There are not only seven types of rain in Belfast, as the saying goes, but seemingly seven separate weather systems that all converge daily upon this corner of Northern Ireland. On this early-winter afternoon, we’re experiencing several at once. Sunlight, perpetually at eye level at this latitude, slants through darkened thunderheads; a faint mist sprinkles the verdant kale, lettuce, and chard as we tenderly pinch leaves from stalks. 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?”
You believe it could when it’s coming from her, as she bubbles with genuine enthusiasm and radiates childlike wonder. 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. The two host multi-course dinners with a side of history, as well as cooking and brewing workshops. They also invite small volunteer armies to help transform their home, garden, and events center into a self-sustaining ecosystem and grassroots hub for gastronomic joy.
In a way, the whole thing started with beer. When the two were married in 2010, “Erin did commit, in front of everybody, to supporting me in my crazy endeavors, including starting a microbrewery,” Facer grins. The original vision for what would become The Edible Flower was a gastropub, one where they would grow their own ingredients. Little did they know, over a decade later, how much that seed would sprout.
As we shovel the rich, black compost the whole system revolves around, Facer tells me how they hope to inspire a movement. “We want to grow vegetables, but we want those vegetables to have a ripple effect on everything,” she says. “Growing stuff is the same as making compost is the same as making beer. You’re using yeast, fungi, microbes, and microorganisms, the sun and the rain, and creating an environment; you’re nudging things towards something, and then this magic happens.”
Their goal is to teach others to make things themselves, from brewing to plant-centered meals, and even to start their own farms. As women—and as a visibly queer couple in the straight-male-dominated fields of farming, food, and beer—they’re nudging the industries and their communities toward empowerment and inclusivity, making the whole journey joyful.
In September 2011, on the eve of her 29th birthday, Facer had a mission: drink 1,000 different beers. The challenge was first posed by a colleague during after-work drinks, though it was quickly downgraded to 500 beers in a year for practical reasons. She and Bunting, then living in London, were feeling creatively unfulfilled in their careers—Facer as a systems engineer, Bunting in arts management—and already dreaming of leaving it all behind.
London’s craft beer scene was still developing then, and finding new beers required real effort. “It really pushed me out of my comfort zone in terms of styles,” Facer says. “I’d literally go into a pub and be like, ‘Right, had that, had that, had that—what have you got in your fridges? Anything down in the back? Whatever it is, I’ll try that one.’”
“Growing stuff is the same as making compost is the same as making beer. You’re using yeast, fungi, microbes, and microorganisms, the sun and the rain, and creating an environment; you’re nudging things towards something, and then this magic happens.”
Bunting, always up for a good challenge—in 2021, she made 50 different dumplings—joined in, often helping Facer finish pints. They made notes and incorporated food pairings, noticing the strong or subtle shifts in flavor or experience when the two came together. “It made me think differently about the whole world of food and taste and how you describe flavors,” Facer says. Soon, they began experimenting with more formalized food and beer pairings, seeking these experiences in their international travels.
As they share their backstory, we’re sharing beers I brought back from a sojourn to Scotland: a funky, fruited Saison and a big, bold English Barleywine blend. They tell me how they met while attending Cambridge University; Facer began homebrewing four years later, inspired by a friend’s stag party at a brewery.
“I saw how simple the process could be, and became more and more obsessed with doing this at home,” Facer says. Bunting recalls, with raised eyebrows, the stacks of metalware and piles of steaming grain that once packed their East London flat, “turning the place into a sauna,” she chuckles. “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. The trick is to see the complete system, she says; how one part affects the whole. “Anyone can do it if you keep excellent records, vary things one by one in a controlled manner … and try to understand what’s going on,” explains Facer. “Every time I was brewing, I was reflectively testing the limits, watching how my actions affect the end result.”
In September 2012, Facer turned 30 and drank her 500th beer. The next month, she and Bunting quit their jobs and spent 10 months in Southeast Asia cooking, eating, and drinking, what they call the “test run” for quitting for good. In Vietnam they drank Bia Hoi, or “fresh beer,” brewed daily by households and restaurants, served streetside and often free with meals. On that trip, inspired by the food and beer they were enjoying, they committed to starting a new life with homegrown food and beer at the center.
They returned to desk jobs in 2013, but not for long. 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. From the beginning, education was on the menu. “No one would leave the supper club without knowing how to brew beer,” Facer says.
In 2015, Bunting enrolled full-time in Ballymaloe Cookery School in County Cork, Ireland: a sustainable farm, culinary school, restaurant, and hotel where almost everything is produced on site, an inspiration for their future homestead. She then worked as a chef at a charity-run café serving a sizable South Asian immigrant community, which hosted workshops for growing, cooking, and creative arts, underscoring the value of local involvement and education for the pair. In 2016, they quit their jobs for the final time, pooled savings and inheritance to purchase their property in Northern Ireland, and The Edible Flower was born.
They paid themselves nothing and operated at a loss the first year, then only taking the equivalent of an £8,000 ($9,700) annual salary each. Six years in, the profit and loss ratio has finally flipped, albeit modestly. But the goal isn’t gains or expansion. “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. Bunting sips her dark-red Saison, grins, and finishes her wife’s sentence: “And serving it with love and merriment!”
Today, there are even more shades of green in the rolling countryside that surrounds Bunting and Facer’s property than there are types of rain: sage and moss, hunter and olive, forest and mint, jade and chartreuse. They live in a royal-blue farmhouse with their sandy-haired twins—dressed in complementary-color peacoats and matching Wellington boots—and a giant orange cat named Gilbert. Until a remodel in spring 2022, it was also where they hosted events, preparing everything in their home kitchen, where I had a chance to help behind the scenes.
It’s impossible, really, to believe this is their actual life. A snapshot of any scene in their homestead ends up looking like a page earnestly ripped from an L.L. Bean catalog. Their aesthetic reflects their backgrounds in art and architecture: the abstract feminine works adorning accent walls; their Irish-countryside-meets-Camden-thrift-store attire; the tables sweetly laid with candles, blooms, and bundles of herbs; the platings of vibrant vegetables garnished, of course, with edible flowers.
But no matter how busy things get, I never see them lose their cool, even during their delicate ballet of stirring and basting, roasting and tasting, seasoning and plating. Their partnership seems rooted in mutual respect and admiration, evidenced in the way they look out for each other; sparkling in stolen glances I catch when I peer up from my meticulous salad-layering.
“The ambiance there is so magical, no matter what season. You feel like you’re in another world, even though it’s just outside the city. Part of that is the physical environment, but a big part is just the energy they radiate. You feel like you’re going to dinner at your best mate’s house. You’re in their home, and it’s a kind of holiness.”
The kitchen smells of perpetual autumn, savory and slightly spiced, air hung with the yeasty sweetness of something freshly baked. This is Bunting’s domain, and she greets me with a warm, ruddy smile, plastic-frame glasses perched on the tip of her nose and wearing a brightly flowered apron. I marvel at her multitasking as she stirs and lifts lids over a stove with all four burners going simultaneously, saucepans holding broths, stews, poaches, and, of course, dumplings.
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. Menus include up to a dozen courses of complex dishes made with simple ingredients from their rapidly expanding smallholding. 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. Noble’s organization hosts events, meetups, and a beer school to increase accessibility and offer safe space for women in Northern Ireland’s beer scene.
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). She found kindred spirits in Bunting and Facer, who were early members, and has attended several supper clubs, which she describes as an unparalleled experience.
“The ambiance there is so magical, no matter what season. You feel like you’re in another world, even though it’s just outside the city,” Noble says. “Part of that is the physical environment, but a big part is just the energy they radiate. You feel like you’re going to dinner at your best mate’s house. You’re in their home, and it’s a kind of holiness.”
It’s an accessible way, she adds, for even less adventurous eaters to discover new dishes, drinks, and flavors from all over the world. Guests also learn important concepts like sustainability and provenance in a warm, engaging environment, sharing pints around the fire pit with strangers who become friends. “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. You don’t get that from a restaurant.”
In spring 2022, a large stone granary and outbuilding on the property were transformed into a big, bright commercial kitchen and event space. 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. But the greatest transformation has come through local involvement. Simultaneously with the remodel, they started their CSA scheme. “The community-building element has been amazing,” Bunting says.
Unlike typical CSA arrangements, where people simply purchase a vegetable box, they build monthly “Farm and Feast Saturdays” into their subscriptions. Members are invited to spend a few hours helping with everything from planting, harvesting, and making compost to constructing garden beds in the brand-new polytunnel. Along the way, there are food demos, snacks, and informational sessions, and at the end, participants are treated to a decadent lunch prepared by Bunting. (Members get a weekly veg box and freedom to forage from the nascent “food forest” of herbs, fruit, nuts, leaves, and flowers.)
They host regular volunteer days with the public, and crops now sprawl beyond the original garden into the surrounding fields. Like the sold-out supper clubs, many volunteers return regularly. It’s a spirit they hope to replicate in their future microbrewery, where they’re considering a co-op or social enterprise structure. The goal is to set up something manageable and profitable without too much expansion, selling beer yet serving as a hub for education and community involvement.
“[E]ven if people never brew, I think that experience of seeing the process changes how you appreciate beer. It’s the same as growing vegetables. If you can change the way people think in a delicious and fun way, that awareness-raising is important.”
“I always thought that for a brewery to be successful at a small scale, there had to be a reason for it to be small-scale. 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. “I knew it had to be linked to a place and fundamentally limited in its ability to scale, due to its specialness and its connection to the land.”
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. Yet it’s entirely her own, reflective of the little ecosystem she and Bunting have created: the things that grow from the ground and the people who put them there. She brews whenever inspiration strikes and time allows, as often as three times a week and as infrequently as every few months. 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. “Whether you’re brewing 40 liters or 40,000 liters, brewing takes about a day. So it’s obviously more efficient to do big brews … but we don’t want to do that. It’s a good thing to be small; it’s something that we value and want to maintain.”
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. It’s also decidedly queer—bold yet tasteful, inverting the expected, harmonizing seemingly contradictory elements as part of an interconnected community.
“It’s big and hairy and has beautiful little delicate, five-pointed, blue star-shaped flowers. The bees love it, and it smells amazingly of cucumber,” Facer adds. “As you brush past it in the garden, if you don’t get stung by the bees buzzing all over the flowers, you get amazing wafts of this refreshing cucumber scent. Each year I do a brew using borage tips, and use that mainly instead of aroma hops. … It’s a nice, summery, refreshing Ale.”
“Borage would be classically used in England, particularly … as a garnish for Pimm’s, which often has cucumber chopped into it,” Bunting says. “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. Starting your own farm from scratch after a career as a London engineer, it turns out, is easier than selling beer commercially in Northern Ireland. There is a fixed number of licenses available for pub and off-license businesses in the country, and the only way to obtain a new license is from another business that is closing, called the “surrender principle.” This scarcity means licenses cost an average £100,000—and large retailers snatch most of them up.
The alternative, the local producers license, only allows alcohol producers to open 104 times per year from 4 to 10 p.m., selling only their own beverages. The cost of opening and running a brewery under these restrictions is prohibitive for most; it also prevents multiple brewers from sharing space, or even selling guest and collaboration beers. The result is that most small, independent brewers simply have no outlet for selling their own beer directly to customers. The current legislation, implemented July 2022, is actually an improvement: former laws prevented breweries and distilleries from selling or even sampling to customers on-site. But it still falls far short, and like many brewers, the pair are hopeful laws will further change.
The craft beer industry itself is still in its infancy in Northern Ireland; today, there are only 34 breweries, and most beer spaces are dominated by men. Many BWBC members had been wanting to homebrew, but didn’t feel comfortable going to shops to try and find out, or didn’t even necessarily know what questions to ask, Noble says. 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.
“What a legacy,” Noble says. “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. The event is intended for first-time homebrewers or beginners who “want to take the next step to full mash.” Facer gathers ingredients ahead of time and washes up after, so the focus is on knowledge and enjoyment.
“If you know the story behind something, it makes it taste different,” Facer says. “So many people say, ‘I hate beer. 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.”
Everyone leaves with an instructional booklet for brewing, and many guests return with their own homebrews in tow. “But even if people never brew, I think that experience of seeing the process changes how you appreciate beer,” Facer says. “It’s the same as growing vegetables. If you can change the way people think in a delicious and fun way, that awareness-raising is important.”
The first post-pandemic brewing workshop, held on October 22, 2022, saw 18 attendees of varying experience levels learn to make a 40-pint batch of West Coast Session IPA while exploring tasting and pairing. The day packed in brewing information with six beer and food matches illustrative of their journey, including the likes of apple and sage sorbet with Winter Borage Pale Ale; mapo dofu with Winter Savoury Ale; and chocolate and rye brownies with Porter. Ticket sales were opened to the BWBC in advance, before the general public had a chance to snatch them up.
That’s because the point is to celebrate the variety of life, which includes bringing new people in. Of all the projects volunteers helped create, the couple’s favorite is the rainbow mural that graces the hilltop. They smile describing how members brought their families during Pride month to paint the mural that symbolizes all they stand for. The two even wrote a book that chronicles their philosophy and the practice of growing, cooking, and eating edible flowers, which will be published in March 2023.
Maybe their brewery could change the world, I think, as the rain begins again and I head inside with my harvest. After all, something happens on a neurological level when hands are plunged into soil; when seeds nestle in compost and their bounty is shaken from its subterranean slumber. 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. “It’s about celebrating a polyculture over a monoculture, and everything that is brilliant and different.”
Words by Holly ReganPhotos by Sharon Cosgrove
