This seminar will include talks by Dr Susan Flavin, Dr Chris Ridout, Dr Joanne Russell and Dr Calum Holmes.
Speaker Bios:
Dr Susan Flavin is an Associate Professor in History at Trinity College Dublin. She is the principal investigator of FoodCult, a five-year interdisciplinary project examining food, culture and identity in early modern Ireland, funded by the European Research Council. Broadly interested in consumption and material culture, she is the author of Consumption and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Ireland: Saffron, Stockings and Silk (Boydell, 2014). Her work is grounded in interdisciplinary approaches to history, and she teaches on topics such as the social and cultural history of food and drink, and material culture in Britain and Ireland. Today she is speaking about her work on the history of beer and brewing and a major experimental project undertaken in 2021 to recreate Tudor beer, using Orkney bere.
Summary:
Dr Susan Flavin will present a talk entitled 'Bere and Brewing History: An Interdisciplinary Approach'. In 2021, after several years of preparation, the team of the ERC FoodCult project recreated a beer last brewed in the sixteenth century. In Ireland and across early modern Europe, beer was integral to social life and a vital source of nutrition. But up to now we have had little sense of what that beer was like, how strong it really was, and how much energy it provided. By reconstructing the recipes, equipment, and techniques used at Dublin Castle four hundred years ago, FoodCult set out to answer these important questions. The project was radically interdisciplinary in approach, bringing together colleagues in a multitude of fields including agronomy, microbiology, brewing science and craft-based historical interpretation. This talk presents an overview of the work and the results, with a focus on the importance of bere to the project.