National Organic Awards: and the winners are

Mr. Trevor Sargent TD, Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, presented the Overall National Organic Award 2008 to Glenisk Irish Organic Butter. This new product will be launched onto shop shelves in the coming weeks. The awards, organised by Bord Bia in conjunction with the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, attracted over 100 entries from organic companies nationwide.

The winners were announced on Monday at SHOP, the annual food and drink retail trade event taking place in the RDS, Dublin. The individual category award winners were as follows: best organic grocery product went to Solaris Botanicals Presentation Box of Teas; Lily O�Brien�s Organic Collection won best organic sweet, flour and chocolate confectionary; in addition to the overall award Glenisk Irish Organic Butter won best organic chilled/frozen product and a new category this year best organic meat product was awarded to Oliver Carty�s Organic Loin of Bacon with a Citrus Topping.

(Pictured above, John McCracken, a farmer who supplies Glenisk)

a nice cup of tea: Solaris botanicals

Here's an article I had about a great cup of tea I tasted a few weeks back....

(check out their tea bag for restaurants over there - that's quality!)

Maybe it was the blazing heat and sunshine, but the cup of tea I had at Farm Fest 08 was simply stunning. It was no ordinary cup of tea - organic rooibus chocolate chai to be exact, and on a hot hot day it was perfectly refreshing.

I was introduced to the makers of my fine cuppa by an organic gardener studying to be a herbalist. He was doing work experience with Karin Wieland and Jorg Muller, who are both qualified medical herbalists. The couple run the nascent but still multi-award winning Solaris Herbs whole leaf organic tea company.

I have a hunch that tea houses will be the coffee houses of the next ten years, that people will go out for a clear, see through glass pot of loose leaf tea, whiling away the time in conversation in a way similar to pubs, wine bars and cafes today.

If that does happen, then Jorg and Karin will be well ahead of the game. They blend and prepare their own whole leaf teas in Ireland, and even offer a personalised service for individual restaurants or tea houses.

The loose leaf teas themselves, their website, their brochures and their packaging all smack of quality. And they have the awards to prove it. They won three gold stars at the great taste awards 2007, and best grocery product at the SHOP national organic awards 2007. Only 30 out of 5000 entries won gold in the former, and only one product won best grocery product in the latter. So these products really are considered top of the range by their peers in the quality food business.

Their teas manage to combine health, environment and taste - a master blend if ever there was one. All certified organic by the Organic Trust and sourced in a genuinely careful way, the loose leaf dimension is quite deliberate from a health perspective. �whole leaves maintain their optimum levels of antioxidants � machine harvesting and processing oxidates the leaves, thereby reducing the antioxidant value of the tea� according to Jorg.

They specifically blended their herbal teas with different body systems in mind such as nervous system, digestive system and immune system.

The flavours that develop are fuller yet subtle, and without any of the sneaky enhancements other teas in the herbal idiom sometimes have. They pay a fortune for their teas, but don�t carry this over proportionately in their price. While large multinational tea companies can pay less than a euro per kilo when they but their tea by the tonne, �We pay 40euro a kilo for our most expensive type� according to Jorg.

The story of this most expensive of teas, the organic Jasmine Dragon Pearl Tea is exquisite. Spring fresh special grade green tea is sourced from the Fujian Province in China, traditionally described as being eight parts mountain, one part water, and one part farmland. The leaves are hand rolled into little balls, called Dragon Pearls. The little pearls are then steamed seven times over fresh Jasmine flowers.

This is, unsurprisingly, their most expensive tea, retailing at 9 euros and 55 cent on their website. Any yet you actually get 240 cups out of each one of their cylindrical containers of Dragon Pearls - �that�s 4c per cup of tea!� according to Karin.

Along with speciality green, earl grey, pu-erh, oolong, lapsang souchong and rooibus teas, they also have flowering teas, herbal products and tea accessories.

The flowering teas also tell a great story. According to their literature, �these premium white, tender tea buds are Jasmine scented and hand sewn into flower buds with cotton thread by artisans in China. When steeped in hot water, the flower buds slowly blossom into breathtaking displays.�

For a variety of practical reasons, restaurants prefer teabags to loose leaf teas. With this in mind, Jorg and Karin have come up with a delightful display box and unique bags for the individual teas. This �100% biodegradable silken tea bag range� comes in a presentation box containing 5 certified organic, 1st flush, speciality whole-leaf teas ranging from Herbal Tea blends to Green Teas, and Black Teas.

Right, I�m parched. I�m off to make myself a cup of that organic rioobus chai.

For more, (p) 091 586443 or just click here

Farm Fest 08: organics comes of age

If ever there was an event that represented the coming of age of the artisan and organic sectors in Ireland, then it was Teagasc�s Farm Fest 08, held in Athenry on the 20^th June last. And if the Ploughing championship could be compared to the Oxygen music festival, then Farm Fest was the Electric Picnic.

This is because the otherwise more boutique, small, niche, high-end and specialist was actually centre stage. While all of the main players from the agri-food world were at the event, the main marquee, and by far the busiest and liveliest of the locations at Farm Fest, was the place where the organic producers were.

This marquee was called �innovation and artisan food�. Interestingly, the word organic wasn�t in the Marquee�s name, despite the fact that the majority of stalls, by a considerable distance, were by or of interest to organic and artisan producers.

The place seemed young, active, dynamic and positive about the future. In other arenas, people had heated debates over one cent. In this marquee, people seemed to know and love their product, and seemed able to convince consumers to pay a fair price for it.

In most cases, the farmers here were food producers � they did something to their primary products and got a proper mark up for so doing. In one section of the marquee there was Noodle House Organic Pastas, Gerry and Mary Kelly�s Moonshine organic diary products, both sitting alongside Ralph Haslam�s Mossfield Cheeses. The food producers themselves were all present and accounted for, dealing with enthusiastic and interested consumers, curious farmers and an array of media.

For Ralph, Bruce Springsteen�s decision to buy copious amounts of Mossfield when here recently seems to have catapulted the cheese into the culinary stratosphere. When I dropped by, Valerie Cox from RTE radio 1 was chatting to him. Within five minutes, during which time I devoured some hearty slices of his mature gouda-style cheese, TV3 had dropped over to find out about the Bruce Springsteen cheese.

And considering the fact that at he has done so well at the World Cheese Awards, Ralph is looking forward to the event being held in Dublin later on this year.

Another set of products attracting attention were those of Solaris botanicals. Here, a range of leading-edge organic whole leaf teas were on display and available to taste. The business is run by Karin Wieland and Jorg Muller, a couple who are qualified medical herbalists. As well as a simply spectacular range of teas, their knowledge, skill and passion were also on display.

There was a strong interest in organic feeds and seeds, while many of the main organisations involved in the organic sector had a presence too, including IOFGA, NOTS (National Organic Training Skillnets), as well as the Wexford and Leitrim Organic Centres.

The rural development, artisan and organic ends of the state institutions such as DAFF, Teagasc and Bord Bia were also busy and present, taking up a whole area of the marquee itself.

Along with the wandering and chatting, there was business being done:

Joe Condon of Omega Beef Direct was flat out gathering potential recruits for his upland farming �Organics with Altitude� idea, (featured in this supplement two weeks ago). Martin Henry and Liam Lyons had their recently purchased organic mobile butchers� unit outside the marquee in the market area � it took me five visits just to have a quick word with Liam. Padraig Fahy of Beechlawn Organic Farm seemed as busy with his vegetable selling and interactions with various players in the organic sector as when he was chair of IOFGA.

The artisan stalls were super busy too: Glastry Farm�s artisan ice cream stand, all the way from the county Down, was absolutely trobbing, as was the Foods of Athenry stall from just down the road.

When I did leave the �Innovation and Artisan Food� arena, it occasionally did look like the Electric Picnic, with some of the same food stalls, surrounded by entertainment like wooden toy tnets, a kids zone, Connemara Pony displays and then all the other marquees.

It was a beautiful day in many ways. Great weather helps, but the contented feeling of a sector on the rise helped too.