Ferment Lab: A makerspace for Fermented Food Enthousiasts
It’s been more then two years since I talked about the ambition to create a dedicated space for fermentation and conservation enthusiasts in Brussels. I dreamed about it when arriving at BeHere and having to reinvent Fermenthings for the first time, but COVID pushed us into more day to day production to keep the boat afloat.
In October 2020 while in the midst of the second (or was it third) lockdown we were granted a fund from innoviris & Bruxelles Environnement to develop fermented techniques applied on the spent grains from beer. The Ferment Lab was back on the table!
A year later we are starting to launch a couple of prototypes developed in our aspiring ferment lab: A sour and complex limonade using koji and IPA spend grains, a shoyu sauce made with coffee ground or from stout spend grains and multiple miso tests with local ingredients or recup (looking at you vegan brownie miso). We are also looking into new ways to use unripe tomatoes through barrel fermentation, tamari, vinegar,… Progress is being made, but we’re not yet at our full potential.
The reason why I’m writing this piece is to invite the fermentation community to partake in this journey. Like makerspaces ten years ago, we feel that there is a mass critique in the making involving sustainable food solutions based on fermentation and conservation techniques. We want to make our place a democratic and social tool for these people to be able to prototype, research and invent the food of tomorrow based on sustainable, local & circular values. Not with fancy lab equipment in the first time, but through knowledge sharing based on millennia of fermentations being created around the world. Get inspiration globally, but resource your ingredients locally.
Concretely at the moment we have a 22m2 equipped kitchen, 40m2 space dedicated to fermentation experiments (with a couple of barrels, mid scale incubators, cold room and all equipment for making lactoferments, vinegars, kombucha, koji,…), a 10m2 cellar, a 15m2 room dedicated to baking and 20m2 dedicated to the Barista Cooperative “Koffie Entre Amis”. There are still works to do to make it more optimal.
The dream that we want to make reality: be able to co-create with local farmers, universities, social projects, cooks, food entrepreneurs and build a space and the needed protocols together to run this space. Like makerspaces we want to make it easily accessible, transparent and self sustainable quite fast. We are now at 70% of the final form and are using it at 1/3th of its potential. We are eager to share the space with like minded individuals and projects that want to give time to make the spot as effective as possible & create a solid place for a new form of makerspaces: food labs with a community based approach because food is the one thing you need to survive, so why not make the tools accessible for making it more sustainable and future proof.
