Boxing clever
British farmers’ markets and home delivered box schemes have become increasingly popular, but it’s a legal grey area. Andrew Burnyeat reports
Farmers’ markets are great. Rosycheeked, Wellington-shod shoppers arrive home brimming with satisfaction and unload their recyclable bags onto their oakwood kitchen table and admire their newlyacquired radiantly colourful fruit and gloriously muddy vegetables.
Later that same day they will prepare a delicious, flavoursome meal full of natural goodness and vitamins free of nasty chemicals or genetic modification.
But something is missing. Man cannot live by bread alone. There’s nothing to drink! So it’s back in the environmentally-disastrous 4x4 for an airpolluting dash to the nearest supermarket to stock up on non-organic beer.
Then a stressful dash back home again before the potatoes start to turn and the guests start to get impatient.
Possibly with this scenario in mind, brewers up and down Britain have been talking to farmers’ markets with the result that many such events now offer beer for sale.
Many of these brewers are very small indeed.
Like most of the food on offer, the beer often comes from small concerns who just wouldn’t be able to get shelf-space in a supermarket.
Mike McGuigan of Liverpool’s Betwixt Beer tried his luck at the recently-established Lark Lane Farmers’ Market.
On regular sale is Sunlight beer, a pale, golden hoppy ale made with styrian, challenger and East Kent goldings hops) with an alcohol level of 4.5 per cent. It’s actually brewed a short distance away in Sandy Way, Cheshire, by McGuigan to his own recipe at Northern Brewing. It is unpas.....
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By Andrew Burnyeat
Section : Spotlight
Page number : 25
