A Big Chat with Lucy at FUTTLE

Futtle - Lucy Hine & Stephen Marshall
Scotland, Fife, St Monan’s

On a trip in the summer of 2020, taking advantage of lifted restrictions to head roving across the country with Fernando from Otros Vinos; we had spotted a wine & record shop in the East Neuk of Fife and thought we’d go and say hello. An hour and a half into meeting Lucy & Stephen we still hadn’t poured any wine but had discussed music, tasted some cask strength whisky and had a nose around their beautiful brewery, with that summer’s beer conditioning in can. 

Feeling a closer affinity with the natural wine world than the beer world, Lucy emailed a couple of weeks later, wondering if we’d be interested in being the first place to stock their beers in London. Whilst we are fans of beer, we’re no experts; but these shone as an example of how to do things properly.

These are clean and delicious small batch beers made by people that really care, at the beginning of their journey into making drinks with a sense of place. They work with foraged ingredients alongside organic grain and hops- with a view to soon start malting their own organic barley - and are excited to be installing a coolship (open fermenter) this month for wild fermented beer to age in ex-wine barrels.

Having worked in the drinks industry their whole lives- Lucy in beer and Stephen in whisky-  in 2012 the pair moved to Fife, opening their bar & record shop/label Triassic Tusk in 2017, with the brewery established a little later. Initially kegging small brews to pour at the bar and as refills for lucky locals, lockdown afforded them the opportunity to think about taking production further afield.

We had a great chat with Lucy about foraging, beer with a sense of place, and whether the word ‘craft’ has started to lose all meaning in the beer world:

How have you been going Lucy? Has this been an odd year for you guys?

The last year we've been doing a lot of production and just getting up and running in the brewery which has been a blessing in disguise really. We always knew we'd end up making something for ourselves, but the opportunity presented itself and we were kind of in the right place at the right time. The first cans we filled were the ones you received in November. We canned those in the summer and everything was conditioned very slowly for three months. The next cans are due to arrive with you this week I believe, with a couple more coming hot on their heels, brewed with seaweed and pineapple weed.

How did you decide to start using foraged ingredients?

Where we are on the coast, we do a lot of foraging. We're outside a lot with the kids and it’s something we do a lot as a family, so we knew a fair amount about those ingredients. We just felt like it was a natural starting point for all of our recipes. I think it was the thing we were most sure about actually as we started this process.

How are you adding things like the whin into the brew?

So whin is super coconutty when you pick it but It's really hard to capture. It's not as strong in the beer- it’s quite subtle- but you get it in the finish I think. We’ve tried to use it in lots of different ways. If it gets too hot, or too cold, it kind of disappears completely! What we ended up doing is making a syrup and adding that before it goes into can to be conditioned.

Picking the flowers between the spikes can be pretty difficult, but at least there’s so much of it, it’s not one you need to worry about missing out on. We can get it early in the year, there was lots around already at the start of the year, so we actually made that Wheat Beer in January and canned it in February. It’s so cold in winter that there’s not much growing obviously, so we’ve come to rely on things like gorse, and seaweed.

Preserving those foraged ingredients in a syrup, is that something you’ll do more often, to be able to work with them at other times in the year?

It’s something we’re getting better at to build up a little reserve, but we are trying to work really seasonally, so we don’t want to be using something we’ve preserved from summer for a beer in the winter. We have started to preserve some ingredients to try and capture that essence in things like a syrup, or a shrub or vinegar, so we can use them at the right point.

The brewing process takes a day, and then the primary fermentation will take maybe a week to 10 days. Conditioning will be about a month in tank and then about two months in can. So all in all, it's over three months. Most breweries would be turning a beer around in about a week! So ours is long by brewing standards, but it’s not that long. In terms of natural ingredients, most cycles of flowering plants will be around three, four months, so we can feasibly brew a beer with those ingredients and release it whilst it’s still around for people to see.

Brewing with foraged ingredients is something we're still learning and experimenting with each year. The weather plays such a role in what we can get; last year everything was out super early. So we have to be quite flexible with what we're planning. This year everything's really late. Trying to get enough pineapple weed for the Table Beer to brew in May would normally be absolutely fine but this time, it was really difficult to get.

We’ve got some favourites that we’ll keep coming back to but we’re also just trying to have a bit of fun, and play about with ingredients and styles.

So you’re not going to be stuck to replicating a ‘core range’?

It was never our intention to have any kind of core range all year round, but we definitely do lean towards certain styles. We'll always have some kind of Table Beer on the shelf or about to come out, but the foraged ingredient for those will likely change. We might repeat something if we really liked it, but it’s nice to mix it up. We’ll always be making changes to the malt bill, depending on what organic produce we can source. We’ve been able to get more organic oats this time so we’ve upped the oat content in the Table Beer which has really changed the body, feeling creamier and heavier even though it’s a really light beer.

To be wedded to a core range, with our size, if we had to always make 2 or 3 beers- well that’s all we’d be able to make. Whereas if we can make each beer a bit different each time, that’s what we’re interested in, and our drinkers are interested in too. That was always our intention at least.

Could you talk a little about sourcing organic ingredients? It’s another element that feels lacking in beer at the moment. Are you able to source things nearby?

It's a mixture. We're working on bringing everything as close as we can. For the time being organics is the thing that really guides what we're buying- but restricts us too. For the moment the majority of grain we're getting is from Warminster which is miles away, but that's the closest malters we can use for our barley.

Our brewery is based on an organic farm that grows organic grains like wheat, barley and oats, but the only issue is that we can't malt it ourselves. It's something we're working on, to be able to malt it at the brewery, as a traditional floor malting. I don't think it's something that’s going to happen this year, but certainly next year, it will be a focus for us to try and close the loop a little bit.

That’s the bulk of our raw ingredients, the grain. With the hops again we’re restricted by keeping things organic, most of our hops come from a broker called Charles Faram, and we've got a small list of organic varieties that we can get as a small producer. Some will come from the UK, some come from New Zealand, which doesn’t sit very well. The foraging is great for that because we have the potential to be able to substitute hops completely from the recipe with something that's native to Scotland. It was done traditionally, we've got loads of old brewing books that we turn to quite a lot. We’re looking to be making those traditional beers in our own way, using things like heathers and bog myrtle, yarrow, pansy, these kinds of plants are right outside our door and that’s what people would have used instead of hops, but nobody’s really doing it anymore.

The only unhopped beer we make at the moment is the Gose, that has no hops at all. The last brew we finished with Alexanders, or Horse Parsley and this new one we’ve used seaweed. Alexander’s are very coastal, you see them less inland, they’re really aromatic and citrusy when you get them early. The seeds turn black in the sun and have more characteristics of a dried berry I suppose, we try to use them at both ends of the cycle.

We’re actually going through a process to be certified as a B-Corp, and a huge part of that process is all about the supply chain and sourcing. Obviously our intention and our hope is to make that supply chain as short as possible, that we can rely on things that reflect our location, and come across in the drinks we’re making. It’s not perfect at the moment, but with our key parameter being organic, that is limiting where we can get things from, but we do have plans to bring each of the core ingredients closer to where we are.

And whilst things are brewed with traditional yeast strains at the moment, you’re hoping to start doing some spontaneous fermentations soon, how will that process start?

We're about to install the coolship, an open copper cooling tray that we’ll put up in the rafters of the brewery. The unhopped & unfermented beer will go up into that to cool overnight and pick up airborne yeasts, before going to barrel to ferment naturally over a few months. We're hoping that that will be installed soon and we'll be brewing into it by spring!

I think to start with we'll carry on making these clean, more conventional beers and the wild beers as two separate things. But I can see us moving there completely once we’ve got the hang of it... but we've never done it before!

Our hope when we started was that we would make wild beer, that was the beer we liked drinking. We just felt such an affinity to the natural wine world, but we can't grow grapes here- if we could, that's what we would be making. So we’re going to make the beer equivalent.

It feels like such a missed opportunity for the craft beer world, that more people aren’t exploring natural fermentations, it’s obviously not the most commercially viable thing to be pursuing

I don't know why more people aren't exploring it. There’s a big trend for mixed-ferms in craft beer which I feel like is hedging your bets a little bit. Half your batches are brewed with regular yeasts and the other half are left to chance, then they get blended together. Consumers are really fine with that at the moment, but I guess there's no real alternative. I think some breweries can be a little bit disingenuous with that idea of natural, or wild beers that aren’t really the case.

I’ve been meaning to write something about this actually. You see so often restaurants saying “come and drink our lovely natural wines and craft beer” - the two are considered in the same breath but craft beer gets away with being small and independent and that's meant to be enough? Whereas natural wine actually stands for something, the integrity is there in the production and growing, and I don’t think it’s there in beer.

I’ve lost track of what that term means any more. It feels like we’re so far past where the term ‘craft’ came from. You guys are much closer to what it should mean.

It feels a bit lonely at times, but actually it does suit us that we sit in between lots of different worlds like the natural wine world. Of course, there are breweries in other places that are doing the kinds of things that we're doing, it's just that they're not right here. But hopefully, there'll be more to come!

All of these things take such a long time. If you look at more developed markets like Denmark, or the West coast of the States, consumers have gone the right way there, and we’re just like ten years behind. There’s little pockets where you see ‘okay, that’s the future’ but we’re just not there yet. Fingers crossed though!