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By the age of 30, Louise Avery had achieved what many of us would consider the dream. She had escaped her sleepy life in rural Scotland for the 24/7 buzz of London life and was earning a decent salary in design management.
But — by her own admission — living in the city had left her ‘bored’ and already burnt out.
‘I liked the job, and there were really lovely people. But every day I would stare out the window thinking, “when is this going to end?”’ Louise tells Metro. ‘I was so bored. I just wanted to be outside.’
So, she quit. Not just her 9-5 at an architecture studio in Clerkenwell, but London altogether and moved more than 500 miles back to her childhood hometown on the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides off the coast of Scotland. She had no savings in the bank for this huge life change nor did she have any firm plans about what she’d do once there.
Taking such a big step into the unknown was daunting, but looking back, Louise now 44, says she felt huge relief. ‘It’s really pivotal when you realise you’re in the wrong place, and I love change,’ she explains.
Heading home
A love of foraging was first planted during Louise’s childhood. Her mum Sylvia, was a ‘self-sufficient’ painter, who grew her own vegetables, snared rabbits and went fishing every day. She would also take Louise and her brother Charlie down to the local beach to collect mussels.
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‘Mum taught me about picking mushrooms and what plants were edible or poisonous,’ Louise recalls. ‘She would show us where all the white raspberries were, and the red ones, and the blackberries and what we could do with them. She knows the name and the Latin name of every single plant ever. She’s 82 and a walking encyclopedia.’
The landscape on Mull has ‘harshness and softness’, adds Louise. ‘You have mountains and woodland, and beautiful wild land in between that’s not cultivated at all.
‘There are deer and lots of stags making a real racket, sea eagles and golden eagles, there are no foxes or badgers, but there are otters and seals. It’s magical.’
Moving back home after quitting her job helped her rediscover this love, but money was low. ‘I rented a cottage in the grounds of a castle that was just in front of the tide. The tide would come up almost to the door, which was beautiful but it also meant there was water running down the inside of the cottage. It was so damp.’
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Starting afresh
Her boyfriend at the time was American and he introduced her to kombucha, a fermented drink made from tea, sugar, and bacterial culture called a SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast). It had caught on in LA, but had yet to make an impact in the UK, Louise recalls. ‘It was fizzy and tarte and delicious and tasted of nothing I had ever tasted before.
‘When I started reading about kombucha, I realised there was a huge following and I started making my own.’
Louise got a job at Ardalanish weaving mill on Mull, and spent her spare time experimenting with the fermented drinks she concocted at her rented cottage.
‘I would go to a nearby bridge and make a very simple wish, “I really want to have a business and find out what my path is”, and slowly these drinks started developing.
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‘I started playing with the idea of champagne, and I used white tea and rose petals to make a wildflower champagne and there was something so magical about that because of the richness of the flowers and the land.’
Experimenting did have its share of mishaps, and not just the overload of bottles in the small cottage.
‘I learnt quickly to use plastic bottles, because if you use glass and it’s too thin, it will just explode. If you open a ferment and it’s very ripe and fizzy, it will end up all over the ceiling. Anyone you speak to who makes kombucha will tell you they’ve had to repaint their ceiling.’
As her newfound love for fermentation began bubbling, Louise decided to combine the two to create a fermented, kombucha-based drink only using foraged ingredients. With this new idea in mind, she moved back to London, just three years after she left, to start her own company.
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Returning to the city
Heading back to the capital with just a business idea in her pocket, Louise still had no money and even less free time. She lived in Hackney and juggled four jobs: waitressing at a friend’s restaurant, nannying and working with a professional tailor – all the while trying to run her fledgling business.
Any valuable spare time was spent foraging, where Louise would often cycle along the local canal and hunt for rosehips, while friends introduced her to spots in Peckham and Hampstead Heath.
Foraging in the city was a learning curve though, Louise admits. ‘Once I picked something that I thought was a three-cornered leek, but after consuming a few pieces, I looked it up and realised it could easily be something similar which makes you sick [and] I started to feel queasy,’ she remembers.
How to go foraging in London
Although London may not have the same magical landscape as the Isle of Mull, Louise says there are a number of spots to visit if you fancy foraging.
‘I particularly love Hackney Marshes and the canal, you can get rosehips and if you give them a squeeze they let out a paste. There’s so much life there and the air is clear. Nettles, dandelions, an abundance of undergrowth.’
Louise also recommends Victoria Park, Hampstead Heath, Peckham Rye, Regents Canal, Wimbledon Common, and Richmond Park. You can find rosehips, elderberries, blackberries, bullace (wild plums), hawthorn berries, crab apples and quince which are all very rich in vitamins and can be used to create cordials, syrups or jelly.
But always avoid foraging in graveyards because of the risk of chemicals in the ground.
Foraging may seem like a daunting thing to take on, but the goal should not be to completely change your palette overnight. Instead, Louise encourages people to add one or two foraged ingredients to their regular meals for the health benefits.
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‘It’s nice to pick a few ingredients and mix it with stuff from the supermarket,’ she says. ‘The reason for using foraged items is that they are very rich in vitamins because the roots are really deep into the soil because they haven’t been cultivated. It’s a good way to get extra nutrients. It’s about taking tiny bits and adding it to your food.”
Foraging always served as a source of ‘taste and inspiration’ rather than necessity for Louise. ‘There’s a code of conduct with foraging that you only take a little bit, because it’s free and it’s for everyone. You don’t want to deprive anyone else from having it. I always think, “do the birds want some?” but the birds don’t always show me the same courtesy.’
‘I then sent a picture [of the plant] to my mum who said, “Its grass, you will be fine.”’
Louise soon discovered that working as a waitress was key to growing her business, as it opened up doors for her to sell her drinks, which she was making in a ‘cupboard’ facility she rented on Kingsland Road in Dalston with a loan of £6,000.
Word of mouth meant other London restaurants began requesting them and she would deliver the bottles herself, going to great lengths to disguise the fact she was a one-woman band.
‘I would take the drinks in my car and dress up as a delivery person in a boiler suit,’ Louise explains. ‘I’d then park down the road and dump the bottles at the entrance. If anyone ever said I needed to bring them to the bar, I’d think ‘I cant because the bar manager would recognise that I was the founder who pitched him the drinks before!”‘
Big business
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Soon, Louise’s graft paid off and after getting two business partners on board, she launched her non-alcoholic drinks brand, L.A Brewery in 2017, which is now stocked in Nando’s and Ocado.
She’s also moved again, this time swapping city life for the Suffolk countryside, where her brewery is on an old US military base famous for UFO sightings. ‘I think it’s wild,’ laughs Louise.
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Finding the time to go foraging is harder, but Louise still hunts for nettles and berries when she visits London, and in Suffolk, for the added health benefits, especially leading up to the peak cold and flu season in the autumn and winter.
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Looking back at the path she forged fills her with pride, mostly because she gets to educate people about foraging and its health benefits.
‘Before I turned 30 I thought mostly about my career and felt it was too late to change, but it was actually the opposite,’ says Louise.
‘We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to have a certain amount of success by a certain age and it’s just not true. You can have a new career at any age, whenever it’s right for you. I felt really liberated leaving my job and I’ve had a chance to discover myself. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.’
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