Well, 2025 has got off to a pretty swift start. As the early spring flowers start to unfurl and reveal themselves, I’m looking out of the taproom window on a sunny Sunday and wondering where the time has gone! Glancing across at the new growth and the beginning of another cycle calms me though. Having passed the temporal landmark of the vernal equinox my mind is turning to thoughts of getting out to the reliable foraging spots and seeing what’s on offer that is waking from a long winter slumber.

I’ve been reading The Gallows Pole recently, a historic fiction account of the rise and fall of the Cragg Vale Coiners. They were a pretty ruthless bunch of Yorkshire folk led by one “King” David Hartley, who, from the atmospheric, rolling moorlands and shadowy valleys of the Calder Valley managed to attract the attention of King George III through the treasonous act of coin ‘clipping’ and almost completely capsized the British economy!

While it is a captivating story, I’m not suggesting that we have another go at crippling the British economy, rather, having grown up in the Calder Valley and walking some of the same shadowy and seemingly barren lands of Bell House Moor, Turvin Clough, Blackstone Edge and beyond, it’s amazing to realise how abundant and plentiful those lands are with edible plants, roots, herbs, fruits and more!

Some of this bounty would have supplemented the Coiners and their families in both lean times and abundant. Dock pudding, for example, was a staple. This combination of bistort leaves (dock), nettles, oats and onions, usually cooked in bacon fat or dripping, provided a very cheap yet nutritionally and calorically dense foodstuff to bulk up meals. Interestingly, since 1970 there has been an annual World Dock Pudding Championship held in Mytholmroyd Village Community Centre, where locals (and the occasional out-of-towner, including Robbie Coltrane, who won second place in 2007) pit their dock puddings head to head for a chance to claim the trophy and continue the legacy of this humble, yet noble, ancient dish.

Having grown up with such wholesome examples of foraging used in a very palpable, community focused way, they have inspired a love of foraging for ingredients to use in beer that are a little more unusual. Some of these ingredients may need a bit of explanation as to how or why they fit with our ethos and our beers too. In that vein, this year we’re going to be trying to weave a little bit more of a narrative into our foraged beers.

One of the main projects we’ve been working on is a collaboration with University of Salford Graphic Design students. We’ve named it Land & Lore and it is shaping up to be a really interesting project in which students use British folklore and historical brewing inspiration to illustrate and contextualise a range of six beers which will showcase ancient herbal additions to ale which would have been used in gruit. Gruit refers to a mix of herbs, dried leaves, stalks, seeds, flowers and more that would have been used to flavour the ales of yesteryear before the advent and popularisation of exclusively hopped beer. These ingredients are still abundant and with a little knowledge and some pointers from history we’re going to be exploring five different gruit ingredients. We will be using a single base beer, splitting it into six parts and will infuse the five individual ingredients into those portions with the sixth beer infused with a combination of all five ingredients together in one beer. In this way we can focus in on each foraged ingredient and compare that with how they work together in the sixth beer. As well as a release at the taproom, we will be running foraging walks to show you where these plants can be found and how to identify them. Once you’ve gained this knowledge, hopefully you can add an extra layer of enjoyment to your regular walks too.

Another project idea in the pipeline is trying to create a drinkable landscape. Focussing our attention on a particular area and taking ingredients from that landscape to invoke a sense of place through flavour. The first thought sprung from reading about the bleak moorland of the upper Calder Valley where millstone grit and swathes of heather and bilberry bushes sit close to the peated earth, with islands of rowan at the edge of oak, ash and hazel spreading from pockets of clough woodland in the shaded, steep sided valleys carved deeper by copper-coloured brooks and streams.

Finally, a project that may take a little longer still and is a pretty ambitious one: to focus entirely on the different parts of the oak tree, a cornerstone of British natural heritage and our particular brewing techniques. The barrels, made from oak, form a vessel in which we can facilitate our visions and projects through fermentation and ageing but what else can we use from the oak tree? Acorns, bark, leaves, sap…. How wonderful it would be to explore the flavours of the oak tree in all it’s different forms and how remarkable that all of this can come from something so small and unassuming as the humble acorn.

So far in our foraging expeditions we've been able to learn a lot. As we develop our processes and methods of imparting flavours from the wild into our similarly untamed beers we have become more confident and more adventurous as a result. The rabbit hole continues ever deeper and more complex as we explore what's available locally, seasonally and what has been used in beer historically.

Exploration of all kinds keeps us excited and motivated here at Balance. Flavour, process, folklore, history, culture and beyond. With so many ideas and ways to infuse those ideas into a tangible, drinkable product to spark discussion and conversation, we want to continue to surprise and tantalize the tastebuds of those who trust us in our sometimes nebulous, often quirky but always interesting experiments in beer.

Stay funky,

Will