Drink the Seasons! Brewing a Biodiversity Revival

Aim

Funding the next decade of Old Tree Brewery CIC: brewing for biodiversity and community land regeneration.

Update from Luke:

Thank you, so much. You beautiful humans. You showed up in hundreds for us, and for nature and our biodiversity.

🌱❤️‍🔥🕊️💪🌳

Together, we proved that while we don't have the power of extractive capitalism's monocropping, mass producing scale and pricing that doesn't reflect the cost on nature and communities, We make up for it in solidarity and community action. We know what we stand for and we fought for it together.

We've achieved our goal thanks to you all believing in us and making time in your busy days and prioritising us in your expenses despite the cost of living.

We even got some of the way into achieving our stretch goal, which directly funds the huge wider vision that Tom and the team are so devoted to; their reforesting projects, educational workshops, community gatherings and the Mycelium network that resources a whole network of Planet before profit local, seasonal and regenerative breweries like this; in collaboration, not competition. 

Donations are still accepted here, to continue breathing life into the wider vision regeneration work (which you can watch unfold on our Instagram here and here, and LinkedIn) and for everything else - including the Drink The Seasons flagship product you enabled us to launch: Head over to our shop!

And let us know if you'd like an Old Tree bar at your event!

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For twelve years, we have been making drinks from foraged hedgerow plants, local orchards, and our own Drink Forest Gardens. 

Award-winning kombucha and seasonal wines. Botanical elixirs that people genuinely love. Drinks that are alive and wildly good.

We can be truly proud of what our team and community have achieved! 

Here's a celebratory photo from Apple Land, our annual orchard harvest festival.

We call it "Brewing for Biodiversity."

It's a circular process from garden to gut and gut to garden.

We've been pioneering what our founder Tom calls "drink forest gardening": making use of the abundance offered freely by our native trees - from elder to hawthorn to birch to oak, roses, mugwort, nettles, sea buckthorn, blackcurrants, rosemary and so many more - in our drinks. 

Whether fermented, distilled, or simply fresh from the tree. We can all drink for a forest garden future! 

Trees make the most delicious drinks ingredients and they also cool our climate, reduce dependency on fossil fuels and make land more resilient to droughts and floods.

We want Old Tree's drink creation to help fund land regeneration with microbes, plants and people power.

Biologists tell us we should eat at least 30 different plants a week. We say: let's drink them too!

So why do we need your help?

Our drinks are alive - genuinely fermented, unpasteurised, full of beneficial cultures. 

That's what makes them brilliant, but it also means they have a limited shelf life.

Supermarkets want products that sit on shelves for months. Wholesalers and retailers take huge margins. By the time the shop, the distributor, VAT and duty have all taken their cut, we're left with less than 10p in every pound.

We've spent a decade proving the drinks work and the demand exists. But the traditional route to market is broken - not just for us, but for every small producer trying to do things differently.

So we're changing it!

Introducing: Drink the Seasons

A quarterly subscription box of small-batch, seasonal, botanical brews - foraged, fermented and delivered direct to our customers.

This is a chance to join the part of Old Tree that normally happens behind the scenes - where we're testing ideas, figuring out what's possible, and getting excited about the weird and wonderful things we make!

This is a major pivot for us. 

Our hope is for this campaign to be the beginning of a new chapter for us to become a community supported brewery.

As a Community Interest Company, all our profits go back into ecological and community work. 

Now, we are changing the central business model of Old Tree to go DIRECT TO COMMUNITY. No middlemen. We make it, you drink it, and we keep enough to actually keep going and fund the nature restoration work that drives everything we do.

After a decade of exploring the infinite potential and variety of foraged and fermented brews, we've decided these drinks are too good to keep to ourselves, and the time has come to share!

Spring will be led by two plants, birch and nettle.

We'll be tapping birch trees in March, harvesting nettles in April, and the first box will ship soon after.

The Spring box is likely to include things like:

• Birch Nectar. Fresh sap, gently concentrated, mineral and lightly sweet. Proper "drink the forest" energy.
• A birch leaf Kombucha. Bright, tannic, tea-like. A way of tasting the tree, not just the sap.
• A nettle beer or higher alcohol kombucha - fruity, fizzy and full bodied!
• A bottle of our special Nettle Lemonade cordial

Then a couple of small-batch experiments like the ancient grain herbal beers we're reviving and a seasonal hedgerow wine.

Each box will also include extra seasonal gifts from the wild: hydrosol shots, botanical sweets made from the by-products of our fermentation processes, or other foraged gifts plus illustrated information connecting you to the celebrated plants.

Available to just 100 founding members locally and another 100 nationally, you'll receive six different bottles each quarter. The first edition is being gathered and small-batch fermented for you by our team right now!

We'll share what we're testing, ask what you loved, what you didn't, what you'd want more of. That feedback becomes next season's brewing decisions.

If you want to experience it beyond the box, there are other rewards in this crowdfunder too: tastings, workshops, a monthly oak-barrel kombucha subscription, and the whole in-person side of what makes this community so special.

Changing what we drink, changes what we grow. 

The drinks industry has a massive problem that most people don't think about. 

The vast majority of what's on the shelves in this country is artificially carbonated, full of preservatives, and produced from monoculture crops that strip biodiversity from the land and deplete vital soil carbon. We need to reverse this for our health and climate safety. 

The companies making these drinks externalise their ecological costs onto all of us - depleted soils, polluted waterways and biodiversity loss - while the climate pays the price. 

Old Tree is the antidote.

This isn't just making healthier and more delicious drinks for us all to share (though this is important!) 

Our motivation is an entire cultural reckoning, a remembering of what was lost, and a practical demonstration of what's possible when people reconnect with trees, seasons, fermentation, and each other.

Why are we all still consuming this stuff when we could be enjoying wonderful drinks from our local plant landscapes at with a fraction of the negative climate consequences? 

Did you know Britain was once a temperate rainforest? Tragically, around 90% of it is gone. We've lost 97% of our wildflower meadows. Since the dawn of industrial farming, we've lost so much ancient hedgerow it could have circled the entire planet three times!

The hedgerows, the woodlands, the orchards - they're waiting for us to remember what to do with them. 

Every drink we make is a practical demonstration of what's possible when people reconnect with trees, seasons, fermentation, and each other. Perennial plants that are easily foraged help soils to recover and cool local micro-climates. Our bodies, our cells, and our gut bacteria know these plants as food. This is what our ancestors drank. This is what nourishes us.

The future food system has to be based on trees 

Trees cycle all their nutrients. They create the oxygen we breathe. They store the carbon the soil needs. 

They don't just tackle the climate crisis. They create shade, protect soil, slow evaporation, and create cooler climates. They give us the best buffer against the droughts and flooding already arriving.

Our goal has always been to fund the planting of food and drink forests. 

Forest gardens are not just a way of mitigating changing climate. They're whole ecosystems, holding carbon for thousands of years while giving us food, medicine, and drinks from the seasonal abundance of perennial plants.

Imagine a network of forest gardens connected by edible hedgerows with human-scale micro-fermenteries, all across the country!  

That's not a fantasy. That's the infrastructure for a new tree-based culture, and we're building the first pilots. 

The first farm-scale landscape we're working towards reviving is a magical place with important history. It's called Ragmans Lane Farm.

It's a 60-acre, organic, permaculture farm in Gloucestershire, held by the Ecological Land Cooperative, that was instrumental to the rise of Permaculture in the UK.

Through what can only be described as a miracle of social relations - years of harvesting unwanted fruit, building relationships, sharing knowledge - we've been offered the chance to develop a project there that demonstrates exactly what we've been talking about: education and regeneration through fermentation and reconnecting with trees. This is what Old Tree was built for!

We used a small social impact grant from the Real Farming Trust in 2024 to organise the mass community harvesting of the windfall fruit there in October 2025. It was the same volunteer powered "fruit rescue service" operation we have organised across the west of England and Wales for over a decade - at a whole farm scale for the first time!!

There's a dream team of people already assembled. Partners who share the vision. An Old Tree team is applying to become stewards of the land here through the Ecological Land Cooperative.

Closer to home, right here in Glynde where our brewery sits, we're in the early stages of exploring nature restoration work in support of the Glynde Whole Estate Plan. 

The plan was endorsed by the South Downs National Park Authority in 2024, and it puts nature recovery and sustainable land management at the heart of the estate's future. We want to be part of that. Hedgerow planting, foraging partnerships, community connection to the land around us!

Ragmans is the long-term vision. Glynde is where we put roots down locally. Together, they show where all of this is heading.

Crucially, none of it happens without the brewery's powers of creation.

That's why this crowdfunder matters so much. It's not just about keeping the lights on. It's about keeping the momentum of twelve years of work alive, reaching the places it was always heading towards.

Who we are

At our community harvest events and in the brewery we compost 100% of the organic materials we use, helping to regenerate local living soils. 

We are a small team of five, rooted in a community of hundreds.

We're a Community Interest Company, meaning all our profits go back into ecological and community work.

Over the years, our small and passionate team has brewed thousands of drinks from many different live cultures, using everything from fruits to berries to leaves and roots. We've produced award-winning kombucha and sought-after limited edition wines, ales, vinegars, and cordials.

From 2015 to 2018 we created Brighton's first Drink Forest Garden, growing herbs for brewing and creating an urban oasis, which brought dragonflies back into the city. The closed-loop composting system we developed there caught the attention of Brighton and Hove Food Partnership, and it has since been rolled out far more widely.

Since 2021, this ecosystem has evolved into three partner organisations with one shared purpose:

• Old Tree Brewery - seasonal, biodiversity-led drinks
• Old Tree Soil - composting systems and microbial education
• Old Tree Events - gatherings, celebrations, and community work

Together, we now deliver over £250,000 a year in social and regenerative products and services, all working towards funding agro-ecological regeneration with future profits.

How you grow defines what you are. 

Infinite growth for growth's sake is the behaviour of the cancer cell. 

We believe that "human scale" production is the remedy to the cancerous growth that is destroying our world.

An oak barrel is human scale. A 200-litre oak barrel, the kind people have always used for fermentation. You can make enough from a small amount of produce that a community can harvest from an orchard or a hedgerow in half a day. You can spend a day pressing apples and fill a barrel of cider. That's human scale.

Did you know? 200 litres is also about the amount of water a tree takes from its root system and transpires through its leaves in a single day. This shows us a scale that's part of the Earth's breathing and aquatic system!

We can't produce millions of bottles, but we can produce thousands. We can't compete on price with industrial producers, who externalise their costs onto all of us. 

We'll never be in every supermarket, and we don't want to be, but we can co-create a future of many more local enterprises creating higher quality products that can be supplied everywhere at a lower ecological cost.

What your support will fund

We are already profitable for almost half the year. Without VAT pressure at our current scale, we would already be fully viable.

We've partnered with the Aviva Communities Fund, who are match-funding this campaign to support community-led climate action. 

Here's how it works: Aviva will match every individual donation up to £250, once per person. So if you donate £50, Aviva adds another £50. If you donate £250 or more, Aviva adds £250. Each person's first donation gets matched - so the more individual supporters we have, the more match funding we unlock. 

That's why sharing this campaign matters as much as donating - every new supporter doubles their impact.

All of Aviva's match funding goes directly towards our climate and nature restoration programme - the planting, the foraging walks, the workshops, the education.

Imagine our own electric van! One of these would help us save a fortune on shipping costs, take our drinks and kit to communities around the country, and support our foraging and nature-restoration days.

Here's what we can achieve together at each milestone:

🌱 £10,000 - The First Box Ships

• Core team supported through spring. First Drink the Seasons boxes packed and delivered. Birch tapping and nettle harvesting funded. The direct-to-community model is live!!

🌿 £20,000 - Summer Programme Funded

• Foraging walks and fermentation workshops funded through summer. First community planting day organised at Ragmans Lane Farm. Organic certification process begins. The climate education programme has real legs.

🌳 £30,000 - Base Target Hit!

• Full year's core team properly supported - Harry and Iside brewing, Tai and Emma on operations and comms, Tom leading foraging, partnerships and restoration. SALSA food safety certification secured. Full climate programme delivered: 6-8 foraging education events, planting at Ragmans and Glynde, composting workshops, community harvest gatherings.

🌲 £50,000 - Brewery Stabilised (with Aviva Climate Match)

• Website rebuilt with proper subscriber management. Commercial labelling equipment making subscription fulfilment viable at scale. Aviva match funding delivers expanded hedgerow planting and nature restoration at Ragmans Lane Farm and locally in Glynde. Sustainability reached in twelve months rather than two years.

🌻 £75,000 - Growing the Team and the Programme

• Brewing apprenticeship created - a paid position for a local young person learning fermentation, foraging, and sustainable food production. Meaningful new job, rooted in the landscape economy. Electric van for zero-emission local deliveries, powering our foraging days and taking our drinks to communities around the country. Expanded orchard revival and biodiversity work with Ragmans and Glynde partners

🏡 £100,000 - The Taproom

• Development begins on a taproom and tasting room at Glynde - a place where people can taste the seasons, meet the team, and experience what community-rooted brewing looks and feels like. Old Tree becomes a destination. A place to gather, learn, and drink something wildly good straight from the barrel.

🌍 Beyond £100,000 - Dream Territory

This is where it gets really exciting...

• Community Benefit Society - we launch the process for community ownership, so the people who've backed us can actually own a piece of what we're building. A future share offer, rooted in everything this crowdfunder makes possible. Imagine a closed-loop system where foraging feeds brewing, brewing feeds composting, composting feeds living soil, and living soil feeds plants - owned and governed by the community it serves. Not vertical, centralised, vulnerable supply chains, but horizontal, deep-rooted, resilient ecologies of scale to replace them.
• Ragmans Lane Farm pilot properly funded - a staffed, year-round programme of education and regeneration through fermentation. The first dedicated fermentation-and-restoration project on a working organic farm.
• Mobile fermentation unit (??) - a portable brewing setup we could take to festivals, partner farms, and community harvest events. Brew where the ingredients grow!
• Investment in the Mycelium Network - we've already built the beginnings of an open-source, Wikipedia-style knowledge-sharing platform for ethical brewers, foragers, composters, and land-based food producers. With proper investment, it becomes something much bigger: an interconnected web of planet-before-profit enterprises sharing methods, recipes, and resources openly. Thousands of tiny fermenteries instead of a handful of massive factories. The vision is big and will need significant further funding, but this is where it starts to grow.
• More foraging, more planting, more people - every additional pound extends the hedgerow planting programme, increases the frequency of educational events, and creates more meaningful jobs rooted in the landscape.

Help us grow from an exposed tree to a sheltered woodland. Help fund the next decade of Old Tree and join us!!

12 years ago someone opened up a space and put up a sign in Brighton that said "imagine a garden."

The next thing that happened was all of these amazing people came in, brought plants, brought compost, and reclaimed the space.

That sign changed everything for us. It led to forest gardening, permaculture, to years volunteering in a Sussex woodland, Woodland Wednesdays, and Forest Fridays, taking people into whole ecosystems, out of the city, out of the stress. It was the discovery of free medicine, and it was the birth of our community. 

That woodland led to a brewery. The brewery led to everything we’ve achieved over the past 12 years.

By going direct to the community - through subscriptions, events and workshops - Old Tree has a real chance of stabilising. Not by scaling into something bigger and blander, but by becoming more rooted.

Supporting this crowdfunder shows you're backing a decade of hard-won knowledge, and a community-rooted alternative to extractive food systems. We believe this can be a practical, replicable model for something that can inspire a major change in our current toxic food system.

We're still imagining and fermenting the forest garden future, but now we're asking you to imagine with us and get planting. 

Back us and share this. Tell someone who needs to see it.

As the saying goes, the best time to plant a forest was 25 years ago. The second best time is now.

THANK YOU 🫶 

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made