The Positivity Project, episode three: hedgerow to bottle

Written: 14 October 2026

Episode three is about something small, patient and circular, working with nature rather than around it. This time we’re in Glynde, East Sussex, at a brewery smaller than most people knew a brewery could be.

A nanobrewery is even smaller than a microbrewery, and in a world that optimises towards profit and output, what could possibly be the role of such small-scale operations? Old Tree Brewery is a shining example of this scale of production and a blueprint for a better food and drink industry.

Foraging the ingredients

Their small team work harmoniously with nature, sustainably foraging local plants to produce brews that are delicious to drink and slot seamlessly into a circular production model that gives back as much as it takes. The episode follows them from plucking fruit and berries directly off the tree, hedgerow plants and orchard windfalls included, all the way through to a bottled finished product. Nothing is grown to a schedule, the season sets the ingredients list.

Nano, not micro

A nanobrewery and a microbrewery aren’t the same thing, and the difference is the whole point. Old Tree Brewery sit a size down from even the small end of brewing, by design. Staying nano keeps the production circular and the ingredients genuinely local and seasonal, rather than scaling into the volume game that pushed them out of supermarket shelves in the first place.

Inside the brewery: Fermenting, bottling, capping

What makes Old Tree Brewery unusual isn’t the foraging; it’s what happens to everything that doesn’t end up in a bottle. They call it garden to gut and gut to garden: the drinks are fermented the traditional way, live and unpasteurised, kombucha, seasonal wines and botanical elixirs among them, and the leftover organic material goes straight back into the ground. They compost 100% of it. They’re also saving for a bottle-capping machine that would let them swap plastic caps for aluminium and go fully zero waste.

It’s a direct answer to an industry that doesn’t work for small producers. As the team put it when they hit their first crowdfunding milestone: “Supermarkets want products that sit on shelves for months”, and once VAT, duty and distribution are taken out, “we’re left with less than 10p in every pound.” Old Tree Brewery’s answer is to skip that route and sell straight to the community that drinks what they make.

The taste test

The episode ends where it should: tasting what all that foraging and fermenting actually produces, before Old Tree Brewery and The Positivity Project close out what nanobreweries like this one can teach the rest of the food and drink industry.

Drink The Seasons

That’s where Drink The Seasons comes in: a quarterly subscription box of six small-batch, seasonal, botanical drinks, not sold anywhere else. Spring means birch and nettle, summer elderflower and honeysuckle, autumn hedgerow fruit and orchard apples, winter oak, pine, roots and spice. Subscribers get first access to each new brew, and some get to join the harvests that make it.

What’s funding it

Crowdfunding has enabled Old Tree Brewery to launch Drink The Seasons, and their total raised through Crowdfunder is approaching £60,000, £59,781 from 331 supporters on their campaign, Drink the Seasons! Brewing a Biodiversity Revival. Aviva Communities Fund matched donations to help the brewery past its £50,000 milestone, the point the campaign describes as the brewery becoming stable.

“We are a small team of five, rooted in a community of hundreds,” the brewery said when they passed £58,000. “This affirms beyond any doubt that we are a community supported brewery, and we are so, so grateful.”

Watch it, then raise a glass. Cheers to brewing for biodiversity

The Positivity Project exists to show the positive projects people are building when the news and the internet are dominated by negativity. This episode, that’s five people in a Sussex village proving a nanobrewery can be a blueprint, not just a curiosity.

Useful links

Watch The Positivity Project on YouTube
Learn more about Old Tree Brewery
Support Old Tree Brewery on Crowdfunder