin Grieve of Hens and a Garden, Mhairi Macpherson of Highland Seedlings and Leanne Townsend of Wild Food Stories and beautiful illustrations from Jai Bess Prints
For me, the best aspect of homebrewing is the giving…probably because as someone who doesn’t brew myself, I have delighted in being given the ferments of friends. Its that community aspect that we wanted to capture in this, and our future field guides.
Homebrew as community currency
By Dr Mairi MacPherson
Homebrewing is about so many things: the joy of making something from very few ingredients; having a supply of something you’ve made to last you through the year; sharing something you’ve created with friends, family and your community; and learning skills and practising them until they’re so ingrained that going to the shop feels like more effort than making your own.
We’re at that point with beer, cider, and various fruit wines, and the ease with which they can be scaled up means we can make enough to be self-sufficient in them. For beer, we brew enough for the month ahead, or rather, for the month after this one. For cider, it depends on the apple harvest – in a good year, we end up with enough to eat and about 40-50 litres of cider.
For fruit wines, it’s easy to make loads, because you don’t need masses of fruit to get a decent harvest. Our two favourites are rhubarb and gorse because both turn out really nice, and both are in steady supply where we live. We’re lucky to have the space to grow a lot of rhubarb (and the climate to support this), and our neighbour at the bottom of our lane has the largest rhubarb plants I’ve ever seen – but she doesn’t actually like rhubarb, so we are the grateful recipients. Gorse is abundant where we live, near the sea in the Scottish Highlands north of Inverness, but collecting the petals is much more work than preparing the rhubarb, so we make much more rhubarb wine than gorse.
Our homebrewing adventure came about because the house we moved into nine years ago came with six big old apple trees, and we’d always fancied the thought of making our own cider. We bought a press, and learnt how to make a reliably decent cider that keeps well, when to harvest, and how to process the fruit in a way that doesn’t feel like an enormous amount of work.
Cider making was a gateway skill to all sorts of things, from other kinds of brewing to cheesemaking, fermenting and breadmaking. Once you learn to make one thing reliably, it becomes a skill you can adapt for other things.
Making and sharing our cider and other homebrewing efforts soon became the norm. Our neighbour with the rhubarb was happy to have someone make use of her bounty. We turned her rhubarb into cake, crumble and wine, and took to leaving small offerings on her doorstep every time we harvested her late husband’s plants.
Over the years, our homebrewing efforts have been a fantastic source of friendship and currency. When we first met Kat and Kevin in person, we took them some cider, and we’ve traded homebrew for woodchips, manure and all sorts of other things we need for our way of life. I would say that homebrew ranks higher in the community barter order than jam and bread, but below homemade cheese. We bottle a significant portion of our homebrew into small beer bottles so we always have a little something to give to folks in exchange for stuff, and to say ‘thank you’.
For us, homebrewing is a way of life. It’s not a hobby, but something we do because we have the equipment and setup, and because doing this gradually over the year is not only a source of great joy and purpose, but also much less effort than trekking to the shop. It’s cheaper too, once you’re set up. But most of all it’s joyful – making it, drinking it, sharing it with friends and our community.
Dr Mairi MacPherson is a smallholder, educator and maker of all things. They live slowly and quietly in the Scottish Highlands, about an hour north of Inverness, with their partner Seamus and a menagerie of creatures. When they’re not brewing stuff they're most likely growing veg, knitting, making cheese, writing, or running their community garden, the Fearn Free Food Garden. You can find them on Instagram as @highlandseedlings.
