So my name's Gotti Follis, I'm the brewer and owner here at imagepixene brewery, we're
a very small scale, as you can see, farm brewery in the west of Ramamma here.
We produce small batches of beer, roughly 1,200-300 bottles at a time.
Using a brewery that built myself out of old dairy equipment that we sourced from the local
area here, most of this stuff is old dairy equipment from dairy farmers who have not
found it profitable to be in dairy anymore, so it was a matter of collecting tanks, engineering
them into a small brewery and now we're producing beer on a small scale.
We're picking this bog myrtle here today and we're going to attempt to recreate some
of the flavours that would have been in some of the very old ales brewed before the onset
of hops, hops are relatively modern import before that, beers and ales would have been
made with local herbs that people would have found on the mowers and the countryside around
here and I've no doubt that bog myrtle would have been used in those beers as well, there's
evidence to suggest that the vikings used it and in Scotland it was also used as an
ingredient a long time ago so we're going to make use of these very flavoursome aromatic
male capcans of the bog myrtle plant and we're going to try and get some of that lovely flavour
into our beer. One area of our brew that we're hoping to develop is short run specialty beers
using local ingredients either sourced on the farm here or in the local area such as
the bog myrtle beer that we're trying to develop today. We've got a great range of herbs in
Primana here both on the farm and up in the up in the Moorlands which we hope to make
use of over the next year to do one of small run specialty beers.
Bog myrtle is a very aromatic herb that grows in upland areas bogland in Primana, it's a
very common herb in Primana here and we're hoping to try and get some of that aroma and
flavour into the beer. I started brewing really at university as many students do, making
a bit of home brew. I was up in the north west of England and there are a lot of really
good real oils from that area and that sort of got my curiosity and beer started. I came
back here to the farm in about 2002 and we immediately started looking for farm diversification
ideas because we're a small 30 acre farm, it's not really viable from the agricultural
point of view so we started brewing 20 litre batches in the kitchen here on the farm which
we managed to trial in the local market and in the scale. It was a pale ale blonde ale
which is very well received by the local population here and that encouraged us to go on ahead
and try and up scale our efforts. So we moved up to 100 litre brewery and finally we're
up now to our four bar plant here. I suppose the idea of our beer is that we're giving
people a choice which they haven't really had in the past. Ireland's beer market's
been dominated by a few big players for a long long time and what we do is produce beer on
a small scale with very very good ingredients that we know the problem is of. No artificial
additives whatsoever is this completely natural beer, it's bottle conditioned which means
that the carbonation is derived from the yeast in the bottle so there's absolutely no chemical
input of any type into our beer and as a result you get a very full flavored unfiltered character
for the beer and I think that's a great alternative to a lot of the mass produced beers that are
on the market which although very drinkable you could argue that they're a bit bland so
we're giving people a bit more taste, a bit more flavour and a bit more goodness in their
beer. So today we've picked some bog myrtle from the local hills here in West Fermanagh.
I've brought it back to the brewery here, I've put it in a mortar and pestle and tried
to crush it up a bit to release a bit of that aromatic flavour from the herb. We've put
that in what is essentially a big tea bag and placed that within that keg of quite bland
non hoppy beer so we're going to let the flavour infuse into the beer over a period of time
and we've got a special location where we're going to do this, it's actually a local limestone
cave not far from here and we're going to put the keg in the cave because the environment
within the cave is very very stable, it's at a perfect temperature of about 9 or 10 degrees
all year round and that will be the ideal environment to let this beer mature, let the
flavours and the aromas of the bog myrtle infuse into the beer and we may leave that
down there for up to 6 months and then crack it open during the summer and we'll see what
we've got.
