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bottleofginger-blog · 7 years ago

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A Couple of Drinks

In 2017, our biggest and most fruitful community engagement project was initiated by the CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts and funded by Goethe-Institut Glasgow with the total amount of £5500. The CCA commissioned Kathrin Bohm –

‘a London-based artist with a long-standing interest in the collaborative making and extending of public spaces through methods of collective production, distribution and usage within both urban and rural situation. Kathrin is a founding member of the international artist initiative Myvillages’ .

In 2014, as part of Myvillages Kathrin set up Company Drinks, ‘to link east London’s history of ‘going down to Kent’ to the set up of a new community drinks enterprise’.

As part of the CCA & Goethe-Institut commission, Bottle of Ginger and our community were invited to collaborate with Kathrin and Company Drinks on a Glasgow-based project.

The intention of the project was to:

Exchange skills and knowledge between the two communities focused around each Community Drinks Company,

Create an intervention, informed by the food and drink culture and heritage of Glasgow’s East end, and one which was meaningful to Bottle of Ginger as a Community Drinks Company as well as the wider Bridgeton, Calton and Dalmarnock community.

The project was proposed in two parts:

‘From Here Since…’ - a series of conversations and workshops with the two respective East-end communities, reflecting on the history of urban drinks manufacturing, community growing, harvesting and participation. These initial enquiries and their findings were to inform the second part of the project, as well as the proposal for the production of two beakers. The beakers were to present scales and measures of locality in respect to each East-end location.

‘A Couple of Drinks’ - a series of events engaging the communities focused around Bottle of Ginger and Company Drinks and reflecting on the findings of ‘From Here Since…’. The community activities were to be part of the making of two paired drinks in each East-end urban location.

A Couple of Drinks

REFLECTING ON ‘FROM HERE SINCE...’

For the first part of the project, The Bottle of Ginger team and Kathrin were engaged in conversation with local groups, who shared their ideas on who, what and how is local, and helped us to uncover Glasgow’s history of seasonal berry picking work in Blairgowrie and the not yet forgotten alchemy behind the infamous ‘sugarallie water’! The stories from both communities were then re-interpreted to make two Superlocal Cups – each represented measures of locality for each community. Find out more about ‘From Here Since...’ here.

A SHARED HERITAGE - PICKING

The most prominent finding from our research and conversations was that both East London and East Glasgow had a shared heritage of picking - East Londoners picked hops in Kent and East Glaswegians picked berries in Blairgowrie.

Until 60 years ago thousands of east Londoners travelled to farms in Kent each summer for a working holiday picking hops. What would happen if Londoners today grew and harvested crops, produced drinks and ran their own company? This is what Company Drinks has been set up to do.

The photos below are from Lily Barnes, who we met during our community drop-in at BCLC, during the first part of the project - ‘From Here Since...’.

TWINNED DRINKS : ENGLISH STRAWBERRY-ADE & SCOTTISH STRAWBERRY CORDIAL

The decision was made that the second part of our collaborative project would focus around the strawberry. Each community enterprise would produce a strawberry drink, and involve their communities in picking, making and trading activities.

Company Drinks decided to outsource the making of their Strawberry-ade, whereas the team at Bottle of Ginger wanted to take this opportunity to test our ‘Chain of Production’ model - we wanted to involve our community in all activities: from the concept, sourcing of ingredients, making the drink and designing the packaging, to trading the drink and re-investing the profits.

BOTTLE OF GINGER : CHAIN OF PRODUCTION MODEL

Piloting this model allowed us to answer questions which lay at the core of Bottle of Ginger as a Community Drinks Company:

How can we involve our community in each stage of the chain of production?

What is the value of engaging in our activities - both, for the community as a whole, as well as for each individual?

Can this model be taken forward as a socially, environmentally and economically viable solution?

Therefore, the activities for Bottle of Ginger’s community were shaped as follows:

SOURCE: strawberry picking at East Yonderton Farm

MAKE & DESIGN: cordial recipe testing & packaging design workshop

MAKE: the big batch

TRADE: Bridgeton Cross market & BCLC Gala Day

RE-INVEST: celebration & film screening

A PICKING TRIP – EAST YONDERTON FARM

For our first activity, the Bottle of Ginger team took a group of 20 women from the Bridgeton Community and Learning Campus - many of whom went picking as children; their daughters and their granddaughters on a fruit picking trip to East Yonderton Farm.

A spacious fielded spot just a short drive away and tucked in behind the airfields and Glasgow Airport, we struck gold with a (mostly) sunny day and managed to savour not only strawberries but gooseberries, green peas, potatoes and raspberries too!

Collectively we picked 20kg of strawberries!

We finished off the day with a lovely picnic of sarnies, lentil soup and fruity snacks.

CORDIAL RECIPE TESTING & PACKAGING DESIGN - BCLC

Together we tested a few different recipes. We used a number of sugar to strawberry ratios, trying out xylitol and stevia, and substituting freshly squeezed lemon juice with citric acid.

Sugar can be substituted with alternative natural sugars like stevia, xylitol…

1 teaspoon (4g) of sugar has 16 kcal and is as sweet as:

1/3 teaspoon of stevia (0 kcal) 1 teaspoon of xylitol (7 kcal per teaspoon)

The strawberry design for the label was created by the youngest berry pickers. And the clear medicine bottle was chosen for nostalgic and aesthetic value – to show the strawberry red colour of the cordial. We chose glass over plastic as a re-usable, environmentally friendly option.

MAKING THE BIG BATCH

8 of us, came together to tackle the task of making the big community batch of strawberry cordial. We hulled, chopped and boiled down over 20kg of strawberries, making 40 litres of cordial!

To minimise waste, we whizzed up the leftover strawberry pulp into a sorbet which we planned to hand out during the trading days.

TRADING – BRIDGETON CROSS MARKET & BCLC GALA DAY

We set up a stall at the Tuesday Bridgeton Cross Market and two days later at the BCLC Gala Day, making the cordial available on a pay-as-you-feel basis. We handed out our Superlocal cups to the community to take home with them, and completely sold out of our cordial! Our zero waste strawberry sorbet was also a hit! Altogether, we raised £250 and reached over 800 local residents.

CELEBRATION – MEAL & FILM SCREENING

We gathered at Soul Food Sisters café for a celebratory meal and together watched the film documenting our strawberry adventure. We voted as to how to reinvest the money raised. The decision was unanimous – the lost tradition of berry picking will be revived in our community! We will hold an annual community picking trip every year!

WHAT WE ACCOMPLISHED.

The intention behind ‘A Couple of Drinks’ was firstly to exchange skills and knowledge between the two East End communities focused around each Community Drinks Company.

We achieved this by:

sharing our networks and resources. Company Drink introduced Bottle of Ginger to their drinks producer – Square Root London. As a result, Square Root helped us develop one of our commercial products.

sharing of oral histories around drinks and picking. We had the opportunity to visit Company Drinks in Barking and Dagenham to share, hear and pass on stories.

sharing skills and knowledge around drinks-making, trading and picking.

Secondly, we wanted to create an intervention, informed by the food and drink culture and heritage of Glasgow’s East end, and one which was meaningful to Bottle of Ginger as a Community Drinks Company as well as the wider Bridgeton, Calton and Dalmarnock community. The interventions created included:

Super local cups reflecting on local drinks and picking heritage. These were gifted to members of our community during trading days.

A Strawberry Cordial, made by Bottle of Ginger’s community and a twinned Strawberry-ade, made by the community in Barking.

An Annual Picking Trip

Bottle of Ginger Community Food and Drink Archive - We learned so much about local heritage and decided to begin collating it into a Community Archive. We hope to be able to develop this further in the future into an online resource available to the community.

A short film, documenting our journey. It can be found here.

Thirdly, by piloting our ‘Chain of Production’ model we answered some core questions for Bottle of Ginger as a Community Drinks Company. We ascertained that there is potential for and interest from our community to be involved across all stages of production – conceptualising, growing, foraging and sourcing ingredients, designing the packaging, testing the recipes, trading and re-investing. The engagement could be informal or formal, like for ex. drop in sessions, workshops, events, projects, volunteering, training or employment.

We also established that involvement in our activities is of value to our local community as a whole as well as to each individual participant. The notable outcomes of the project include:

a stronger sense of community and belonging through collective making and sharing oral histories,

improved health and wellbeing - both mental and physical through learning in a social setting

a closer connection to local heritage and culture as well as the natural environment through re-visiting family and community piking heritage

Additionally, through project questionnaires we learned that:

All participants learned a new skill - this was the first time they made cordial, and 5 out 6 of participants had the confidence to make cordial on their own following this project.

All participants agreed that following the project they had a better understanding of sugar content in drinks and planned to use this to make better food and drink choices

And we had some lovely comments from the participants too:

‘This was the first time I have ever picked berries.’

‘Good meeting with people, eating together and general chit chat. The open air was great! It was great fun and a learning day for all. Great community spirit!’

‘Made me want to get more involved.’

WHAT’S NEXT?

These findings will form part of a proposal for our Community Drinks Kitchen project which will invite the local community to engage in our ‘Chain of Production’ model on a monthly basis - from locally sourcing ingredients through picking, foraging and growing, to making and trading cordial as well as collectively making decisions on the re-investment of the profits.

We can’t wait to create even stronger links between Bottle of Ginger and our local community in 2018!

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bottleofginger-blog · 7 years ago

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From Here Since...

In 2014, as part of Myvillages Kathrin set up Company Drinks, ‘to link east London’s history of ‘going down to Kent’ to the set up of a new community drinks enterprise’.

As part of the CCA & Goethe-Institut commission, Bottle of Ginger and our community were invited to collaborate with Kathrin and Company Drinks on a Glasgow-based project.

The intention of the project was to:

Exchange skills and knowledge between the two communities focused around each Community Drinks Company,

The project was proposed in two parts:

From Here Since…

We started the conversation early on in February 2017 with two days of drop-in conversations with Bridgeton, Calton and Dalmarnock based community groups. The Bottle of Ginger team and Kathrin were welcomed by groups from the Bridgeton Community Learning Campus, Glasgow NE Foodbank, Bridgeton St Francis’ in the East Church and Glasgow Women’s Library, who shared their ideas on who, what and how is local...

SUGARALLIE WATER

We heard many stories of local drinks, and many about the not yet forgotten alchemy behind the infamous ‘sugarallie water’ - a children's drink made by dissolving a piece of liquorice in a bottle of water:

‘ We were alchemists, with our mysterious sugar-olly water, made of water, sugar, licorice, and any other ingredient that might give it a strange flavour. After being vigorously shaken, it was kept in a dark secret place for a certain number of days. Then we would chant: "Sugar-olly water, black as the lum, Gether up peens and you'll get some." Robin Jenkins

BERRY PICKING IN BLAIRGOWRIE

But the most repeated story, parallel to the heritage on which Company Drinks was founded, and the one which would inform the events of ‘A Couple of Drinks’, was that of seasonal berry picking work in Blairgowrie.

The photos here are from Lily Barnes, who we met during our community drop-in at BCLC, of her family, picking away in a very relaxed working environment in the fields.

SUPERLOCAL CUPS

Kathrin initiated similar conversations in Barking and Dagenham, home of Company drinks. The stories from both communities were then re-interpreted to make two Superlocal Cups – each represented measures of locality for each community. Pictured here are the measures created for Bottle of Ginger and the Bridgeton, Calton and Dalmarnock community.

The cups will be used for the second part of the collaboration - ‘A Couple of Drinks’ - for berry picking, measuring ingredients and drinking.

And here are the cups alongside Company Drinks Strawberry-Ade!

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bottleofginger-blog · 7 years ago

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forage. farm. ferment.

As part of a successful crowdfunding campaign, Bottle of Ginger was awarded £1500 by The Santander Changemaker Fund to build skills and knowledge within our Bridgeton, Calton and Dalmarnock community through a local project titled – Forage. Farm. Ferment.

The intention of the project was to provide local individuals with skills and knowledge to:

identify, harvest and cook with foraged plants readily available in the immediate urban landscape,

grow herbs in an urban environment using easy and affordable techniques

naturally preserve food found and grown in an urban environment.

FORAGE.

Mark from Galloway Wild Foods started our community forage off with a glass of elderflower champagne (made with sea buckthorn!) - a great way to get into the spirit of the day!

Mark guided us through Cuningar Loop and showed us all sorts of wild edible plants for drinks-making, including : pineapple weed, mugwort, thistle, common hogweed, nettle, larch... All the while topping up our glasses with a bounty of homemade and foraged bitters, wines, shrubs, cordials and even some kombucha!

All of this was followed by an open air workshop in a shaded corner of the park. Mark showed us how to juice sweet cicely, infuse water in a flash and make simple syrup using the plants we found that day.

We finished off the day with some wild mushroom and seaweed topped sourdough and washed it down with a cup of pineapple weed, larch and tansy cordial (through a biodegradable aniseed straw!).

FARM.

For the 2nd workshop in the series - FARM., Sinèad from Urban Catch Aquaponics shared her knowledge and skills on winter herbs and drinks with our local community. The Crafting Herbal Drinks workshop took place at Calton Heritage and Learning Centre on a rainy September morning.

During the workshop, the participants got a chance to get their hands dirty with soil and sticky with sugar. They learned how to cultivate, grow and care for hardy herbs like rosemary and thyme in an urban environment using easy and affordable techniques.

Sinead spoke about the healing properties of the herbs while the participants made two herbal remedies: a rosemary, lemon and honey syrup – a soother for a sore throat; and a thyme, peppercorn and clove tincture – a natural cure for an upset tummy. Each participant went away with a selection of hardy herbs, their handmade tinctures and recipes to share with friends and family.

FERMENT.

For ‘ferment.’ - the third and final part of the project we decided to ferment a community batch of elderflower champagne! Together we ventured out to a local park to forage for this beautifully fragrant flower and returned to Bottle of Ginger HQ to share fermentation knowledge and skills.

You can find photos from the forage and fermentation session as well as foraging tips and a champagne recipe here.

WHAT WE ACCOMPLISHED.

The intention behind forage. farm. ferment. was to build skills and knowledge within our Bridgeton, Calton and Dalmarnock community. Through project questionnaires we learned that:

For 2 out 3 participants it was the first time they had a go at foraging and cultivating herbs.

Following the workshop, 100% of participants had the confidence to go foraging and cultivate herbs on their own, as well as to make drinks using foraged and herbal ingredients.

All participants also planned to share their new skills and knowledge with family and friends.

We didn’t anticipate all the additional outcomes which were reported back to us. The positive change amongst participants additionally included:

a stronger sense of community and belonging - ‘great group’, ‘loved the personalities!’,

improved health and wellbeing - both mental and physical - today’s activities made me feel...: ‘epic!’, ‘invigorated’, ‘more confident’,

a closer connection to local heritage and culture as well as the natural environment: ‘at one with nature’.

We took our collectively acquired knowledge as a Community Drinks Company and did what we do best - made drinks! We made three cordials using locally grown and foraged ingredients: pineapple weed & larch tips, nettle and lemon balm, and rhubarb and rosemary.

The pineapple weed, larch tips and nettle were foraged at Cuningar Loop whereas the rhubarb, lemon balm and nettle we grew at our site with Urban Edge Glasgow. The profits from the sales of the mini cordials were re-invested into our next community project - ‘Women Who Brew’.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Everyone agreed - there is a need for the project to continue in our community beyond the planned activities. From feedback we established that there was most interest around quarterly/seasonal/local picking and foraging events as well as a local community micro-farming project. The found/grown ingredients would then be used for the 3 most popular drinks-making activities (as selected by the community):

drying and blending herbs for teas,

extracting and blending essential oils to make drinks, like for ex. a local kola

making cordials.

These findings will form part of a proposal for our Community Drinks Kitchen project which will invite the local community to engage in our ‘Chain of Production’ model - from locally sourcing ingredients through picking, foraging and growing, to making and trading cordial as well as collectively making decisions on the re-investment of the profits.

This project has also highlighted the need for a growing site to serve Bottle of Ginger, both, as an enterprise, as well as a community - to grow ingredients for drinks and also build local skills and knowledge around food and nature. We plan to begin our search for a local green space in early 2019!

PARTNERS & LINKS:

Santander Changemaker Fund - crowdfunder.co.uk/funds/changemaker

Galloway Wild Foods - gallowaywildfoods.com

Cuningar Loop - scotland.forestry.gov.uk/visit/cuningar-loop

Calton Heritage and Learning Centre - caltonhlc.co.uk

Urban Catch Aquaponics - urbancatch.org

Urban Edge Glasgow - www.urbanedgeglasgow.co.uk

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bottleofginger-blog · 8 years ago

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‘A Couple of Drinks’, a berry picking story.

Earlier in July the Bottle of Ginger team took a group of twenty, their children and their grandchildren from the Bridgeton Community and Learning Campus on a fruit picking trip to East Yonderton Farm.

The picking group members and the BOG team will be developing a new berry drink for our continued collaboration, ‘A Couple of Drinks’ with East London based community drinks company, Company Drinks (who are currently crowdfunding for their new premises if you have a moment to read and support please do!)

Together in the spirit of a ‘twinned drink’ we are each designing our own labels and drinks, inspired and made by our respective east-end urban locations and the communities within them.

Now we have a couple weeks to finalise our collaborative designs for the look and label of the new ‘Straweberry Juice’ and brew it up in a big batch ready for bottling in our community kitchen at Crownpoint Road.

The first launch event is at Bridgeton Market on Tuesday August 8th from 9-3pm. There will be a follow up up public celebration event on the 12th September (at Soul Food Sisters’ new venue in the Barras) where we will have a photo exhibition of our journey together in making the drinks as well as sales and tasters of the drinks we have made, and some thank you’s and congratulations for all the participants! Announcement coming soon.

Get in touch via [email protected] with any questions, if you would like to get involved, or just find out more.

#a couple of drinks #cca-glasgow #company drinks #go_picking #berry picking #community drinks #barking and dagenham #bridgeton #community kitchen

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bottleofginger-blog · 8 years ago

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Keep the tradition of 'going picking' alive in London. Donate to Company Drinks' #Kickstarter for delicious rewards http://thndr.me/APU8ny

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bottleofginger-blog · 8 years ago

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Tabletop Barter

Despite a forecast of rain (and to everyone’s delight), the sun shone bright and warm at Radial’s Picnic in the Park.

RADIAL

‘Radial is a collective of creative thinkers from the university community of Glasgow. We are all connected through a shared need and desire to live sustainably. We believe that climate change is a cultural issue connected to inherent values we all hold. Therefore we can all find commonality and connection to tackle these issues together transforming current habits into meaningful habits that will build a sustainable future.’

Garnethill Park was the perfect setting - fully blooming with elderflower – and right at the heart of this warm, creative community. There was a picnic of cake, soup and sarnies from The Project Café and Social Bite. Eleanora fired up the bread oven and Glasgow Piano City delighted everyone with short recitals. There was a clothes swap shop, composting workshops, jewellery making, spoon and masonry carving for all to enjoy.

TABLETOP BARTER

Bottle of Ginger was too invited to curate a stall. Our proposal was: ‘A tabletop non-monetary exchange of objects, skills and stories between two communities - Bottle of Ginger / Bridgeton & Radial Project / Garnethill.’

We asked those attending to:

‘Bring a part of you/your community to barter.’

THE EXCHANGE

John dug up a bagful of tatties, Bex sourced mint, rosemary and sage cuttings from our growing site, Sandy handed over some lovingly saved borage seeds, Nat dried some lemon balm for tea… We brought along our SuperLocal measuring cups, self-watering bottle propagator kits and a ‘giraffe’ sunflower too.

We had a good foundation of ‘stuff’ ready for barter.

Suggested ‘items’ in exchange included a story, a recipe, a skill, an hour of time…

Here is what you left behind:

A story of censorship

An elderflower embroidery

A space at the Six Foot Gallery

Woodruff for making Waldmeister

A recipe for Mint Chutney

5 x hr of time

A fruit and veg instrumental session

Handmade necklace

2 x banana

A story of the start of summer

Hand-carved spoon

We met some wonderful folk, many of whom have since been along to visit us in Bridgeton, offered their time and skills to the project. The barter gave us an opportunity to understand what we hold of value as a community and what we can offer to others. Now, our intention is to build on this new knowledge, so as to develop a valuable exchange for those who volunteer their time, skills and knowledge with Bottle of Ginger.

CHECK OUT THE OTHER STALLHOLDERS & PROJECTS:

Radial - www.facebook.com/radialproject/

Glasgow Piano City - www.facebook.com/glasgowpianocity/

Garnethill Bread Oven - www.facebook.com/garnethillbreadoven/

O-pin Project - www.facebook.com/opinproject/

Friends of Garnethill Greenspaces (FroGGs) - www.facebook.com/Friends-of-Garnethill-Green-Spaces-1637658216485724/

Glasgow Student Housing Coop - www.facebook.com/glasgowstudenthousingcoop/

Nae Such Thing as a Free Lunch - www.facebook.com/NSTAAfreelunch/

Green Aspirations Scotland - www.facebook.com/greenaspirationsscotland/

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bottleofginger-blog · 8 years ago

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Elderflower - Foraging & Champagne

Elderflower season is coming to an end – it starts early to mid May and continues through until late June/early July. If you’re lucky, you will still be able to find the last remaining flowers in shaded, northern parts of parks and gardens. It may be too late for this year to make a batch of cordial or try out some elderflower tempura though – now it’s time to hold tight for the berries. But if you’re elderflower mad like us, then keep a hold of these foraging instructions and champagne recipe for next season.

How to Identify Elder

Elderflowers come from the elder tree (sambucus nigra).. It generally grows as shrub or small tree to a height of around 5 to 10 metres.

LEAVES

The leaf is compound and pinnate (which means feather-shaped) with 5 or 7 leaflets. The leaflets are arranged opposite to each other with one single leaflet at the tip. The edge of each leaflet is serrated (toothed) and there may be small hairs on their underside.

FLOWERS

Flat-topped clusters of tiny, creamy-white flowers appear in June. Elderflowers have a ‘spray’ of flowers called a corymb (10-25cm in diameter). The individual white flowers are 5-6mm in diameter and each flower has five petals.

Note: NEVER EAT ANYTHING YOU ARE NOT COMPLETELY SURE ABOUT.

A few things to remember when picking elderflower:

It is pollinated by black fly, therefore the flowers are usually completely covered in little black specks underneath. Try to pick flowers free of the flies or pick them off by hand

Pick the flowers when they are fully open on a warm dry morning. Keep the flowers upright so as to avoid losing the precious pollen.

Don’t be tempted to wash the elderflower – you’ll be washing away the pollen and yeast!

Leave plenty behind for wildlife and other hungry foragers.

Elderflower Champagne

INGREDIENTS (makes 8litres)

16 elderflower heads, stalk-free and clean

8 litres water

4 lemons

800g white sugar

4 tablespoons white wine/cider vinegar

pinch champagne yeast (optional)

INSTRUCTIONS

Pour 8 litres of warm water into a disinfected large container.

Add 800g of white sugar and stir in until dissolved.

Add lemon zest and juice or lemon slices.

Add 4 tablespoons of white wine/cider vinegar.

Add the flower heads then gently stir the whole pot for a couple of minutes until mixed.

Cover with clean muslin or towel and leave to ferment in a safe, cool space.

Remove the flowers & lemon after 12-24 hrs.

After 24 hours, check for signs of fermentation- bubbles and foam activity. Stir each day to encourage activity. Add a pinch of champagne yeast if necessary.

Leave safe to ferment further for between 5 days to two weeks in a warm place (18-25 degrees) out of direct sunlight.

Once you are happy with the level of fermentation sieve and decant into strong sterilised glass bottles or PET (for beginners). Your brew will continue to ferment and carbonate. Keep you bottles in a cool place (if in glass, wrap in plastic bags and keep in cardboard), plastic keeps well in the fridge. Release excess pressure in the bottles by turning the screw top every so often.

Best drank chilled as soon as it is ready for consumption.

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bottleofginger-blog · 8 years ago

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“A Couple of Drinks”

East meets East. Bottle of Ginger is collaborating with Kathrin Böhm of East London-based Company Drinks to develop a pair of new drinks made in tandem through workshops and discussions in each East-end urban location. Twin beverages foraged and crafted through conversations in our communities.

The drinks will reflect on the history of urban drinks manufacturing, community growing, harvesting and participation. We started the conversation early on in February with two days of drop-in conversations with Bridgeton based community groups. The Bottle of Ginger team and Kathrin were welcomed by groups from the Bridgeton Community Learning Campus, Parkhead Foodbank, St Francis’ Church and Glasgow Women’s Library, who shared their ideas on who, what and how is local, as well as helping us to uncover Glasgow’s history of seasonal berry picking work in Blairgowrie and the not yet forgotten alchemy behind the infamous ‘sugarallie water’!

(Design by An Endless Supply)

Alongside the drink we have also created re-usable ‘superlocal’ cups using different local and picking measures.

Many local people remember travelling with their mothers to Blairgowrie and Perthshire to go berry picking over the summer months. It was a chance for families to earn some extra income, as well as to get the children out of the city, away from trouble, and have a little bit of a holiday living communally with the other pickers and their families. The photos here are from Donna who we met during our community drop-in at BCLC, who has kindly shared photos of her family here, picking away in a very relaxed working environment in the fields!

We hope to ignite a conversation about the histories we have discovered and use them to inspire and inform the continuing collaboration and the new drinks!

Over the course of 6 months Bottle of Ginger’s FORAGE. FARM. FERMENT. program will see a series of talks, walks, skillshares and workshops culminating in the launch of the two new tandem beverages towards the end of the summer.

Pencil in your diaries!

‘A Couple of Drinks’, Bridgeton Market Launch Event, Tuesday 8th August, 9 am - 3pm, find us at the Bridgeton Umbrella! Tasting our new community drinks as well as snacks and a catch up!

Keep an eye on our website and Facebook for upcoming events surrounding the community and collaboration.

#superlocal #bottleofginger #companydrinks #community drinks #glasgow #kathrin bohm #cca-glasgow #a couple of drinks

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bottleofginger-blog · 8 years ago

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Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice? The Story of Sugar.

words and images by L. Sasha Gora

The last week of October I flew to Glasgow to talk about sugar and spice and everything nice (or so we say). Cooking Pot, a series initiated by the CCA’s public engagement curator Viviana Checchia, was turning one. I was coming to celebrate by baking an Icelandic cake and, to add some food for thought, by giving a talk about the complex history of the world’s most popular sweetener.

Bottle of Ginger is a story of five ingredients, and what happens when they come together. Each ingredient has a different story, but today let’s begin with sugar.

I was just in Panama and although I arrived only days before the harvest began, I was able to still visit fields of sugar cane and witness the messy tangles the plants make across the landscape. The overlapping stalks made me think of the complex origins of both my sweet tooth and the foods I use to console it.

Sweet Talk

According to food historian Bee Wilson taste is learned with one exception: a preference for sweet over bitter. Everything else is taught.

We learn a cuisine like we learn a language. Cooking can be described as a type of literacy. You don’t need to be able to write in order to speak. What takes place in the mouth is enough.

And sweetness plays a role in learning how to eat.

Andrew Smith writes in Sugar: A Global History, “From birth, humans are attracted to sweet-tasting foods . . . all 10,000 taste buds in the mouth have special receptors for sweetness . . .This may have an evolutionary explanation: about 40 per cent of the calories in breast milk come from lactose, a disaccharide sugar that is readily metabolized into glucose, the body’s basic fuel. The sweetness leads infants to eat more, making them more likely to survive (7).”

The attraction to sweetness is a matter of survival, an evolution of lived experience.

Sweetness is associated with pleasure, decadence, luxury, and celebration. But the history of sugar is anything but sweet. It is a history of colonized bodies, lands, and tastes. Today, sugar has a more recent history entangled with nutrition, health and disciplined bodies, lands and tastes.

Guilt, pleasure, guilty pleasure. Clean, dirty, whole, fast, real, fake, good, bad, healthy, junk, right, wrong, allowed, forbidden, mindful versus thoughtless eating – countless trends and doctrines regarding diets busy themselves with sugar. Food becomes not just about health, but also morals. We often encounter the idea that something that tastes good must be bad for us, which creates the idea of forbidden pleasures. Food, and especially sweetness, becomes entangled with guilt.

This introduces what talking about food means. Food can be studied as a commodity; one can look at production, distribution, and consumption. It can be studied based on what it tastes like, what it does nutritionally, physically, emotionally, or spiritually. It can be studied in the public realm, and in private. By talking about food, and in this instance sweetness, we are also talking about the history of changing relationships between people, societies, commodities, and values.

From a Spice to a Sweetener: What is Sugar?

The expression “sugar and spice and everything nice” suggests that sugar and spices are two different things. However, sugar once was a spice. So what are we talking about exactly when we talk about sugar?

Historically, sugar has had many uses. American anthropologist Sidney Mintz (1922-2015) is sometimes referred to as the father of food anthropology, and sugar is to blame. His PhD at Columbia University was based on fieldwork among sugar-cane workers, a topic he continued to work on for decades. In 1985 he published Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, in which he defines sugar’s five principal uses: as a medicine; a spice and condiment; a decorative material; a preservative; and a sweetener and foodstuff. However, these uses are often difficult to separate from one another, and these different uses did not evolve in progression, but instead overlapped and intersected.

What we call sugar is sucrose, which is a part of the carbohydrate family and an organic chemical. It occurs in all green plants and can be extracted from various species.

Sugar is composed of two monosaccharaides—glucose and fructose—that are linked in chemical combination. They separate during digestion: glucose passes though the small intestine into the bloodstream and is distributed to the organs, where it is then metabolized into energy (and the surplus is stored in fat sells); whereas, fructose, is mainly metabolized in the liver, where enzymes convert it into glucose.

From Luxury to Staple

When we talk about sugar, we mostly mean cane sugar. Sugar cane is part of the grass family. There are six different species; the one most common for sugar production is Saccharum officinarum.

I was planning to write about the history of sugar, but a newsletter just brought this article to my attention from the American food magazine Saveur. With a title like “The Illustrated History of How Sugar Conquered the World”, how can I compete? I mean it has a drawing of a crusader on a horse pulling two begs of sugar, not to mention the aesthetic quality of Quentin Blake, and snappy subtitles like “A Sweet Public Menace”. So, I advise the history buffs to follow the link.

For those who want to keep things short and sweet, let me sum up the history of sugar in a few sentences.

Sugar cane is native to Papua New Guinea. The historical consensus is that sugar was first cultivated in India, and then travelled to China where it spread because of Buddhist ideas of it being pure and a medicine. From Asia it travelled west to Persia. A sugar industry was established in the Mediterranean. Here the model was developed that was then implemented in the Caribbean, where European colonialists introduced sugar. This makes the history of sugar also the history of slavery.

Few Europeans knew of cane sugar in 1000 A.D. (It first appeared in Europe around 1100 AD; however, it was first a rare and expensive luxury. The presence of sugar was first acknowledged in England in the twelfth century), by 1650 the nobility and wealthy in England had become enthusiastic sugar eaters and sugar was present in medicine, literature and displays of ranks, by 1800 sugar was a common necessity (although still expensive) in the diet of every English person, and by 1900 it was supplying nearly one-fifth of the calories of the English diet. Sugar went from being a luxury to a staple in most homes.

It has a long history, and takes a long time to grow.

Sugar cane takes between nine to eighteen months to mature. Sugar cane grows best in the wet months and typically ripens in the dry months, from January to May.

It can grow as thick as two inches, and twelve to fifteen feet high. Once the stem flowers, the sucrose is at its maximum level and is ready to be harvested. Once cane is cut, it needs to be processed quickly to prevent the juice from fermenting and spoiling.

The cane is crushed to extract juice and then the juice is heated to reduce and thicken it, transforming it from a liquid to a solid. Going from shades of dark and golden brown to white, the different colours of sugar reflect how refined it has been.

The Scale of Sugar

Sugar is big business. According to the FAO, sugarcane is the world’s third most valuable crop after cereals and rice, and occupies nearly twenty-seven million hectares of land across the globe. It is estimated to be responsible for approximately twenty per cent of the caloric content of modern diets.

Today Brazil is, by far, the largest producer of sugar (although the crop never grew wild there), followed by India, China and Thailand.

And big business means big money and big business interests.

In September 2016 the Guardian published Amanda Holpuch’s article “Sugar lobby paid scientists to blur sugar’s role in heart disease – report”, which reports “Influential research that downplayed the role of sugar in heart disease in the 1960s was paid for by the sugar industry.” A researcher found that scientists at the Sugar Research Foundation paid three Harvard scientists to do a 1967 literature review that overlooked the role of sugar in heart disease. This is just one of many articles that reveals the lobbying that goes behind our perceptions of what is healthy and what is not.

In other words, sugar, an ingredient that is almost always on the table, has a complex history that is many things but not necessarily nice.

Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. London: Penguin Books, 1986.

Smith, Andrew F. Sugar: A Global History. London: Reaktion Books, 2015.

Wilson, Bee. First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. New York: Basic Books, 2016.

#sugar #sugar talks #sugar tax #ginger #ginger beer #community #drinks company #farming

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bottleofginger-blog · 8 years ago

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Economy as Public Space, Trade as Public Realm

By Kathrin Böhm

This text is a shortened version of an essay initially written for the publication series ‘Your Money or Your Life: Feminist Perspectives on Economy’, edited by Bonnie Fortune and Lise Skou, printed by Five Letter Press, 2016

My involvement with art and its relation to economy begins with my interest in public space. Public space is where we articulate, show and offer ideas and goods in order to pass them on through negotiation and agreements over value. I see economy as a public space where we meet to go through these negotiations and exchanges. It is a public space, which we shape through how we produce, trade, and invest.

The fact that our current experience of economy is dominated by the reality, language, and logic of a capitalist economy is lamentable and horrifying, but it doesn’t stop us from reclaiming the realm of economy with different tools, different ideas, and different values. This is where culture and art come in for me, they can question how we shape and make by taking part, making space, making suggestions and making the economies we produce visible, tangible, and real.

Company Drinks CIC

Company started as a project proposed and initiated by the artist collective, Myvillages. As I am the UK based Myvillages member, the main work fell to me. I think it also represents my interest and ambitions quite directly. In researching the project, we came across this remarkable history of London’s East Enders ‘going picking’ (mainly hops) to Kent every year, an unusual urban/rural relationship, which I began to research.

Kent (located roughly 40 miles southeast of London) has and still is a fertile food growing area. The cultivation of hops there peaked between 1850 and 1950, parallel with the setup of a train line from London to Kent. It ended with changes in the labour market and the mechanisation of the harvest process. But for roughly a century the hop-farmers required huge numbers of pickers to do the annual harvest and up to 180,000 East Londoners, mainly women and children, would descend to Kent for this task.

The 'picking' or 'hopping' days are still vividly remembered by many old East Enders, and research (mainly oral history documents) explain the ‘going picking’ as something that had developed its own culture and is remembered as a mix of freedom, matriarchy and autonomy combined with the possibility to make some money.

I was intrigued by this culture and the proposal for Company came out of an attempt to revisit this collective history and memory, and to alter some of its aspects in order to allow for a new collective realm and shared culture to evolve. It was clear that the socio-cultural and economical aspect would need to be linked as closely as it was during the hopping days, or as one women during the hopping reminiscence sessions said: 'it wasn’t just about the money, it was about being in good company.'

Company’s proposal (it’s full title to start with was Company: Movements Deals and Drinks) was to link the history of ‘going picking’ to the development of a new community led/based/run drinks enterprise, including the act of picking in a full drinks production cycle, from planting to picking, processing, bottling, trading, drinking and reinvesting.

We didn’t want to create a homogenous cultural realm by reenacting or recreating the ‘hopping’ days, which were relatively homogenous, all white working class from east London, mainly linked through extended family links. Company wants to be a new public realm that would reflect the new East London communities and demographics, which (even Barking and Dagenham remained largely white and working class until the late 1980s) have changed dramatically, and are not white nor family and neighbourhood centred anymore.

In the same way that our community wasn’t homogenous anymore, the clear-cut relationship between the urban and rural had also dramatically changed since the ‘hopping’ days.

East London traditionally being the more confined East End has grown into Essex and the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, home of the largest housing estate in Europe in the early 20th century, the Becontree Estate. The estate became a new home to many East Enders, who were forced to move out of a war damaged East End or wanted to ‘better’ their situation by moving into a new house with open green spaces and gardens.

The boundaries between London (there is no identifiable territory called London – there is only the City of London and Greater London) and the countryside have become very blurry. The borough itself is much greener than the East End had ever been. Built around the principles of the garden city, it has large green open spaces, individual private gardens, small neighbourhood greens and incorporates parts of London’s Metropolitan Green Belt. The need to go to Kent decreased both from an economic aspect (work for women could be found closer to home due to post WW2 labour regulations) and fruit and plants could be picked much closer to home, in the borough itself.

The call for a new ‘going picking’ was therefore addressed to a very mixed local community, and the borough of Barking and Dagenham itself became a place for picking, combined with a few larger picking and gleaning trips to the nearby countryside in Essex and Kent. Throughout the summer of 2014, we mapped and explored local interest and local growing spaces by going picking again. We advertised the picking walks and trips through the local newspaper, flyers and posters, the local libraries, and a variety of ‘word of mouth’ and other local networks. We additionally ran drinks making workshops and drinks labs for younger people, approached schools, growers, makers, historians, publicans, etc. to raise interest in the project.

Image courtesy of Happy Hoppers Group

Our drinks range

By October 2012, we had our first drinks range ready, one green hop beer, four sodas, a DIY cola and eleven cordial flavours. The sodas and beer were made by other small drinks manufacturers on our behalf, the cordials we made ourselves–cottage industry style. In its first summer, the project was an organically growing network with the set task to make drinks we could trade. It was about exploring the potential of our proposal by making it – from scratch and with a community we didn’t know.

Hundreds of people went picking this first summer, college students, school children, former hop-pickers, families, and community groups. Once the drinks range came together, was launched, photographed and promoted it became obvious that the “picking” wasn’t an isolated activity but one in a chain, and that the whole thing was also a business – our new company that would be shaped and cultured through a new collective “going picking” culture. The project was big, but the team running the logistics and making sure the different activities in the chain were synchronised was tiny. Basically me, with support from Create for key events, a production assistant and Susanna who is from Barking and Dagenham joined in late summer as a permanent team member.

Nothing in the project was streamlined – it was expansive and complex, with each drink evolving from multiple relationships, places and narratives. It was a mapping out through action of local interest and resources. Someone suggested picking blackberries and we organised it. Lorna rang that the wild plums were ready and we came.

Image courtesy of Jennifer Balcombe

Company and company

To set up a company that would have both a cultural and business ambition and where all points in the production and reproduction chain would be publicly accessible, was a way of creating a structure that allows for new economic imaginaries while at the same time making and constructing a new social and economical structure. Company as a name and structure, was also chosen because it is something familiar enough to engage and become involved with, and then reveals its more unfamiliar sides, e.g. that it is art or that it is collective. From the feedback we have gotten the reasons for joining the project are very similar to why people went hop-picking in the past: Company is a place for social gathering mixed with green and outdoor experience and the satisfaction of doing something productive. But declaring the project a business invites a whole new range of comments, suggestions and critique. Business is a bit like football, something most people – often men – would have a strong opinion about.

Company was setup to have a business side which would allow for some or eventually all of the project to become financially sustainable. This is of course a big plan – one that is liked by many in times of public cuts and shrinking financial opportunities – and one difficult to implement within an economy and market that seems to be either determined by cheapness or scale.

To gain profit you have to streamline production and start with a focus on a few rather than many things. Company is big and messy and now in its third year still allows for all sorts of ideas and suggestions to be included (for example: “let’s try and make birch sap”) rather than expelled for the sake of profit.

While running the project and applying it to all sorts of situations and demands, we are also mapping out and researching our market. We have not made a business plan, so far. We have come across new possibilities for how to expand and grow the project. We have experienced the cut through reality of the drinks business–the high risks, low returns, and competition for cheap food. We have learned about how to make drinks and understand what’s feasible for us in the short term.

The main focus is the public programme and the ‘going picking’ trips, which are relatively expensive and not the most cost efficient way to make drinks (taking eighty people hop picking costs roughly £1500 including coaches, insurance, portable toilets, and support staff costs).

Going Forward

In 2017 we are developing new soft drinks with young people and local training colleges, we’ll continue our monthly Hopping Afternoons and picking trips and we’ll run quarterly public consultation sessions in order to grow the social and business side of Company Drinks. The plan is to take on a 25 year lease on a council owned building – the former Green Bowls Pavilion in Barking Park and have this as our central meeting, storage and events space with a small cordial and juice making kitchen attached. Until now productive mobility across the borough was a higher priority than establishing a central workshop, but after three years a more centralised infrastructure becomes more suitable and will also allow us to explore business ideas around hire, catering and resource pooling.

Company will continue to first and foremost produce a new public space which can be productive and allow for financial gains and we use this as an opportunity rather than setting it as an end goal. Productivity, business, and profitability for us are means to produce and sustain a public realm which allows for new cultural and economic relationships and roles.

For me, the project is clearly an arts project, art in the shape of a community drinks enterprise. This doesn’t have to be the same for others, and the project has enough flexibility and ambiguity to be seen and used as something else–a social gathering, a community enterprise, or an educational tool. Economy is an everyday structure and activity that I mean to culture differently with Company by practicing less familiar models and ideas. Economy is a particular public realm, as is architecture or food production or history, it’s a public realm that affects me massively and its current form affects me in a way that makes me unhappy. So my art is not just a comment and reflection or representation, but a public realm in which to practice and culture economy differently.

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