Old Tree Brewery
Old Tree Brewery are a botanical drinks for edible landscapes enterprise, making delicious, artisanal drinks from foraged ingredients. Their drinks are available at Zero Waste restaurant Silo, and they have recently set up a new cafe at Field Brighton. We met with one of the founders, Nick, to learn more about Old Tree’s roots and what they do to ensure they are being as kind to the Earth as possible.
N: It wasn’t primarily drink making which drove us to become a brewery. The primary motivation was a friendship, and that friendship was based upon an immersiveness in a forest. Tom and I met each other on a train and from that serendipitous encounter we then forged a friendship by going out to a woodland together which he was helping to manage. During those visits we built the foundations for a log cabin together, and through that forged our friendship within a woodland environment that was completely out of my normal habitat of an urban centre. So my mind was unlocked in many ways, and the way in which we became friends was also unlocked — it wasn’t hemmed in by the conventional norms and the rules of engagement with someone. It was completely wild, self sufficient and strong, but also very vulnerable as we were two very small beings in a very big environment with towering trees. So that was how our friendship was made, and we realised that we wanted to become friends but that we also wanted to sustain ourselves and not take ourselves away from each other by getting caught up in jobs that would require us to get back into that urban mindset.
Drink making became a natural choice because it involves plants and trees, and it was plants and trees that were core to our relationship, but it also offered us a chance to work on our vision and aspiration, which was to regenerate the land. If you use the lands resources, in our opinion, you must put those resources back. That’s a wound that we see a lot — people going to areas of the world which have something to offer, taking them, and not properly paying for them. Drink making became a way of neatly paying back for what we’re taking — as in, take something, plant something. It’s not easy to do this if you’re working with plastic or metal, and obviously those resources are important because the vessels that we use are metal, but the core constituents of our business are plants and it’s fortunately very easy and nourishing to put those things back into the environment.
So starting Old Tree was the result of a friendship and an aspiration to close a resource loop, which, in my opinion, many other people could be easily doing but don’t because they haven’t been inspired to and are lacking the relationships with each other and therefore a relationship with the Earth.
It wasn’t primarily drink making which drove us to become a brewery. The primary motivation was a friendship, and that friendship was based upon an immersiveness in a forest.
IJ: Yes, I think a lot of people are living very disconnected lives, and they don’t actually see that there are loopholes to close.
N: Massively. We’re not informed enough, or there isn’t enough self enquiry because everything appears to be so abundant, but you don’t have to look very far to know that there is a problem with consuming infinitely in a world that is finite. It’s a systemic problem, and is very complex, so you can’t easily hold people personally responsible for their decisions. To be able to describe it in words without opening up a Pandora’s box of problems, is near impossible, but fundamentally it’s a system failure. It’s the way that we’ve designed society, the way we consume, and how we produce things which is responsible for many of the environment wounds that you guys are exploring.
IJ: And I think another huge problem is that many of us don’t have a direct relationship with the environment. We stay in our concrete jungles and do not go out into nature, into the forest, into the wild…and we have such an incredible amount to learn from nature, from plants, from trees. They are incredibly complex and intelligent species, and yet we take them for granted and see them as objects that, as you said, we don’t actually have a relationship with.
So you clearly see the whole system as a problem, was this something that you really tried to incorporate into Old Tree when you set it up?
N: Definitely. And to begin with, we started Old Tree almost as an anarchist brewery, where we didn’t follow the norms of how you set up a business. We were simply producing something and then letting people purchase it from us, on the margins. Our initial way of thinking was that to resist and heal we were not going to play into or buy into the system that we attribute to so many of the wounds that we observe. But in the end we decided that we needed to be more mainstream in order for us to have a bigger impact, and also to evolve as people and evolve the friendship. However, we also wanted to stay true to our roots, which is why we drafted our manifesto which is on our website. For us it was important that we understood our roots and our principles, because we could then drive our project forward with those values in mind.
It’s very tricky getting a feeling that you feel inside yourself down on paper. I believe that everyone feels the pain of the Earth in some shape or form. Even if it is simply that you feel pain in yourself and you are an extension of nature and part of the Earth. There is pain there. We have a pain body, the Earth has a pain body, and we are part of that body. Many of the decisions that we make in the business, we make in light of feeling the pain body of the Earth. I can probably speak for you two as well in saying that our pain bodies are more aligned to the pain body of the Earth, where as many people don’t make that connection. This means that at every turn we encounter obstacles which other businesses don’t encounter, like for example, our vessels. All of our drinks are sold in vessels with swing tops, so that the bottle remains a bottle and can never become a vessel without a top that can’t be reused. We have ceramic swing top lids, and they, relatively speaking, cost a lot of money, but we had to make that purchase because we could not accept following a model which allowed for this much surplus glass in the environment.
IJ: Like all these single use products.
N: Exactly. Now obviously we have paid for brand new bottles, which, somewhere along the line have taken energy to produce, but whatever you do if you’re in commerce, you’re tapping into something that requires energy, it’s just a question of how sustainable and how comfortable you are in accepting that energy going forwards and backwards. So we paid the price in our pain bodies for those 1000 bottles that we created, but we are not continuing the feeling of pain into the future by consistently buying more bottles, because we know that many of these will be reused by customers. It’s a model that works — people still come back with their bottle and refill them. We charge a bottle deposit, so there’s a financial incentive there for them to keep it. It gives the bottles some value.
So that’s an example of a decision that was at once very hard due to the financial commitment, but at the same time very easy because of the emotional element. Our internal compass was very much set on making that decision.
IJ: And in trying to be a business that is sustainable in today’s world it is almost inevitable that you will be making compromises. Even if you’ve decided that a particular choice is the most Earth-friendly, it is still a partial compromise, and you’re having to assess both options and figure out where the balance is, or find the best you can do with the resources available to you, which is not always simple.
N: Exactly. It’s not always simple at all. But if you allow yourself to be guided by the pain body of the Earth, then you might talk about it for hours but you will ultimately arrive at a decision that you knew you were going to arrive at anyway.
IJ: I guess that motivation basically runs through the entire business, and informs all of the decisions that you make, including with regards to production as well.
N: Yes. There are some realities which we have to accept. i.e, to pass food safety we have to have a certain stock of cleaning products which have a lot of petrochemicals in them. So you have to tick boxes and jump through hoops.
IJ: So could you give us an idea of how your desire to be sustainable manifests in practical terms? The certain elements of the business where you have consciously made choices to be as environmentally friendly as possible?
N: Yes, so the swing tops is one example. We also have a solar powered refrigerator, so the way we refrigerate our drinks here is by using the sun’s energy. Again there is obviously a historical input of resources going into that, but going forward we are unwilling to use unsustainable energy. Composting organic waste is another way — we have have a really amazing composter, and it has an output of really nutrient rich compost, which is then a perfect fertiliser for the garden. The garden is another big part of it — we are trying to create a closed loop system where we grow many of the constituent ingredients of our drinks from seed, and are therefore not buying into a supply chain, which would end at us, but would start with someone, somewhere in another part of the country and would use all manner of transport to get here etc. Some things we can’t grow, but the things we can we are trying to. This is important to us because at the end of the day, drink making is a business model where you can close certain loops very easily if you know what you’re doing, and actually it doesn’t take a lot of knowledge to grow something from seed. We’ve planted about 120 trees on this site already, and they’re all fruit bearing trees. So we’re trying to bring the ingredients as close to the source as possible which not only lowers emissions but also if you can pick something fresh then it is ultimately going to be better for your body as well. It does not get more nutritious than something that you’ve just picked. You have to see the body as something that is made up of what you put into it, and it’s simple — if you’re not putting the right things into it, then you will not have a healthy body. And if you don’t have a healthy body, then the world doesn’t have a healthy body, you know? You’re a sick person who then requires treatment, and the health care in this country is centred on pharmaceuticals which then extends to resources being used etc.
IJ: I think you also don’t have the health to be in the right mindset. A lot of nutritious eating is based on plants and vegetables and I think you end up having more of a connection with your food that way. When you have a close connection with your food, you then understand the whole system much better. You understand how related your health is to the health of the Earth, because if our soil is all depleted we simply can’t grow nutrient rich foods.
N: Exactly, exactly. So another thing we have is our rickshaw. We have a battery assisted, pedal powered trike, which we haven’t actually got on the road yet. We obviously have to distribute what we’re making, and so far we have been using a diesel powered van, and that obviously can’t go on for much longer because it’s hurting us and the world. So imagine a battery assisted tuk tuk but loaded with amazing drinks! And obviously we can charge that battery from our solar panels, so that’s another closed loop.
Also the way we heat our fermentation room is via the heat exchange from our freezers. Our freezers are currently full of bananas that we intercepted from a fruit and vegetable man who was about to chuck them away, that we then skinned and we now sell them in our ice cream. So our freezers are in use both in the sense that they are helping to keep things fresh, and because they are heating the room and helping some of our drinks ferment at the right temperature.
IJ: Do you do a lot of intercepting food?
N: We don’t do as much as we used to, just because some of our drinks no longer require it. It’s for our raw juices mainly, which we don’t pasteurize but freeze instead which maintains a lot of the nutrients. So we definitely do intercept food, but partly because we’ve been so busy with setting up the cafe here at Field Brighton, we haven’t had much of a chance to do much recently. Our main interception is gleaning from farms and orchards — rather than getting loads of exotic fruits and vegetables that have come from around the world, it’s actually a lot nicer to go to a farm or orchard and glean them ourselves. Last year we went to an orchard in Somerset and got 1000 liters of apple juice which we’ve fermented into cider and is now available to buy. That was from an orchard where the cider producer who normally takes the apples didn’t want them, so they reached out to us and we went and harvested the apples that were otherwise going to fall on the orchard floor and not be used, over 3 days. They were all organic apples as well.
There is a slight problem now because I suppose we’re becoming more focused on health and wellbeing, that the idea of intercepting a load of fruit which is covered in pesticides isn’t so appealing. Again, it’s where you choose your battle really. For example, what the Real Junk Food Project are doing is amazing, but there are some people that wouldn’t want to eat that food because it’s not organic. We’re not by any means an exclusively organic producer, because we recognise the importance of using surplus food, however, our ideal scenario would be to go and pick the ingredients from the farms themselves, even if they weren’t fully organic. So they may not be optimal for the body, but to see them going to waste is worse.
IJ: I also just wanted to ask whether you consider yourself to be a particularly spiritual person?
N: Definitely! 100%.
IJ: And are you religious in any way? Or how does your spirituality manifest?
N: I’m not religious in a prescribed monolithic sense. I have had experiences which were, I would say, deeply deeply spiritual. I believe in an intelligence, in a power which is so plainly obvious that none of us can actually access it, but it’s still there. That’s the thing that actually gives us life force, and I take a lot of inspiration from prescribed scripture, Buddhism in particular, but I am by no means a Buddhist. I think that what a lot of religions do is say the same thing but under a different rubric, and I suppose I’ve created my own religion aided by scripture and aided by a willingness to slow down, turn off and look inside myself.
IJ: Mmm. I think it’s actually a gift of our time that our generation has really been able to create our own spirituality and our own religion, which isn’t a traditional form of religion but in some ways incorporates all of them.
N: Yes. And I actually love religion, I just think it’s unfortunate how it’s practiced in many ways. Religion in it’s “official” sense, is not really religion at all, it’s politics.
IJ: And do you think that being a spiritual person is something that has enabled you to connect deeply with the Earth?
N: Definitely. Absolutely 100%. Which is why I think that if we were all open to, and allowed to be, more spiritual then the world would look very different.
This is a sample story from Inherited:Brighton, a combination of magazine and journal that aims to provide the tools and inspiration to help you cultivate a deeper connection to nature. Read another sample story here, or visit www.inheritedjournal.com to pre-order a copy today.
