I think a lot of people fancy giving up an office job and becoming a maker of something (gin/bread/coffee etc)

Neighbour across the road has been doing this for years. She got made redundant from the MRC IIRC and set up Bread on a bike making sourdough bread. Just does small batches in her kitchen, used to deliver by bike then Arthritis got in the way, so now people just collect from her front door.

About Me

I wanna do something like that but she’s doing it with a home oven 😳

Must take forever.

IMO artisanal almost always means more expensive & nowt special.

i had a custom mountain bike frame that wasn’t a particularly good mountain bike. i was disappointed with that.

edit: i now have a mountain bike made in small batches by artisans and it’s great.

There’s a builder in my village who has the word artisanal written on his van, somewhat randomly too. My wife spotted it, it’s hilarious as he’s just a distinctly average brickie.
We have a nice local brewery, Mantle, whose beer I like but he doesn’t use the dreaded A word thankfully, kiss of death!
Some friends have a reasonably successful gin distillery nearby. I think their gin is rank and when they introduced their artisan vinegar I definitely ROFL’d!
I like lavazza espresso ground coffee and am quite happy with Hendricks gin but I’m rather uncouth and appreciate size over quality!

I do agree with that to an extent, but there has to be some value for money and the claim ‘when they have been grown sustainably and picked/processed by people being paid a fair wage etc’ is often not substantiated (or even claimed) by the sellers.

Taking the example of coffee the trend is for ‘artisan’ or specialty roasters in the UK make a point of giving loads of info about the specific farms where the beans come from, and notes about environmental/sustainability practices, and are transparent about how much they pay farmers – typically well above fair trade rates.

Maybe doesn’t apply so much in other industries I don’t know, but buying anything with a transparent supply chain where buyers can build relationships with producers is much more likely to end up involving better pay/conditions etc.

We have a load of artisan stuff around that we see, being around Bristol and Bath, some nice, some not so nice, but it’s just down to my personal tastes, only thing i’m not a fan of is ‘artisan’ that’s not exactly what you see, so those who buy in the stuff, or have it made in mass for several things, including the artisan range.

Only thing that puts me off a lot of it is price, but that’s not their fault to be fair, couple of places in Bath sell loads to tourists and visitors, so they look like they’re doing well and getting buyers to buy at those prices, i’m just cheap i guess.

Artisanal chutneys / relish and jams.
Some are okay – but generally they are over-priced and rubbish
Biscuits / cookies – tasted great in the makers kitchen but ….

Lmao this thread is so post-pandemic (yes it’s still raging) anxiousness.

I agree lots of crap.

But way more mass produced crap in circulation.

Coffee yes a bug bear of mine. Never consistent.

Chutneys are an utter waste of time and are basically easy to make, market and store for the seller.

Artisanal chutneys / relish and jams.
Some are okay – but generally they are over-priced and rubbish

This. Not that many variables with jams. Only exception I’ll make is gooseberry jam – it’s hard to buy in shops but I really like it so buy it when available from hipsters.

Pickles tend to be very well served by the Baxters / Shaws etc of this world. Even Branston pickle does the job.

My wife was given some artisan soap for Christmas – but she doesn’t use soap so gave it to me to use.

Lovely smell, but lasted about 4 rubs around the sack, crack and armpits and poof it was gone! Never seen a bar of soap disappear so fast! 🙂

Don’t drink beer but I’ve had some stunning ” Artisan” cheese which, in my opinion, is well worth the extra money .

There’s another thread for those not predisposed to moaning, you know! But I actually do agree on the cheese front.

Troll thread of the decade 😆 Coffee, beer,cheese and even the local butchers. Well done, you’ve included all of us, and should get a fair old singsong 😆

Thanks. But I must point out that while I brought the beer and coffee, but you guys added the cheese & meat. No one has mentioned a disappointing log burner or VW T5 yet though.

We have 2 farm shops locally, 1 is wildly popular, hideously expensive and just sells overpriced groceries as far as I can tell, although the butchers does make their own sausages/do traditional butcher stuff, but the last batch my wife bought were inedibly peppery. I think they make most of their money off selling overpriced pepper-sausages to the local wish-we-had-a-waitrose crowd.

The other sells a few other bits and bobs, but is mostly about the butchers, the meat is almost all raised on the farm and while not cheap, is usually very fresh, and they can cut it any which way you like. I think they make most of their money from selling to restaurants. You can even go and see the little piglets and give them a stroke a few weeks before they meet their end. For some people its a bit weird but at least my kids are under no illusions as to where their food comes from.

I know which I prefer!

I wonder if the problem is that these small businesses are too small to be able to fail i.e. if they make a bad batch of their product then they can’t afford to chuck it and start again so they sell it even if they’re not 100% happy.

For me, I want an artisanal product to be better than a mass produced product and better than something I can make myself. I think the threshold can vary a lot depending on the product and my (or your) own abilities to make the item yourself.

Jams are tricky as the market is used to stuff from the supermarket slammed full of sugar and artificial sweeteners

I don’t get this ‘artisanal coffee’ bit. They don’t grow it, they import it, roast it and ship it out. I use a great independent, Hormozi, but as far as I know there’s no value-added from the A word, long beards or leather aprons.

@footflaps @grum

I wanna do something like that but she’s doing it with a home oven 😳

Must take forever.

Me too. Have genuinely considered it (will be unemployed as of March), and I’m obviously not the only one – it’s almost become a cliché in the last couple of years! Have thought of delivering it by bike too, as a bit of a USP/paid exercise.

Doing it in a home kitchen is impressive, and not a very big one either – I found this little film about her: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J-JqqSnpJU
I can’t get my head round the economics and the timings of it though: the ingredients are cheap (but not free), and even ignoring the cost of energy (increasingly unrealistic) and any one-off equipment costs, even at say £4 a loaf (which is about the top end of what a loaf of artisan sourdough sells for, around here at least), you need to bake quite a few loaves to make it worthwhile. With a domestic oven, there’s only so many loaves you can bake at once. She’s obviously making it work though, kudos to her.

Anyway, that was a bit a of a tangent.

There’s a builder in my village who has the word artisanal written on his van, somewhat randomly too

I have a personal policy on “artisan(al)” which is that if you describe yourself/your products as one yourself, you’re/they’re probably not.

I don’t get this ‘artisanal coffee’ bit. They don’t grow it, they import it, roast it and ship it out.

This is true. I suppose the value added is the fact that you can buy recently-roasted beans which is usually* better for freshness vs supermarket beans which will often have been roasted weeks / months earlier. I’m not sure if using local roasters reduces transportation costs / air miles. Perhaps someone else can comment. And yes, I’m aware of the absurdity of worrying about coffee air miles.

*Apparently the ideal time to brew is 10-14 days after roasting.

My beef is with small-batch locally-made expensive products that don’t live up to expectations, not whether they call themselves ‘Artisans’. But yeah, if you self-apply the term it raises alarm bells!

Yep, they roast to order and it’s here in a couple of days and I’m paying about 13 quid a kilo upwards and I’ve seen stuff flagged up on here for 11 quid without indicating a weight on their website so I imagine 250gms. Must be some rich hippies out there.

I don’t get this ‘artisanal coffee’ bit. They don’t grow it, they import it, roast it and ship it out.

Many of the UK quality roasters go out to visit coffee farms and encourage them to grow certain types of beans or encourage sustainable practises, or to dry/process them in a certain way. They are then graded by people who have qualified professionally to be able to discern quality and identify different flavour notes etc. Then they are imported, roasted etc.

It may be too much fancy faff for you but its definitely a real thing and when you get into it you absolutely can tell the difference. You can pay £80 for a 250g bag though which for me is crazy but I’m sure some people out there appreciate it.

She’s obviously making it work though, kudos to her.

Sounds like it could be more of a hobby or something done for mental health etc than a pure commercial business.

Where are you @thenorthwind ? Wanna join forces? 🙂 I’m in Arnside in S Cumbria.

Salt. It all tastes of, well you know, umm, salt.

A new start up near me is producing sea salt. £60/Kg. No ta. A bloke who works there mentioned they were aiming to become like Maldon sea salt. Ok, yes, why not. But theirs is £9/Kg.

Sorry @grum, I’m in Newcastle, but nice idea.

I think you’re right, maybe more of a paid hobby, but at 100 loaves a day, fairly well paid.

Ah well! Didn’t see the 100 loaves a day but 😳 How is that even possible in a home oven. Takes me about 40 mins to bake one 900gm loaf.

Sorry for the digression folks!

No idea! She mentioned 100 loaves a day in the video (not every day I assume). She’s doing 6 at a time, 3 per shelf, rotating them from top to bottom. She says she only bakes them for 30 minutes, whereas I do mine closer to an hour. They might be slightly smaller loaves, but she’s obviously got really good structure in her dough because they’re not spreading at all in baking, hence they all fit without touching.

Yeah, sorry, we should probably revive the sourdough thread (or at least one of them).

Doing it in a home kitchen is impressive, and not a very big one either – I found this little film about her: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J-JqqSnpJU
I can’t get my head round the economics and the timings of it though: the ingredients are cheap (but not free), and even ignoring the cost of energy (increasingly unrealistic) and any one-off equipment costs, even at say £4 a loaf (which is about the top end of what a loaf of artisan sourdough sells for, around here at least), you need to bake quite a few loaves to make it worthwhile. With a domestic oven, there’s only so many loaves you can bake at once. She’s obviously making it work though, kudos to her.

I think also they cost more than £4 (this is Cambridge, everything costs more). I can’t remember exactly as we’ve not bought one for ages (don’t eat bread much).

I suspect, like a lot of us her age her mortgage (if she still has one) is tiny, so you don’t need a big wage. She also works one or two days a week at a local museum.

She mentioned 100 loaves a day in the video (not every day I assume)

Yep she only bakes once or two a week, you place an order on, say Tuesday, and collect your load on Thursday.

She might have two domestic ovens, can’t recall. Her original one died and I remember her replacing that one (she lives opposite) and I think she said she had a second one.

A new start up near me is producing sea salt. £60/Kg. No ta. A bloke who works there mentioned they were aiming to become like Maldon sea salt. Ok, yes, why not. But theirs is £9/Kg

That’s outrageous. We buy salt for cheesemaking (PDV) at £5.00 for a 25kg bag!

I remember when “Artisnal” (before the word was invented) was just supporting the independent guy, now it’s become a byword for charging 5 times as much for someones hobby output that just becomes some sort of bragging right.

Also, their life story has to be some sort of selling point – “we came up with our personalised bag-for-life business while trekking up Machu Picchu where we had a spiritual awakening having met a talking donkey who crafted his own cheese from crushed ladybird dreams”

In central America many coffee growers aren’t waiting for the next Epicurian hipster to turn up and tell them how it should be done. They’re trying to produce the best they can in that environment whilst having to deal with the incessant and varying demands of the local mafia. This £80 stuff must be coming from elsewhere or someone’s leg is being pulled.

I believe the most expensive stuff is normally Gesha or Geisha which originally comes from Ethiopia.

turn up and tell them how it should be done.

Think it’s more about telling them what quality they would like to buy/what will sell well. I dunno about all of them but I’ve read some of the reports some UK roasters have written about trips to producers and its people who are committed to ethical and sustainable practise building lasting relationships not neo-colonialist hipsters on a jolly giving lectures. I imagine that probably exists though.

Re salt: you can buy special artisanal salt for artisanal sourdough making! Not sure how much if you buy a kilo but it’s £3 for 100g I think which I thought was v expensive!

A new start up near me is producing sea salt. £60/Kg. No ta. A bloke who works there mentioned they were aiming to become like Maldon sea salt. Ok, yes, why not. But theirs is £9/Kg

That’s outrageous. We buy salt for cheesemaking (PDV) at £5.00 for a 25kg bag!

I mean, these weren’t commercial quantities, it was retail packaging. The wonderful design and witty blurb on the back must be worth something. I doubt they have made 25 Kg yet…

Posh products not worth it are always a disappointment, but if you find something good it can be so much better.

Pilot Brewing for a nice IPA, and Unorthodox Wee Stoater for a coffee bean. Luckily both very local to us but do ship, highly recommended both

That’s outrageous. We buy salt for cheesemaking (PDV) at £5.00 for a 25kg bag!

Salt is the cheapest ingredient in the food industry.

With the amount of pink salt there is , I find it hard to believe there is any left in the Himalayas

We have 2 farm shops locally, 1 is wildly popular, hideously expensive

We have one. I’ll raise you on price. Hint – A certain HRH (RIP) used to serve in The Firm’s shop of a Sunday afternoon once a month. Can be very hit and miss, but the butchers is first rate. And silly expensive. The rest is more miss.

Not been for a while but this was always a v good farm shop with non-ridiculous prices.

https://keelhamfarmshop.co.uk/

Mass-produced “craft beer,” surely the biggest scam of the last decade. It’s beer in half-sized cans at twice the price. It might be good but, worthy of a quadrupling of the price?

There’s a builder in my village who has the word artisanal written on his van,

Please tell me it’s written split across a sliding door.

@theotherjohnv

Anything similar from someone else I should try instead?

I’m a latecomer to Brewdog, but had a bottle of Hazy Jane which convinced me.

Prefer draught in general, but at a push there are some notable canned or bottled ales I’ve enjoyed. Off the top:

Fourpure Citrus Session
Ægir Dag Sitrus
Salopian Lemon Dream

In the spirit of the thread, it feels like I’ve tried more disappointing (or plain horrible) ‘craft beers’ than I have hot dinners during the last decade.

But the latest horror I tried was some ‘’Rhubarb and mango craft cider’. There are no words to describe it. ‘Rank sugar taking the piss in in water’ will suffice. I’ll stick to the real stuff. Even the best local traditional cider maker I know (to my palate the best of the best) has begun to use the words ‘craft cider’ on his website. End Of Times, to the bunker…

She might have two domestic ovens, can’t recall. Her original one died and I remember her replacing that one (she lives opposite) and I think she said she had a second one.

In the video she said she’d killed two previous ovens, but in the comments mentions that she’s using a Rofco B40 now, which is the artisan bakery equivalent of the T5 on here.

This £80 stuff must be coming from elsewhere or someone’s leg is being pulled.

Probably one of the many other coffee-growing regions then.

Not that I drink coffee but I thought the better stuff grew at specific altitudes so higher quality beans were constrained in supply as there was only so much suitable land and those beans were the ones which cost more.

Jams are tricky as the market is used to stuff from the supermarket slammed full of sugar and artificial sweeteners

The composition of jam is legally defined – it sort of has to be jammed full of fruit and sugar to even be a jam.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/3120/schedule/1/made

A decent supermarket strawberry jam like Mackays has precisely 350g/1000g of scottish fruit, sugar, pectin and citric acid. There’s no junk in it – it has exactly the same ingredients as you or an artisan would use at home to make strawberry jam.