CL-032 Lily Waite Uses All The Salt and Butter

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get the behind-the-scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Claire Bullen and I’m the Editor in Chief at Good Beer Hunting.

I have an almost endless appetite—no pun intended—for stories about food and beer. This isn’t particularly surprising, given the fact that I wrote a cookbook on the subject, The Beer Lover’s Table, earlier this year. At risk of sounding like an evangelist, I think beer is such a natural at the table—so versatile, so flexible, so broad—that it feels like a real shame that we still ascribe dinner-party dominance to wine.

That’s why Good Beer Hunting’s recently revived Provisions column fills me with such hope. Beyond one-to-one beer and food pairings, and recipes, our Provisions pieces celebrate the way that beer organically fits into a meal. Many of our writers and readers are as passionate about good food as they are good beer, and so the two frequently and naturally intersect in our lives. Provisions aims to capture these memorable moments of hospitality—the stories and travels and friendships that lead up to special, beer-centric meals along the way.

And so, when Lily Waite, one of Good Beer Hunting’s London-based staff writers, recently pitched me a fantastical Provisions story featuring Cornish fishing trips and wild foraging sessions and multi-course beer-and-seafood feasts, I couldn’t wait to read the end result. Her final piece, and its accompanying photos, was as exquisite as expected—Lily is a true polymath. In addition to being an exceptional writer, photographer, artist, and cook, she’s also the visionary behind the Queer Brewing Project, a non-profit, collaborative brewing project that supports LGBTQ+ voices and visibility in the beer and brewing industries.

In this conversation, we talk about how a brewery visit turned into an unplanned fishing trip, which in turn yielded an extraordinary meal. We also talk about Lily’s various creative endeavors, from pottery classes to brew days. Here’s Lily Waite. Listen in.