Microorganisms and Magic — Jo Facer and Erin Bunting in Saintfield, Northern Ireland
Jo Facer is beaming with her characteristic sideways smile, a strand of brown hair perpetually escaping the pile pinned atop her head, cheeks flushed with cold and excitement as she breathes: “What if a brewery could change the world?”
Facer is half of the wife-and-wife team behind The Edible Flower: a seven-acre smallholding, supper club, and community-supported agriculture (CSA) scheme in Saintfield, Northern Ireland, two miles outside of Belfast.
Facer, as farmer and brewer, supplies spouse Erin Bunting, the chef, with bountiful produce and beer.
“It really pushed me out of my comfort zone in terms of styles,” Facer says.
“It made me think differently about the whole world of food and taste and how you describe flavors,” Facer says.
“I saw how simple the process could be, and became more and more obsessed with doing this at home,” Facer says.
“But it was just magical, the whole process,” Facer adds.
“Once I’d made my favorite drink out of grain, it was like, ‘I’ve got to keep doing this.’” Bunting says Facer has a natural talent, never having made a bad batch, while Facer, with typical British self-effacement, waves it off as more science than art.
In Vietnam they drank Bia Hoi, or “fresh beer,” brewed daily by households and restaurants, served streetside and often free with meals.
On evenings and weekends, the couple began hosting supper clubs out of the East London flat that doubled as Facer’s brewhouse: packing guests around an extended dining table, focusing on beer pairings, and often featuring Southeast Asian dishes.
“No one would leave the supper club without knowing how to brew beer,” Facer says.
“It’s about sourcing great ingredients, knowing what you’re doing and [preparing] it well, making it beautifully familiar and comforting, but also a little bit surprising,” says Facer.
Her food is inspired by their travels and links past to present: resurrecting Irish history through “An Ode to the Humble Turnip”; pairing Vietnamese dumplings with Facer’s fresh beer; or fundraising for Ukraine through a supper club featuring that country’s cuisine.
Supper clubs are their main event, and most feature beer; they’re so popular that ticket sales are announced to fans days in advance, and sell out within hours.Building something like this from the ground up is no easy feat, says Jenn Noble, coordinator of the Belfast Women’s Beer Collective (BWBC), and it speaks volumes about the community’s thirst for what they do, and the uniqueness of their offerings.
When the group was founded in 2016, the same year as The Edible Flower, “We found very quickly that there were a lot of women who were interested in craft beer and wanted to learn more, but didn’t know where to go or what to do,” she says (there are now 540 members).
You feel like you’re in another world, even though it’s just outside the city,” Noble says.
You’re in their home, and it’s a kind of holiness.”
“You walk in and there are tables full of people you don’t know,” she says, “but at the end, it feels like people you’ve known for years.
This has given the couple much-needed work-life separation while facilitating “lots of reasons for people to physically come here: to eat together, shovel compost together, plant garlic together, and brew together,” Facer says.
“The community-building element has been amazing,” Bunting says.
If it was just a generic product, the business pressure would always be to expand, because that is a more efficient way to produce,” Facer says.
Facer’s beer is a broad homage to pre-hop brewing in the British Isles: botanical and balanced, delicate yet complex, using wild herbs, flowers, and plants as the bittering element.
Beers, too, run the gamut of styles and flavors, from Bitter to Belgian Blonde, Märzen to Oatmeal Stout, Irish Red Ale to Fruited Sour.“We want a business plan for the brewery that doesn’t always push us to get bigger,” Facer says.
Facer and Bunting’s shared ethos is encapsulated by an edible flower: borage, a botanical that grows across Europe and is rooted in drinks history.
“We also like to pick borage flowers in our gin and tonic.”When The Edible Flower began, the plan had been to organize supper clubs and workshops around beer and food pairings and sell Facer’s beer there, but licensing laws proved prohibitively onerous.
So in 2019, Bunting and Facer hosted a “Learn to Brew” workshop just for the group, where they made the first of several collaboration beers.“[It] was a fun day in a safe environment with like-minded women,” Noble says.“It made it a lot easier and more accessible for people attending to ask those questions, find out what they need to do, see it in action, and then be able to replicate it for their homes.” Several members became enthusiastic homebrewers as a result; one even grows her own hops.
“People go away with a passion and a new understanding of something that can really enrich their own life and the lives of their friends and family when they share their beer, and I think that’s really powerful.” At these workshops, guests brew a version of a beer Facer has prepared ahead of time so they can taste the finished product, pairing it and other beers with Bunting’s small plates.
“If you know the story behind something, it makes it taste different,” Facer says.
But I love your beer.” Bunting cheerfully pipes in: “Because they’re having a lovely time in a lovely place, and we’ve talked about the process.”
“But even if people never brew, I think that experience of seeing the process changes how you appreciate beer,” Facer says.
It all starts with what comes out and what you put back in.“It’s not only about welcoming diverse people into our lives and celebrating organic growing,” Facer says.