The Smell of the Mash

Fewer towns these days have a big brewery belching out the scent of hot, wet barley, and that's a shame.

I spread Marmite on my toast (wholemeal, the best toast for Marmite) and as it melts into the butter I am taken to the paving slabs of an Edinburgh street, a thin rain falling as the winter wind brings a warming and familiar scent my way. Sweet and yet deeply savoury, an edge of bitter roast. The smell of breweries and distilleries is the smell of winter, to me.

In Luthermuir, the fields would be covered by used mash from the Fettercairn distillery. On frosty mornings from the school bus I saw steam rising from the piles of spent grain as they continued rotting and fermenting on the stubble, and wondered what it would be like to plunge my chilly hands into them. The smell was sometimes overwhelming, a sickly, vegetable earthiness, like oatcakes being baked alongside a stock pot over-simmering.

The smell of breweries has followed me around all my life. Growing up near Lancaster while the Mitchell Brewery was still in operation gave me a weekly dose of stewing malt while we shopped in town on a Saturday. I could never tell if I liked the smell or if it made me sick — the stickiness of it seemed to stay inside my nostrils long after we’d gone back home. Now, I’m more likely to smell hot barley from the animal feeds factory down the road as I walk along the boggy fields near my house, the scent mingling with oats, linseed and earthy vegetables as they’re processed into sheep nuts.

But in Edinburgh, that’s where the smell is most evocative. Tall tenements and chimneys still look as though they should be shrouded in the soot of the industrial age — their former residents would have smelled this too. Their beer and their whisky being made just around the corner.

Come to my workshop!

It’s more important than ever, I think, to start taking our work off social media and to start keeping our own personal blogs or newsletters.

If you’ve been struggling to keep up a blog you started some months/years ago, or you’re finding it hard to think of topics to write about during this time of upheaval and confusion — please come along.

If you made it your aim for 2025 to create a blog or newsletter to work on your writing and share your experiences and thoughts but you’ve not quite got round to it yet — please come along.

If you’re already a blogger but you’re looking for more inspiration and confidence to keep you going — please come along.

When is it?

Wednesday 25 January at 6.30pm

Where is it?

It’s online

How much is it?

It is £20 to book your place. You can do so here.

All I want is to share my experience with writers, and get more people creating work about topics they care about. Obviously, my primary areas of expertise are in drinks and food writing, but if you are hoping to create a blog outside of these topics, you are still welcome! It will still be relevant!

In order to help make writing more accessible, there are a couple of free places available for those who cannot afford the fee. Please get in touch with me directly to discuss.

I hope to see you there xox