Distillery on the Dairy
GINNED! Magazine JULY 2015
VOL. 9
EDITORS’ NOTE Back in the day, the equivalent of what we know today as Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs would send its agents out in the countryside to find and shut down any alcohol operations they deemed illegal. Many of the distilleries they closed sat on farms that would use their grains and fruits to make eaux de vie, for spirits, at their base, are an agricultural product. This July, we’re happy to announce that the farmhouse distillery in the UK is back and its making incredibly imaginative spirits. The Dà Mhìle Distillery sits on a farm in the Welsh countryside, a farm that has been producing award-winning products, primarily cheeses, for decades. Making spirits was a logical step. But what is not necessarily that logical are the spirits it is making. “Organic”, “Barrel-Aged” and “Seaweed” are some of the terms you will come across this month as you sip these unique gins. In this edition of GINNED!, we celebrate the return of farmhouse distilleries and investigate some of the things they stand for, in particular, the organic movement. You’ll learn about a war on milk, a passionate organic farmer and why the world may end sooner than you think. But more than anything, you will enjoy some of the UK’s finest and most original craft gins, all from a natural setting we can once again associate with wondrous spirits, the Jon Hulme John Burke Co-Founder Co-Founder humble farm.
Cheers!
jon@craftginclub.co.uk
john@craftginclub.co.uk
GINNED! Magazine JULY 2015
VOL. 9
GINTRODUCTION p. 4… Distillery on the Dairy p. 9… Still of 2000 Spirits p 14… The Gin, Spirits & Mixers p 20… Cocktails & Stories
FEATURES p. 30… An Argument for Organic p. 33… Limits to Organic Growth p 39…
Craft Milk Club
p 43…
The War on Raw Milk
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GINNED! Magazine vol. 9
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GINNED! Magazine vol. 9
Distillery on the Dairy “How can you govern a country that has 246 different kinds of cheese?� - Charles de Gaulle
If David Cameron is a student of history, he should study the plight of the first president of France’s Fifth Republic, Charles de Gaulle. With the failure of the post-WWII government, de Gaulle was tasked with reforming the Fourth Republic’s parliamentary system with a semi-presidential government, a job he found utterly difficult due to the nation’s diversity, a diversity embodied in France’s 246 different types of cheese. Why should Cameron be particularly interested in de Gaulle’s politically curdled dilemma? Because Britons now produce even more types of cheese than the French! A country known in recent times for its stodgy, plasticky, chemicallyinfused, faux-dairy product rolling off the industrial factory line has rapidly turned into a milky force to be reckoned with. Led by artisan cheese makers around the country, cheese from the United Kingdom
now numbers 700 named varieties according to the British Cheese Board (greatest association pun name ever!) and their quality is boosted with every wheel: even the French have begun importing British cheeses en masse with sales to France up 20% last year. One of these artisanal examples is the Wales-based Caws Teifi Cheese. An organic cheese made with unpasteurised milk, Teifi Cheese is well ahead of the curve in the UK curd’s renaissance: it began producing cheese on the Glynhynod Farm in Ceredigion County in 1982. All this experience has led to its astounding success as the most highly-awarded cheese in Britain, winning the Best Welsh Cheese six times, the best-Semi-Soft Cheese five times, more than ten gold medals and the title of Supreme Champion twice at the British Cheese Awards. The cheese’s founder, John Savage-Onstwedder who immigrated from Holland to establish the farm, attributes all these creamy triumphs to the mantra by which he lives in his adopted Welsh countryside: “One cannot survive in Wales by producing mediocrity.” We’d like you to remember this mantra, dear Craft Gin Club Members, as you sip your selection of Dà Mhìle gins this July, for it is the same mantra instilled in the gins you are tasting. The Dà Mhìle Distillery, you see, is situated on the same Glynhynod Farm that produces Caws Teifi Cheese and just as John Savage-Onstwedder has produced organic cheeses on the farm since 1982, he has now diversified the farm’s products to create the Distillery on the Dairy.
John Savage-Onstwedder: organically chuffed for cheese 6
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ANYTHING BUT ORGANICALLY ORDINARY To avoid banishing their spirits to the purgatory of mediocrity, the Dà Mhìle team began learning the distilling trade with the world’s best. John’s son, John James, undertook two training stints, one in Scotland and one in Germany. On Islay, he spent a few weeks at the Kilchoman Distillery, one of Scotland’s newest distilleries and one of the only producing its whisky from grain to glass meaning its distillers grow and malt the barley themselves. Like Dà Mhìle, Kilchoman is a farm distillery so John James was right at home as he learned the tricks of the still trade at a working distillery. To top off his Scottish expertise, John James came under the wing of Europe’s spirits expert, Dr. Klaus Hagmann, a PhD in distilling techniques who also helped design Dà Mhìle’s still. Hagmann taught the budding distiller the key to top-quality German distillation - a slow pace. John James explained that where a Scottish distiller may opt for a 3.5 hour distillation time, a German distiller leaves his brood in the still for six hours, a period that results in a fuller flavour. Hagmann trusted his Welsh guest’s slow skills enough on his farm
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still that he left John James behind for three days as he went on a hunting trip. Not only did the still not explode, but John James returned home to Wales with the patience for leisurely distillation that helps give Dà Mhìle’s spirits their signature taste. Dà Mhìle’s first gin went into its experimentation phase in 2012. The team knew that it wanted to make an organic gin with “plenty of herbs and spices”, a gin that maintained juniper up front but which would be more flavoursome than others. Ultimately, they landed on a recipe with twenty botanicals (since reworked with 18 botanicals), some sourced from an organic farm in the south of England, others imported from Europe and Asia but all certified organic. The distillery’s location on an organic farm helped as well; the gin’s chamomile, clover and elderflower go straight from the farmland into the still. John James is particularly a fan of the cloves he adds to the recipe which he says give the gin “a nice numbing sensation.” Some of the organic grain that makes up the base spirit comes from the farm as well, with other organic grains delivered from nearby.
At the Glynhynod Farm even the stills grow organically from the ground! GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
The type of grain used to distill the base spirit depends on the season and what’s available which, contrary to what one might think, has little effect on the gin’s final flavour because John James distills it six times, enough to eliminate virtually all taste. The homemade base spirit - increasingly rare in the UK spirits industry - gets added to the still with water straight from the farm’s spring and the botanicals 300 litres at a time, a batch which results in about 150 bottles at 42% A.B.V. The farm’s water source is especially crucial to Dà Mhìle’s spirits: there is no water main that runs to Glynhynod. FROM BOTANICAL TO BARNACLE With the success of the Botanical Gin under their belts, the boys from Teifi’s Farmhouse Cheese found inspiration for their next spirit in their cheese, which itself found its original inspiration from a staple to any Welsh diet, seaweed. One of Teifi cheeses’ varieties is made with Laverbread, a boiled seaweed dish that, depending on who you talk to, either Welsh actor Richard Burton or Welsh writer Dylan Thomas described as “Welshman’s caviar.” John felt that if seaweed could work in their award-winning cheeses, it could work for their award-winning spirits too. Behind the innovative idea lay another twist: they wanted to conceive a gin that would accompany seafood. In late 2013, John James began experimenting with the Botanical Gin to see how it would work with seaweed. He quickly learned that some of the botanicals didn’t mix well with the algae’s saltiness, eliminated them and added others that would complement not only the seaweed but also the seafood, botanicals such as tarragon, cayenne pepper and thyme. 15 herbs and Gin on the half shell 8
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spices now compose Dà MhÏle Botanical Seaweed Gin’s recipe with seaweed being the 16th. But whereas the first 15 botanicals go into the still with the base spirit and water for a slow distillation process, the seaweed is not added until after - and in a much slower fashion. When the gin is distilled, it is transferred to large stainless steel vats where it rests for two to three weeks, the seaweed swimming within. John James has found three different types of seaweed that work well with the gin, which are harvested during different seasons and which are s o u r c e d f r o m t h e n e a r by Pembrokeshire Beach Food Company and occasionally from Ireland. Each lends a slightly different flavour to the final product but for the most part, the Seaweed Gin maintains a pretty consistent flavour from A cheesy seaweed smile one batch to the next, batches that are increasing in frequency so that Dà MhÏle can meet the demand for its unique gin. But Dà MhÏle didn’t stop being unique with their use of seaweed. In 2014, John James worked on another experiment, one that brought the distillery’s gin closer to its whisky: a barrel-aged gin.
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To ensure that the final result wasn’t overpowered by the herbs and spices of the Botanical Gin, John James stuck with only twelve botanicals, ones that would not mask the flavours absorbed from the barrel. Last year, he began with one barrel that previously held the distillery’s organic whisky and let the gin age for about six months. Craft Gin Club Members have the opportunity to taste the last of this Organic Oak-Aged batch this July, a batch that its distiller describes as “a lot dryerâ€? than their other gins and “one you want to drink straight on iceâ€?. Before the year is out, the distillery plans to produce two additional barrels and depending on its popularity, up production in future years. With three very different and unique styles of gin in production as well as a knack for successful experimentation, the team at DĂ MhĂŹle will surely continue to impress craft gin buffs everywhere. The Welsh farm would even make a great stop off point for someone like Mr. Cameron familiarising himself with his country’s rich diversity. In one go, a campaigning politician could taste several of the UK’s 700 cheeses and three of the ever-growing number of UK craft gins, all at the Distillery on the Dairy. đ&#x;?¸
GINNED! Magazine vol. 9
Still of 2000 spirits
Tucked away in the rolling green hills of Ceredigion County in Wales sits the Glynhynod Farm, a farm that has been producing the best cheeses in the UK for over thirty years. More recently, Glynhynod has diversified, moving into the production of craft gins, whiskies, and liqueurs, having installed a still on the premises, a still that is the centrepiece of what is now fondly known as the Dà Mhìle Distillery, a still of 2000 spirits. 10
“How can one farm possibly make 2,000 spirits?”, you might ask. Well, one probably can’t. But the still’s number comes not from all the potential combinations of spirits, herbs and spices, barrel and bottle, but from the name of the distillery itself. For “dà mhìle” is the Gaelic term for “two-thousand”.
GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
STILL RINGING IN THE MILLENNIUM Dà Mhìle Distillery’s owner, John Savage-Onstwedder, began down the path towards making spirits on his successful dairy farm over twenty years ago. In the late 1980s, he set to thinking about the approaching change of the millennium, a significant event seeing as it only occurs once every thousand years. He sought to welcome the occasion with something unique, something no one else was doing that would not only be remembered but that would be coveted once released.
Peninsula, itself a family-owned business for five generations that makes the “most handmade (whisky) in Scotland”. Springbank started its “traditional production methods” in 1992 for John’s whisky with 11 tonnes of organic barley that he had shipped to the distillery for malting and distillation. What started as bale upon bale of grain resulted in enough spirit for 15 hogshead barrels (about 250 litres per barrel), that contributed their aged wood to the whisky’s maturation and transformed it over seven years and seven months into Dà Mhìle Single Malt Scotch Whisky, a product that first buyers enjoyed as 1999 turned into the year 2000, exactly how John meant his Dà Mhìle to be enjoyed.
As an active supporter of the organic movement, John watched as what began with every day items Today, a few casks remain and the such as organic cereals, breads, whisky is a collectors item selling creams, and the like moved up for around £200 per bottle, one of market towards luxury items such which - bottle number 1,000 - was as wines, beers and chocolates. given by John to Prince Charles. T hinking about what could 1,000th Whisky for the Prince of Wales complement these aspirational After a successful first foray into items, he realised that an organic organic whisky with Springbank, whisky had yet to be produced - and the seed of the cheese John built on the experience by working with the Loch Lomond producer’s first spirit was planted. Distillery in the year 2000 to malt and distill their first single-grain organic whisky. Today, the spirit is sold out but whisky aficionado Jim To make the whisky, John worked with the world-renowned Murray gave it 90 of 100 possible points calling it “Brilliant” and Springbank Distillery in Cambletown on Scotland’s Kintyre citing it for its similarities to a bourbon for its vanilla tones. 11
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With these experiences under his belt, John thought that maybe there was the possibility to do more. A subscriber to Whisky Magazine, he read about the thousands of micro-distilleries in places like Austria “basically, every farm has a still on its premises,” he told the Craft Gin Club - so he figured it was time to do something similar in the UK. In 2010, not long after the entrepreneurs at Sipsmith Independent Spirits set up the first copper still in London in over 200 years, John petitioned HMRC for a license to install a still on his farm.
Hagmann, a PhD in distillation techniques who also helped design Dà Mhìle’s custom-made copper reflux still, a still whose name will be decided this July by the Craft Gin Club’s community of gin lovers. With the still decided, the rest of the paperwork for things such as a warehouse and distribution licenses took another year-and-a-half but by late 2011, they were legally ready to begin experimentation. WILDE-LY IMAGINATIVE
Traditionally, HMRC only allowed permits for stills sized a minimum of 1,500 litres, beyond too large for a farm such as Glynhynod as well as for its farmer’s spirits ambitions. Surprisingly, it only took a couple of months for HMRC to come back to John with a license for a 350-litre still.
When talking of the Dà Mhìle Distillery’s first product, John likes to quote Oscar Wilde - a man known for his witticisms if not as much for his love of champagne who once quipped “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative”. But whereas the masters in Champagne strive for as much consistency in their product Like many other craft distillers as the harvests will allow, John and Savage, Seaweed & Still with Distiller Mike Melrose setting up shop in the UK, John John James decided they needed turned to Germany to find the no refuge and instead found the right type of still, specifically to the Kothe Destillationstechnik, a inspiration for their first spirt in the dual weapons of artists like family-run firm “specialising in copper and steel processing” with a Wilde: imagination and inconsistency. subsidiary in the US that supplies the booming American craft distillery movement. Kothe makes versatile stills that can be used for The father & son team came upon an old family recipe from Holland making whisky, vodka, liqueurs, eaux de vie, and of course, gin. John for an orange liqueur designed for production in a kitchen. James spent some time in Germany training with Dr. Klaus 12
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John James took that recipe, toyed around with it and scaled it up for the 350-litre still. They began with whole organic Seville oranges, first fermenting them in to an orange wine before distilling the wine, diluting the resulting spirit with water from the farm’s source and letting it sit in oak casks for three months with more oranges and coffee beans netted and floating in the aging spirit. After the three months, the spirit was diluted once again to bring it down to liqueur strength, then double-filtered and bottled at the farm. The first test batch of what was to become Dà Mhìle Orange 33 came out of the still just in time in early 2012 to enter for the Welsh True Taste Awards; John and John James thought “Why not enter?” At first, there were several skeptics in the area who wondered how you could make a quality liqueur in Wales from a fruit that is certainly not Welsh. John simply responded by pointing out that the best chocolates in the world come from Belgium and Switzerland, two countries that certainly do not grow cocoa. They quickly proved the skeptics wrong by winning a bronze medal at the Awards - and that was just a test batch! Since that first award, they have won more awards including a Great Taste Award, and have produced four subsequent batches of the spirit. Because the season for organic Seville oranges did not always coincide with the production time, John and John James have used a different type of orange for every batch resulting in different tastes and an inconsistency that is not only imaginative but delicious. Organic oranges aging in oak 13
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STILL OF 3000 SPIRITS? With the success of Orange 33, John James turned his sights to repeating the success of the world’s “first organic whisky of the modern eraâ€?. He barreled the distillery’s first single grain spirit in early 2013, a spirit that will be removed from the barrel as whisky in the summer of 2016 at 3.5 years, the youngest whisky that the distillery will put to market. John James is planning an array of single grains from organic maize, rye and wheat which will be aged in exbourbon barrels. His first single malt - which will start with organic barley and age in sherry, port and madeira casks - will be ready in 2018 as a four year-old whisky, an age that he would like to ultimately push up to 12 years with first bottling occurring in 2025. With only a few barrels of whisky produced to date, the plan is to produce between 10 and 15 in 2015 and to increase that number every year, all whilst maintaining the distillery’s gin production as well as experimenting with new products. In the pipeline are a Calvados-style apple brandy, an absinthe and a vodka that’s “totally different.â€? All of these spirits might not quite get the distillery to 2,000 varieties, but they’re all in the spirit of John’s original imaginative idea. As time moves on, the organic whisky ages, and the gins surprise with every batch, raise a glass to the DĂ MhĂŹle Distillery whilst thinking that, one day, far off in the future, the gin you are drinking this month will be a descendant of those enjoyed at a celebration of the next millennia produced imaginatively by the TrĂ MhĂŹle Distillery. đ&#x;?¸
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A seaweed cheers to your health and another 1,000 years of organic spirits GINNED! Magazine vol. 9
Botanicals 1. Juniper 2. Coriander seed 3. Angelica root 4. Star Anise 5. Liquorice root 6. Fennel 7. Cardamon 8. Savoury leaf 9. Chamomile
10. Nutmeg 11. Spearmint 12. Peppermint 13. Ginger 14. Cloves 15. Cinnamon 16. Lemon Peel 17. Clover 18. Elderflower
Tasting Notes Nose: Subtle fresh rose petals with spice and a hint of juniper. Palate: To start, floral with bitter notes of dandelion and peppery cloves followed by intense juniper tones and peppermint cool.
Botanicals 1. Seaweed 2. Juniper 3. Angelica root 4. Savoury leaf 5. Spearmint 6. Peppermint 7. Cardamon 8. Ginger
9. Cloves 10. Marjoram 11. Tarragon 12. Cayenne 13. Thyme 14. Parsley 15. Orange peel 16. Lemon peel
Tasting Notes Nose: Spicy cardamom with a touch of citrus, light peppery clove and herbs with the salty sea faintly in the background. Palate: Iodine brought on by the seaweed with subtle juniper with the citrus coming through as the perfect accompaniment to seafood.
Dà Mhìle Spirits
The Distillery’s first spirit and True Taste Award Winner
The world’s first organic whisky of the modern era
Blended with the Springbank organic whisky
Distiller’s G&Ts Elderflower - 1 Part Botanical Gin - 2 Parts Elderflower Tonic - Ice - Garnish with fresh Elderflower
Light - 1 Part Botanical Gin - 2 Parts Mediterranean Tonic - Ice - Garnish with lime or kiwi
Doubling Down on Double Dutch
“The contribution of migrant entrepreneurs is, to be frank, breathtaking.” These words of counsel from Matt Smith, the Director of the Centre for Entrepreneurs, were meant to encourage the government to leave the flow of entrepreneurs from elsewhere as lightly restricted as possible. With 14.5% of the nation’s companies launched by immigrants, companies that have created 1.1 million jobs it appears wise for the government to heed Mr. Smith.
For a case study, the government should look to the UK’s youngest drinks entrepreneuses, Joyce and Raissa de Haas, a pair of twins born in Holland that arrived in the UK via Belgium to study and have stayed to follow their dreams of starting a company. And what a bright idea they have had: to make artisanal, all-natural sodas and mixers for the booming craft spirits movement.
Like so many bright ideas, modestly at home as the mixers in their kitchen to Antwerp. When they for a Masters degree in Entre preneurship at London, they turned actual Bright Idea year, UCL holds the Drag on’s Den-style entrepreneurs to pitch panel of angel business men and absence of the of their degree, panel over, taking award and the prize, enough cash action. Upon studies in Joyce and Raissa Dutch Drinks. With all of their done, they moved prototyping, f l a v o u r d i f f e r e n t food pairing 20
Double Dutch beg an twins made juices and bring to house parties in moved to London to study Technolog y and University College their bright idea into an winning business. Every Bright Idea Awards, a competition for aspiring their business ideas to a investors and women. Despite the technology aspect the twins won the home the 2014 accompanying cash to put their idea into finishing their September 2014, launched Double
m a r ke t r e s e a r ch immediately into analysing different compounds in ingredients, learning techniques, speaking
with mixologists and over 120 different types of rums, tequilas and vodkas. testing, they completed the flavours - Cucumber & Pomegranate & Basil batch in February of
testing their recipes with gins as well as brands of After several months of recipe for their first two Wa t e r m e l o n a n d and produced their first 2015.
Since then, their growth Their drinks are now odd venues in London restaurants such as and Galvin at hotels like the Sofitel as well as at They are in the deals abroad in ginsuch as Spain, have branding (see bottle two more lines in released in the
has been astronomical. featured in some 50from Michelin star Corrigan’s Mayfair Windows to posh Dorchester and Harvey Nichols. process of signing loving countries decided on new images) and have the works to be coming months.
With such success you’re a UK-based invest in from overseas, then double down on
s o q u i c k l y, i f investor looking to entrepreneurs we suggest you Double Dutch. đ&#x;?¸
GINNED! Magazine vol. 9
Cocktails & Stories 21
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Making Enemies of Mediocrity and Mozart The mission statement of the Dà Mhìle Farmhouse Distillery is “not to produce mediocrity but only top quality,” a mantra embodied in its unique artisanal spirits and multi-awarded cheeses. Another multiawarded product whose central theme is the struggle to rise from mediocrity to top quality is the 1984 film, Amadeus, adapted from the Tony award-winning play of the same name. Set in Vienna in the 1780s-90s, Amadeus tells the fictionalised tale of Italian composer Antonio Salieri and his nefarious plot to destroy his perceived rival and the object of his envy, the endlessly talented and increasingly popular, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Salieri, who had heard many rumours of young Mozart’s compositional capacity before his arrival in Vienna, secretly admires Mozart’s music as “the voice of God” whilst suffering with the realisation that no matter how hard he tried, his own abilities would always play second fiddle to those of Mozart’s, a situation that leads him to label himself “the patron saint of mediocrity.” In reality, Salieri’s career was anything but mediocre. Don Ginovanni Rising through the musical ranks from his time as a young child in Italy to his adolescent years playing chamber music for the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II in Vienna and his eventual position as the Empire’s Kappellmeister (the man in charge of music), Salieri had the biggest influence on composers of the 22
Classical period, some of which - including Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt - he taught. In fact, historically it appears that Mozart considered Salieri more of a rival than vice versa. Several of Mozart’s letters speak of Salieri as “the only one who counts in the Emperor’s eyes” and accusing him of trickery in dealing with the politics of Vienna’s musical courts, trickery which Mozart seemed to feel slowed his ascent. At the same time, Salieri showed respect for Mozart’s music by resurrecting one of the Salzburg-born composer’s most famous operas, The Marriage of Figaro, amongst other works. Perhaps, if the real-life Salieri could be consulted after his death, he would regret his admiration of Mozart’s music. History holds Mozart’s music as some of the greatest ever written and his name remains immediately recognizable in popular culture. Salieri’s name, however, faded quickly as his music virtually disappeared in the mid-19th century only to be born again as a mere mediocrity in the film adaptation of Amadeus. Fortunately for director Milos Forman, the film was viewed as anything but mediocre, earning itself eight Academy Awards including Best Picture. As for Salieri’s film legacy, the role of the tortured Kappellmeister earned actor F. Murray Abraham the Oscar for Best Actor, a prize symbolizing much more than the mediocrity he portrayed. GINNED! Magazine vol. 9
A Court Composer Craves a Cocktail “Mediocre martinis of the world, I absolve you… I absolve you all!”
Dà Mhìle Dry Martini • • •
2 parts Seaweed Gin 3 parts Dry Vermouth Rosemary & Orange Peel
Method: Combine gin and vermouth in mixer glass on ice. Stir mildly. Strain into Martini glass. Garnish with rosemary and/or orange peel. Food Pairing: Grilled trout or scallops 23
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Nippling Nestlé in the Bud Managing a dairy farm that produces the most awarded cheese in the UK, John Savage-Onstwedder of the Glynhynod Farm and Dà Mhìle Distillery knows a thing or two about milk. So when he says that “Breast is best”, we should probably take heed. John is not just digging up some old wives’ tale that children are better off growing up on their mother’s milk rather than laboratoryproduced alternatives. There is plenty of scientific evidence to show that the short and long-term effects of breastfeeding improve the health of child and mother. The NHS’s recommendations for breastfeeding sum up these findings, recommending that babies exclusively consume their mother’s milk for the first six months of their lives. For the child, breastfeeding reduces instances of diarrhea and vomiting, eczema, ear and chest infections and makes it less likely that the child will develop type-2 diabetes later in life. Other studies have shown that breastfeeding raises children’s IQ and boosts their immune system. For mum, suckling her children acts like a natural diet that burns 500 calories per day, helps build a psychological bond with the baby, and reduces the risk of breast and ovarian cancer. All these benefits and breast milk is free! So why does the primary and expensive substitute, formula, remain so pervasive? The World Health Organisation reports that 60% of new mothers around the globe continue to choose formula over breast milk and that breastfeeding rates have barely budged in recent decades. 24
Most of it comes down to the marketing power of multinational corporations that produce baby formula, particularly Nestlé. The Swiss food giant was slammed in the 1970s for what its detractors considered unfair practices in selling formula to unwitting parents in the developing world. The companies essentially created a need where there was none and made baby formula an aspirational product that poor parents longing for modernity viewed as a step towards Westernization. The results were disastrous. Because the formula was too expensive for mothers living well below the poverty line, they would dilute the formula with local water which, firstly, was unclean, and secondly prevented the baby’s ability to absorb any of the nutrients in the formula. Millions of babies died of malnutrition. Nestlé was sued for its actions and global guidelines on formula sales were written. But the damage was done. Today, thanks to the efforts of companies like Nestlé, an inferior and infinitely more expensive product that barely existed a mere fifty years ago is a $11.5 billion (£7.31 billion) market, a market that continues to grow in developing nations. Perhaps in his retirement, John should travel to these nations, bringing samples of his cheese and educating mothers that his cheese tastes so good because it is made with raw milk, the same type of milk that those mothers produce naturally - and free of charge - for their children. GINNED! Magazine vol. 9
Junior’s Gin He takes his milk neat and from the teat
Sipping Gin • • •
2 measures of Botanical or Seaweed Gin Slice of lime or lemon Ice
Method: Pour selected gin over ice. Garnish Botanical Gin with lime and Seaweed Gin with lemon. Pairing: a lazy day (after a bit of milking) 25
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Giving a Whistler for a Wilde Imagination When speaking of his distillery’s first product, Orange 33 liqueur, John Savage-Onstwedder of the Dà Mhìle Distillery likes to quote the author Oscar Wilde who once wrote, “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” In this case, John is referring to the five different batches of his digestif, each made with a different species of orange and thusly, each expressing different notes and flavours, certainly an imaginative method of making a new product at a new distillery.
“disastrous effect of Art upon the Middle Classes.” Wilde, who felt that poetry was the highest form of art and oft debated Whistler who believed in “art for art’s sake” - on his opinion, decried the everpresent use of professional models as “ruining painting and reducing it to a condition of mere pose and pastiche.” The flamboyant Irish playwright felt art’s “real schools should be the streets,” essentially calling into question many of Whistler’s most known works composed in the studio with visions of contemporarily-dressed models. Even the essay’s title mocks the names of Whistler’s paintings especially his most famous work, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, more commonly known as Whistler’s Mother.
Wilde penned his words of asylum for the uninspired in an essay entitled “The Relation of Dress to Art. A Note in Black and White on Mr. Whistler’s Lecture,” published in the Pall Mall Gazette on February 28, 1885. The Whistler in question is, of course, James McNeill Whistler, the American-born painter who lived primarily in London, even abiding on the same street But the reverence for Wilde we have today, our Tite Street in Chelsea - as Mr. Wilde. Two men respect for his wit and tortured personal of narcissistic, stubborn character, no matter situation with which our more enlightened times how brilliant, Wilde and Whistler influenced Wilde: sometimes tight with empathise, should likely be attributed to his Whistler on Tite Street each other as friends in the early years of their sparring partner, Whistler. The American, twenty acquaintance but were destined to be enemies, years his senior, publicly accused Wilde of each motivated by his rival’s derisive allusions to the other. plagiarising his ideas, a record he meant to set straight with the speech that is the subject of the “Dress to Art” essay. Upon closer Take Wilde’s “Note”. Its lines praise the paintings of the “lord of inspection, several scholars have given the upper hand to Whistler, form and colour” whilst simultaneously taking the piss out of the finding that many of Wilde’s quips are directly linked to the wisdom immigrant artist’s speech, specifically his dismissal of those that of Whistler. If this were true, perhaps it is Oscar himself who was perceive couture as a form of art, a practice Whistler belies as a the unimaginative. 26
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Mother of the Unimaginative Arrangement in seaweed and vermouth No. 3
Dà Mhìle Dirty Martini • • • •
1 part Seaweed Gin 2 parts Sweet Vermouth 1 part olive juice Olives
Method: Combine gin, vermouth and olive juice in mixer glass on ice. Stir mildly. Strain into Martini glass. Garnish with olive to taste. Food Pairing: Oysters on the half shell or sushi 27
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One Second to Disaster As the Dà Mhìle Distillery was preparing for the year 2000 with Britain’s first batch of organic single-malt whisky, the rest of the world was busy preparing for impending doom. The Y2K (Year 2000) computer bug promised to wreak havoc across the globe, spur a huge economic depression and send humanity hurtling back to the Middle Ages. Caused by an historical preference of computer programmers to code the year with two digits, ie 01:07:97 would be July 1st, 1997, it was thought that at the turn of the millennia computers would calculate the year as 1900 instead of 2000 sending systems in numerous industries awry. Obviously, the day of judgement did not arrive. Computers went on computing, the depression was a mild dot com bubble recession, and humanity calmly moved forward into the 21st Century. But that’s not to say the dangers of technological time-keeping have been completely kept at bay.
December 31st or June 30th at the very end of the day. UTC clocks show the leap second like this: 23:59:60. Since the introduction of leap seconds in 1972, the world’s official clock watchers have implemented them 26 times. For the most part, they have passed without a hitch. But occasionally, things go wrong. The 2012 leap second added on June 30, 2012 caused several major websites such as Reddit, Gawker and Yelp to crash for up to 45 minutes, leaving its audiences temporarily in the dark as the sites needed to reboot their servers to cope with the extra second. The IT systems of Australian airline Quantas completely crashed due to the mini-time jump leaving thousands of passengers stranded around the country and forcing staff to revert to pen and paper reservations.
Much more damage is possible. But for the most part, computer programmers are on top of the …and we feel fine… because A Y2K-like phenomenon called a “leap second” issue. The most recent leap second occurred at we have Dà Mhìle gin! occurs once every few years. The one-second midnight on June 30th 2015 as we entered July, difference is added to Coordinated Universal just in time to welcome Dà Mhìle as our Gin of Time (UTC) (the standard that regulates clocks around the world), in the Month. Chances are, you didn’t even notice it. But at least you order to keep it within one second of mean solar time now have the opportunity to ease your mind of a Y2K-style (mathematically calculated to keep clocks in line with the rotation of technological disaster with a refreshing Botanical Gin and the Earth around the sun). The second itself is usually added on Watermelon cocktail. 28
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A Gin in Time saves Nine An extra second to enjoy an extra savoury cocktail
Botanical Watermelon Refresher • • •
4 parts Botanical Gin 1/4 Watermelon Ice
Method: Blend watermelon with a handful of ice. Strain into a carafe. Add gin and stir. Pairing: a summer’s day at the beach! 29
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Magazine
FEATURES
An Argument for Organic with
John Savage-Onstwedder
For over forty years, John Savage-Onstwedder, the owner of Glynhynod Farm on which sit the Dà Mhìle Distillery and Teifi Farmhouse cheeses, has lived by the principles of the organic movement. The movement, which continues to grow in popularity in the face of massive industrial-scale farming and distilling methods, holds different meanings for different people. GINNED! Magazine spoke with John to find out what it means to him and what “organic”’s future prospects are. 31
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How did you begin following the organic movement? In 1972, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published a study that for me kicked off my involvement in the environmental movement, a study called Limits to Growth commissioned by the global think tank, the Club of Rome. The book was like a Copernican revolution in human thinking. Until then, much of the industrial world thought that the earth and its resources were infinite and that humans would be able to continue the growth they had been enjoying the previous decades without end. Limits to Growth showed that the world is finite, that in fact we wouldn’t be able to continue growing as we have in the long term because certain resources would run out. I quickly became a believer in the book’s findings and have since promoted the organic movement in everything I do and the products I make. What does “organic” mean to you? A lot of people think that “organic” is a new fad but that’s simply not true, a fact that I can’t stress enough when I speak with people at the shows we do and visitors to our farm. Think about it. One hundred years ago everything was “organic”! There were no chemicals and
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farms remained relatively small. For instance, the average dairy farm size back then would have been maybe 45 cows whereas today it’s 200 and getting bigger all the time. There are farms now applying for permits for 2,000 cows! It’s so unnatural that they have to inject the cows with antibiotics to keep them healthy which doesn’t even always work. When I tell the story of the first organic whisky we made with the Springbank Distillery, I call it the “first organic whisky of the modern era” to show that “organic” is not a new fad. Some people have the perception that what we call organic products today are only for the well-off but that doesn’t have to be true either. If you know what you’re doing - even people on the dole - you can go to the farmers market and buy organic products on a low budget. Organic foods should be for everyone. We go to lots of farmers markets in Wales and their prices are competitive with the prices in supermarkets. We notice a significant difference, however, when you get to London. The same organic cheese will sell at say £26 per kilo at Borough Market whereas in Wales it costs £18 per kilo.
Glynhynod Farm’s gloriously organic view GINNED! Magazine vol. 9
How do you respond to those who argue that modern-day farming techniques are necessary to feed a growing population? I think that modern big agriculture is eventually doomed. Just in recent memory there are plenty of examples to demonstrate that modern techniques, when it comes to industrial-sized farms and all of the chemicals they use, are simply unsustainable. Think about the well-publicized outbreaks we all can recognise: mad cow disease, swine flu, bird flu, etc. How do you think these epidemics occurred? By the conditions, most often unsanitary, brought on by packing so many animals together. Even in Victorian times they knew that when you put too many humans together in one house, the more cramped the house, the more chance their was for disease to spread.
We can definitely get back what we’ve lost over time. I’m not saying that we have to go back to the farming practices of the 20s or 30s. We can move forward with much more knowledge and adapt modern methods to organic production. You can use modern machinery and other practices to farm organically and organic scientists can help any transition - we just need to cut out the chemicals. Instead of monoculture farms - ones that specialise in one crop which leads to the deterioration of the soil, pathogens that quickly become resistant to chemicals, and lower quality food overall - we should all be working on mixed farms with a variety of crops and animals.
At Glynhynod Farm we have about 60 acres with cattle, pigs and chickens running around and some of the botanicals in our gin are It’s the same principle with animals. If you put picked right off the farmland. With our farm, 150,000 chickens together in one shed or our distillery and our dairy, we have created thousands of pigs caged together and eating our own market following our mission from the same trough of unnatural feed, statement which is “not to produce mediocrity Craft cows make the best curd you’re bound to have problems. And these but only top quality at an honest price.â€? Our problems often arise on farms where the artisan products are completely different than animals have already been treated with antibiotics. Look at what all of those produced in a factory and people are taking notice. They’re fed the antibiotics in our livestock and the chemicals in our food has up with mass-produced things. There is a serious demand for done to the health of the population! artisanal food and drink. People want real flavour, they want to taste something different. Why do you think craft distilleries are increasing How can you appease the skeptics? What’s the answer to in number all the time?! đ&#x;?¸ spreading organic? 33
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Organic Objections Does ‘Limits to Growth’ limit our potential?
As many a young person found inspiration in the myriad social and political movements that swept the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so did John Savage-Onstwedder, the proprietor of the Dà Mhìle Distillery. John’s inspiration, that which set the guiding principles of his life and led him to establish an organic farm in Wales, came from a highly controversial work that shone a light on the potential contradictions between humanity’s propensity to constantly push ahead and the limited resources of our Mother Earth. 34
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The 1972 book Limits to Growth, the all-time highest selling environmentalist book and one that today remains a significant source of debate, summarizes the number crunching of a computer simulation developed to assess these possible contradictions. Commissioned by the political think tank the Club of Rome and conducted by academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led by Dennis L. Meadows, Limits to Growth investigated five variables - world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion - and how these phenomena would evolve over time based on growth patterns beginning in 1900 and predicting those patterns until 2100 in twelve different scenarios. On some fronts, Limits to Growth found that the 21st Century would witness a near reversal of humanity’s progress because we have “overshot” our use of the world’s resources. In other scenarios, it found that if political and societal will came together to moderate our growth, that humanity could sustain itself whilst maintaining high standards of living. Its authors stressed that their conclusions were not meant as predictions largely because the size of their variable resources was not known (for instance, many more oil fields have been found since 1972), but rather as a study of how “exponential growth interacts with finite resources.” In layman’s terms, the book argued that we won’t be able to grow forever because there won’t be enough resources with which to grow.
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FEARING THE FINITE But does this argument hold up? Will we really run out of resources? Are we condemned to economic collapse, environmental devastation, poverty on a massive scale and the huge jump in death rates the book’s authors foresee? Limits to Growth’s many detractors think not. Critics of Limits to Growth emerged almost immediately after its publication and remain vocal today. Their analyses range from dismissing the book as an exercise in fear mongering to finding fault with the authors scientific method. One of the first critiques, Models of Doom: a Critique of the Limits To Growth, was published in 1973 by a team of researchers at Sussex University who familiarised themselves with the computer simulations of and scenarios studied in Limits. Although the Sussex team felt that we do indeed live in a world with fixed resources and that significant social and political change was needed to deal with these limitations, they found the assumptions of Meadows’ team to be overly pessimistic and that they did not take into account humanity’s tendency to change course once it realises its misdoings, particularly from a social and political perspective, perspectives they found lacking in the computer’s algorithms. An example of this political and social change is the one-child policy implemented by China whose government sought to control what it considered unsustainable population growth.
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On the other hand, a respected American economist, Julian Simon, looked specifically at population growth and resource depletion - two of Limits to Growth’s variables - and concluded just the opposite of the book. A February 1997 article in Wired Magazine, which called Simon “The Doomslayer”, quoted the university professor as opining that “Just about every important long-run measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries,” and that “whatever the rate of population growth is, the food supply increases at an even faster rate.” He is known for wagering - and winning - a bet that despite population rises and increased demand for natural resources that the price of those resources would drop over a ten year period between 1980 and 1990. Danish environmental author Bjorn Lomborg built on Simon’s claims and denounced Limits to Growth as “spectacularly wrong.” Noting that the book had predicted, for one, that oil and gas would run out in the early 1990s, and secondly, that humans would have depleted all reserves of elements such as gold, copper, aluminum, zinc, etc. by now, Lomborg lambasted Limits to Growth and its supporters for their desire to implement growth-controlling policies that would destine even more of humanity to poverty. In his 1998 work, The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg finds that the only real resource that humanity is running out of is fish due to overfishing. In the book, he denies that precious metals are running out, that deforestation is a significant problem and that human ingenuity will help for a smooth transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources, principles by which he stands today. GINNED! Magazine vol. 9
In a 2013 article entitled “Limits to Panic” that specifically critiqued the findings of Limits to Growth, Lomborg touches on organic farming, a subject dear to our Gin of the Month Dà Mhìle’s owner, John. Where John believes that there is no reason to use chemical pesticides and hormones in farming, Lomborg claims that “wellregulated pesticides cause about 20 deaths each year in the US, whereas they have significant upsides in creating cheaper and more plentiful food.” He goes on to say that organic farming is 16% less efficient than the conventional sort, would cost $100 billion (£63.5 billion) annually in the US, and would require an additional “65 million acres of farmland an area more than half the size of California.”
The $100 billion cost of organic farming that Lomborg states but does not verify is statistically contradictory to another figure he cites in the same paragraph, that of organic farming’s apparent 16% effectiveness deficiency. According to the US Department of Agriculture, American farms contributed $170 billion (£108 billion) to GDP in 2013. Why would farmers need 60% more money to make up for the 16% in organic farming inefficiency? And even if it were true that organic farming is 16% less efficient and produces more expensive food, does this outweigh the societal implications and health care costs of higher rates of disease caused by all of the chemicals in industrial produced foods? LIMITS TO MARKETING THE TRUTH
Some would say that Lomborg is fearmongering himself. Apart from not citing any sources for his figures in the 2013 As it turns out, Lomborg is just as Lomborg: limiting the growth of article nor mentioning the residual long- public knowledge with false facts dangerous as the environmental trends he term effects such as cancer scientifically denies. Promoting himself as one of the linked to chemical pesticides, in the same world’s top experts on climate change and 2013 article he claims that there are about 1.5 billion hectares (3.7 its related subjects, Lomborg’s academic background is actually in billion acres) of arable land in use with an additional 2.7 billion political science. It appears that he got into the climate changehectares (6.7 billion acres) in reserve. It appears that an additional 65 bashing game for money. He is linked to numerous conservative million acres of arable land (1% of the world’s reserves) would be a think tanks in the United States, is regularly invited to speak at their drop in the bucket if it were dedicated to organic farming and could conferences and even receives awards from them. sustain a country the size of the US. 37
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What’s more, the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty completely tore apart his best-seller, the book that made his name, The Skeptical Environmentalist. In its comments on the book, the Committee wrote, “Objectively speaking, the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty,” and called it “clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice.” The Committee’s report also called out Lomborg for data fabrication, selective citation, plagiarism and the “deliberate misinterpretation of others results.” If the world’s most well-known “expert” on doubting the findings of Limits to Growth turns out to be a fraud but continues to get major press for his fear-mongering - including a spot on The Guardian’s “50 people who could save the planet” - how can the real scientists with real proof effectively get their message out? It’s difficult. But they keep trying. The most consistent supporter of Limits to Growth’s findings has been the report’s commissioning body, the Club of Rome. Since the original 1972 publication of Limits to Growth, the think tank has updated the report nearly every five years. In 2004 the book’s main authors wrote “Limits to Growth: the 30-year update” in which they stated that “the authors are far more pessimistic than they were in 1972. 38
Humanity has squandered the opportunity to correct our current course over the last 30 years… and must change if the world is to avoid the serious consequences of overshoot in the 21st Century.” The authors refer to a graph showing humanity’s “ecological footprint”, the amount of resources we use versus what the Earth can sustain and regenerate. Conceived by a PhD student at the University of British Columbia working on his dissertation from 1990 to 1994, the study showed that humans were using at the time the equivalent resources of 1.2 Earths. Today, that figure stands at 1.5 Earths. A June 2009 article in American Scientist Magazine explored the premise laid out by Limits to Growth in relation to Peak Oil, the much-argued phenomenon that someday (if not already), the world will reach a point where the amount of oil and gas extracted from the ground will max out and subsequently decline every year. The study contributes humanity’s avoidance of a large-scale famine to the use of fossil fuels in producing and transporting the food necessary to feed a global population that has doubled since the 1960s. But what happens to that energy-intensive food when it becomes so expensive to extract the oil left in the ground that the industry becomes counter-productive? GINNED! Magazine vol. 9
To answer that question, the study refers to Limits to Growth’s findings with the book’s scenario, expect the early stages of global collapse to which, plotted on a graph, show that as resources decline start appearing soon.â€? precipitously that food per capita also begins to decline. For the food curve of the graph, that turning point occurs very near to the present THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT? day. Overall, the American Science article shows that despite the “common perception‌ that the limits-to-growth model was a “Expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon.â€? colossal failure,â€? the model had in fact That’s a pretty damning conclusion for a The University of Melbourne’s 2014 statistics in line with Limits to Growth held up until the time of publication theory which to date hasn’t held up and that the authors “are not aware of according to its doubters. But is the any model made by economists that is most recent research correct? Do the as accurate over such a long time span.â€? curves on their graphs really mean the beginning of the end? It’s certainly A 2014 study entitled “Is Global possible. Collapse Eminentâ€? conducted at the University of Melbourne confirmed this But it is also possible that the optimistic statement of confidence in Limits to view of humanity’s ever-evolving Growth from the American Science article’s ingenuity will triumph and we will steer authors. The Australian researchers clear of the downward spiral first plotted information gathered from outlined some forty years ago. After all, several UN departments, the US John Savage-Onstwedder, who started National Oceanic and Atmospheric with very little apart from his organic Administration, and the BP Statistical principles on his Glynhynod Farm in Review of World Energy on the same graph as the 1972 book’s 1982, has grown from success to success, producing award-winning predictions only to discover nearly identical patterns. From these dairy products and spirits all in the sustainable manner decreed as patterns, the authors “sound an alarm bellâ€? that “it seems unlikely obligatory for humanity’s continued growth and survival by the very that the quest for ever-increasing growth can continue unchecked to researchers who warned of doom in Limits to Growth. If John can do 2100 without causing serious negative effects – and those effects it, surely he has found a model that can be repeated by others. đ&#x;?¸ might come sooner than we think‌ If we continue to track in line 39
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Craft Milk Club the slow rise of slow-milking micro-dairies
The Dà Mhìle Distillery in rural Wales is the very definition of a micro-distillery, the type of small, local and family-run operation that Members of the Craft Gin Club support and whose innovative artisanal products they can’t wait to taste every month. Dà Mhìle is one of dozens of micro-distilleries that has set up shop in recent years in the UK, riding the wave of the country’s micro-brewers whose numbers have surpassed one thousand. 40
In the wake of the growing popularity of these craft alcoholic beverages is a craft beverage of another kind: milk. Local dairy farmers whose milk has more often than not been purchased by cooperatives or large-scale producers are increasingly selling direct to consumer, giving rise to a term in the spirit of that of their small, boozy cousins: micro-dairy.
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But what is a micro-dairy? As with micro-breweries and microdistilleries, definitions vary and are sometimes non-existent. In the United States, the Vermont-based association American Micro Dairies (soon to be called the Alternative Dairy Initiative), defines a micro-dairy as “a dairy farm milking 10 or less cows, or the equivalent number of sheep, goats (approx 25-50) or water buffalo,” and not producing more than fifty gallons of milk per day. In the UK, a specific denotation does not exist but much of the literature about micro-dairies speaks of operations in the 10 to 80 cow range.
and more in favour of locally-produced food and drink. In some regions in the UK, people are getting closely involved in their local micro-dairy. Susan Garbett of the 40-cow Holmeigh Dairy in Gloucestershire told the Sustainable Food Trust that their local customers “drive past our fields and see the cows that provide their milk every week.” With this local connection, Garbett has grown her dairy to 600 customers within a 20-mile radius of the farm.
The North Aston Dairy near Oxford issues “cow bonds”, a fixed, 5-year investment opportunity that pays a 3% annual Herds of this size can provide a dividend. Through this innovative substantial amount of milk and approach, the micro-dairy has dairy products, much of which is grown its herd from 3 in 2006 to sold direct to consumers and 17 today, up from 12 in October virtually all of which is sold in the 2014 when the farm was delivering micro-dairy’s local area. For fresh milk to 250 customers within example, John at Dà Mhìle sources 2 miles of the farm. Other farmers North Aston Dairy and its bovines backed by bonds the milk with which he makes all have adopted a practice from the of his cheeses from a nearby dairy Continent and are installing vending farm with 60 cows that delivers fresh milk to his door every day. A machines at local shops that they load up with fresh milk with which micro-dairy near Stratford-upon-Avon called Mabel’s Farm serves up customers refill their bottles. to 500 customers with its 40 cows. The farmers behind these herds are unique in that they are bucking According to the Guardian, there are a mere 20 micro-dairies in the the trend towards large-scale, indoor dairy farms and sticking it to the UK. But demand for them is increasing as consumers become supermarket chains, which by some calculations are destroying the increasingly concerned about what they eat, skeptical of big brands, little guy. But their micro-distillery revolution won’t be easy. 41
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MILKING MICRO-DAIRIES DRY Although the average size of a dairy farm herd in the UK remains a relatively reasonable 125 cows and 90% of UK cows live in packs of less than 500, this may rapidly change. The Guardian reported last October that in the wake of a successful petition to open a 1,000 cow indoor dairy farm in Wales that five to ten more were in the works. The article spoke of British farmers taking exploratory trips to the US to learn the strategies necessary to run large, indoor operations, some of which in the country’s midwest reach over 30,000 cows.
number up to 15,000 from some cows. In comparison, the average cow on a micro-dairy can healthily produce 4,000 to 5,000 litres per year and would struggle beyond that. Secondly, the number of dairy farms in the UK has dropped precipitously in the past twenty years to about 13,000 down 63% from 35,000 in 1995. Thirdly, the milk market has gone global with UK farmers competing with dairies from the US to New Zealand; the UK is actually a net importer of dairy products.
Fraser Jones, the Welsh farmer who won the petition to build enough indoor space for 1,000 cows, summed up these business trips to the States as studies in efficiency and economies of The industrial Land of Milk and Heifers scale: “There is no room any more in this game for people who are not efficient,” he told the Guardian.
But Jones’ argument holds up most when considering the effects of large supermarket chains on UK dairy farms, effects that turned increasingly negative in the first months of 2015. Many supermarket chains use milk as a loss leader, ie, they sell it below cost to get people through the door to purchase additional items. Their tremendous size combined with the fact that they can cheaply import milk means that supermarkets can squeeze farmers and their representative collectives on price.
Jones might be right. Firstly, he’s pushing for his cows to produce an average of 11,000 litres of milk per year and thinks he can get that
In January 2015, milk in these supermarkets became cheaper than bottled water.
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Many dairy farmers selling to supermarkets were forced to sell their milk at less than the price that it cost to produce it. This caused First Milk, a co-operative 100% owned by its 1,400 farmers, to withhold payments to its members for two weeks in order to make up for a £10 million gap in the company’s finances, a gap cause by the plummeting price of milk which, for consumers at Tesco’s, dropped from £1.39 per four pint bottle to £1.00 i n u n d e r a y e a r. T h e discount supermarket chain ASDA was selling the same sized bottle at £0.89 in January. For the farmers, this meant that the buying price per litre dropped from a high of £0.34p to near £0.20 in many regions with regulators warning that prices had even Source: Metro UK further to fall - to £0.17 per litre. The National Farmer’s Union warned that at those rates, by 2025 fewer than 5,000 UK dairy farmers would remain in operation. 43
MICRO OR MASSIVE? What does this mean for the future of micro-dairies and dairy farms in general? Are we moving towards a two-tier system in which huge supermarket chains continue to dominate dairy in our cities and suburbs and small farms sustain themselves through sales to their neighbours and at local farmers markets? Will the mid-sized dairies and collectives like First Milk become completely squeezed out of existence by the industrial and micro? Recent developments and statistics indicate as much. What this means for the long-term health of the UK’s dairies remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: as consumers become increasingly discerning about what passes their lips, microdairies - like micro-breweries and micro-distilleries before them - will continue to proliferate. To organise their communities, maybe we should launch the Craft Milk Club! đ&#x;?¸ GINNED! Magazine vol. 9
The War on “raW” The deliberate defamation of fresh milk
“Don’t eat that! That cheese will kill you!” Many people would react in this manner before you took a bite of Caws Teifi Cheese from the Glynhynod Farm in Wales, the farm that houses our July 2015 Gin of the Month, Dà Mhìle. This is because Teifi cheese is made with unpasteurised raw milk, a naturally-occurring nectar that strikes fear into the hearts of many for its potential to make us weak-stomached humans ill. For others, this fear is completely irrational. Teifi Cheese, for instance, is the UK’s most-awarded cheese and has not killed anyone. 44
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Proponents of raw milk talk of the natural liquid’s assumed benefits on nutritional, environmental and taste grounds. From a health perspective, the argument goes that raw milk provides bacteria necessary for stimulating the immune system and familiarising young people with common bacteria that can be dangerous later in life if they are not introduced to the body at an early age. The enzymes in raw milk destroyed by pasteurisation help digestion, help the body to defeat pathogens and prevent lactose intolerance. One compound in particular - Conjugated Linoleic Acid - not present in pastuerised nor skim milk is proven to prevent different types of cancer, hypertension and obesity. As for the environment, supporters of raw milk point to the fact that pasteurisation is an energy-intensive process that requires special machines to rapidly heat and cool the milk. Much milk found in supermarkets is also produced on large, industrial farms that generate pollution and which feed their cows unnatural diets. In tasting raw milk, supporters almost treat it like terroir wine. Raw milk’s flavour varies tremendously depending on the region, the type of cow, what the cow has eaten, the weather, etc. 45
Despite these apparent benefits, there seems to an all-out war on raw milk in some parts of the world, particularly in Anglo-Saxon nations, some of which, such as Scotland, have banned raw milk outright. But why the harsh treatment of a natural product described by its supporters as “nature’s perfect food”? Are their arguments for banning raw milk justified? MILK-OCALYPSE The American government in particular has vilified raw milk beyond what some might consider reasonable bounds. Reading the literature on raw milk on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Center for Disease Control (CDC) websites, one would think raw milk an imminent threat in line with illegal drugs. Phrases such as “Raw milk and raw milk products… can be contaminated with bacteria that can c a u s e serious illness, hospitalization, or death,” from the CDC website or the isolation of “soft cheeses, such as Brie and Camembert, and Mexican-style soft cheeses…” as foods that are “Unsafe to eat,” fail to simultaneously inform consumers that realistically any food can be contaminated and that French and Mexican people eat those cheeses as part of their everyday diet with no results of food poisoning epidemics.
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Indeed, stories of the US authorities crack downs on raw milk read like breakups of dangerous drug rings. In the 2011 documentary Farmageddon, produced by the mother of child whose asthma and allergies disappeared after the family switched to raw milk on a doctor’s recommendation, federal agents are shown entering small, local farms under the guise of routine inspection only to shut down the farms’ dairy operations, forcing farmers to destroy their dairy stocks and even taking their animals despite any evidence of infection or illness. In 2010 and 2011, the same Venice, California natural foods market called Rawesome was raided by police with their guns drawn proceeding to frisk store employees and arrest the store’s owner, all in the name of shutting down what were legal raw milk sales. Drug bust-like raids seem pretty extreme for a product that the CDC links to 2 deaths in the fourteen years from 1998 to 2011, particularly when considering that the Center also publishes statistics that show that every year, 3,000 people in the United States die from “foodborne diseases” most of which are caused by the same bacteria listed on its website as the harmful agents in raw milk. In the UK, no recent deaths linked to raw milk have been reported despite research by the Food Standards Agency reporting an estimated 500,000 cases of food poisoning per 46
year with nearly half attributed to the consumption of poultry meat and a tenth to “vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds”. No government defamation of chicken or lettuce has ensued. PASTEURISING THE ARGUMENT AGAINST RAW The “raw vs. pasteurisation” debate has raged for decades. A study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published in 1943 called milk pasteurisation “inexorable” as, at the time, between 1,500 and 2,000 people per year were dying of “tuberculosis of bovine origin,” a disease that is estimated to have caused more deaths in animals than all other diseases combined in the first decades of the 20th century. This is a high death rate to be sure, but one caused by the fact that at the time of publication, 40% of cows in the UK were infected with bovine TB. The study, while promoting pasteurisation, also concluded that “the ultimate ideal may be clean milk produced from disease-free herds and protected from human contamination” and observed that “it is not sufficiently appreciated that the quality of the pasteurized product depends to a considerable extent on the cleanliness of the raw milk,” effectively stating that cows from clean, natural environments produce milk fit for human consumption without the bacteria-killing heating process. GINNED! Magazine vol. 9
Research updated in May of this year by the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs echoes these findings, claiming that bovine TB remains “one of the biggest challenges that the cattle farming industry faces, particularly in the West and South West of England,� but that in other regions “the infection in cattle has been virtually eliminated.� The study attributes the current low contraction in humans to “milk pasteurisation and to the early identification of cattle with TB on farms and at abattoirs,� essentially reaching the same conclusions as the 1943 study; milk pasteurisation is helpful but clean dairy farms are also essential. NO USE CRYING OVER FRESH MILK Taking all of these arguments into consideration, it is perhaps most helpful to take a step back and approach the situation from a logical perspective. Human beings drank raw m i l k f o r m i l l e n n i a b e f o r e t h e A murderous mustache? widespread adoption of pasteurisation around the 1930s. Yes, many people became ill and some died from drinking raw milk pre-pasteurisation. Yes, others have become ill and died since pasteurisation’s popularity. Is there still risk today that consuming raw milk could make one ill or lead to death? Of course. But no more so than consuming any other type of food both fresh and processed; or, for that matter, driving in a car, not getting enough exercise, or walking to the corner store to buy a pint of milk. 47
The most important criteria when considering whether or not to drink raw milk is simply knowing where the milk comes from. Pasteurisation definitely works and is for the most part necessary for milk we buy in the supermarket, milk that is a product of industrial methods that mix a number of milks from a number of farms together which then travel long distances before arriving at your local Sainsbury’s freezer. But if you are buying milk from a local farm where the cows are grass fed, left to roam naturally around the property and are regularly tested for disease, there seems to be no reason why their raw milk would be any more dangerous than any other naturallyoccurring food. All in all, it appears that for milk produced and purchased under the right circumstances, the arguments of government bodies that raw milk is dangerous are tenuous at best. Perhaps their position is more driven by terminology-induced fear than by science or experience. Consider what we call the liquid subject of this debate; “rawâ€?, a word that frightens many people where food is concerned. What if we eliminated the adjective? Maybe it’s time to call the natural, unpasteurised creamy fluid what it really is: just plain “milkâ€?. đ&#x;?¸
GINNED! Magazine vol. 9
Milking every last drop of delicious craft gins
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GINNED! Magazine vol.9