OVER THE

Over a BARREL

Foraging isn’t simply about mushrooms, but also ingredients for Scotland’s beers too

Written by Peter Ranscombe

quelching through the forests near Balquhidder on a recent foraging trip with chefs Tom Lewis and Nick Nairn, I was reminded just how well Scotland’s natural larder can pair with wine. Mushrooms galore were retrieved from the woods, later accompanying venison for lunch, served with Champagne Charles Heidsieck’s new Coteaux Champenois pinot noir red wine.

Yet foraging isn’t just about food and wine matching. Scotland’s brewers are busy demonstrating the role that ingredients gathered from the countryside and coast can play in the craft beer scene too.

Exhibit A is Futtle, a brewery in a former stable block outside the village of St Monans in Fife. Lucy Hine and Stephen Marshall moved to there in 2018 to set up Triassic Tusk, their record label, and they host regular gigs at their brewery too.

Hine and Marshall use wild yeasts to ferment their grains, and also produce kombucha. What’s particularly exciting is the range of foraged ingredients that they add to their organic beers, with current incarnations including seaweed for a gose wheat beer and pineapple weed for their table beer. Previous concoctions have included alexanders and sea salt going into their gose, hogweed seeds fl avouring their saison, and yarrow creeping into their table beer.

Fellow Belgian beer enthusiast Robert Lindsay – who named his Stonehaven brewery ‘Six Degrees North’ because that’s its latitudinal location in relation to Brussels – is another fan of

Sforaging. His ‘Foraged & Found’ series has included a sea buckthorn saison made in partnership with Burning Sky brewery in the South Downs, a spruce saison made with Burnt Mill in Suffolk, and a green anise Berliner wheat beer with BFM in Switzerland. Other prominent proponents of foraged ingredients for beers include Amy Rankine, a foray leader who has worked with breweries including Lothians trio Alchemy, Campervan, and Cross Borders. She shares recipes on her ‘Hipsters & Hobos’ website. Just before the pandemic struck, Sean Fleming gave up his career as an accountant to launch Tartan Shark, his small batch brewery in Edinburgh. What’s striking about his brews is their seasonality, including gathering elderfl owers for his early summer India pale ale (IPA) and saison. He’s also invested in cargo bike to make ‘low-carbon deliveries’ around Edinburgh, with stalwarts including Appellation Wines, Beer Hive, Cork & Cask, and Cornelius stocking his cans. His ‘7 Cyclepaths’ saison surely deserves a prize for its name alone, given he gathered its elderfl owers along the city’s cycle routes. Like so many aspects of Scottish brewing, Williams Bros in Alloa got there fi rst. It’s been making ‘Froach’, its heather ale, since 1988. Yet that’s not the only trick in its book, with its Alba pine ale using a 19th-century recipe from the Highlands, its Nollaig festive ale harnessing spruce sprigs, and its Kelpie seaweed ale using fresh seaweed to recapture a concept from the early 1800s, when seaweed was used to fertilise coastal barley fi elds.

‘Foraging isn’t just about food and wine matching’