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KNOWLEDGEshre Live provides insight into beverage industry
The latest KNOWLEDGEshare Live event in Dubai provided stimulating and insightful debate on the major issues affecting the beverage industry.
KNOWLEDGEshare is a beverage industry forum comprising a digital community of senior industry players and thought leaders, with the Live events providing the opportunity to engage in the discussions face-to-face.
The event - the third in the KNOWLEDGEshare Live series - saw almost 150 participants from across the beverage supply chain gather in Dubai. Against the backdrop of various global challenges, the focus was on the many demands faced by the beverage industry and how the supply chain can work much more effectively by utilising the collective knowledge and experience that is available through such a forum.
KNOWLEDGEshare Live in Dubai 2015, presented in association with Sidel, the global provider of PET liquid packaging solutions, followed successful events staged in Germany and China in 2013 and 2014 respectively. The KNOWLEDGEshare community is growing year on year, bringing together decision-makers and influencers, to provide all those involved in the beverage supply chain with a forum for debating issues related to critical areas, from raw materials through to package design, production, transportation, point-of-sale, the consumer and beyond, including recyclability and sustainable methods of production.
Sidel President and CEO Mart Tiismann welcomed delegates to the event and said, “A clear message raised at all three KNOWLEDGEshare Live events is the need to take a holistic view to industry issues and adopt a collective approach to addressing them.
"Operating in isolation, without appreciating the challenges that others within the beverage supply chain are facing, is a rather restrictive view. Of course, individual businesses must make their own decisions but there are degrees of similarity and commonality to many challenges across businesses and across sectors. There is a demand to discuss these matters in a forum where we bring together people with common interests. We have seen this in the increasing level of participation, which is helping us to gain a much clearer picture of what we face as an industry and, importantly, how we can work together to ensure a sustainable future.”
Subjects covered during KNOWLEDGEshare Live 2015 were varied to reflect the fact that KNOWLEDGEshare is representative of the whole beverage industry. The discussion sessions were structured under three main topic streams - how PET can deliver value across the entire beverage supply chain, what the industry needs to do to respond to consumer tastes that are increasingly exotic and varied, while maintaining beverage safety and brand differentiation, and what the beverage production line of tomorrow will look like to meet the changing demands of the future.
During the three sessions, panellists from various sectors debated these issues, with many discussions arising from questions posed live by the delegates. This ensured real engagement, with the content driven directly from the floor, demonstrating the objective of KNOWLEDGEshare Live to be a neutral event that generates open-minded discussion around the issues affecting the beverage industry as a whole.
The next KNOWLEDGEshare Live event takes place on 24th and 25th March in Chengdu, China. For more information, visit www.knowledgeshare.com.
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Monstrously fruity beer
The Loch Ness Brewery has teamed up with soft fruit experts from the James Hutton Institute near Dundee and a Fife berry farmer to create a new blackberry beer.
Tapping into the growing niche market not just for craft beers but also for fruited brews, the new Berry LochNESS beer was actually born out of a possible dispute over use of the Loch Ness name.
The Drumnadrochit-based brewery has been trading since 2011 under the Loch Ness name, and Loch Ness blackberries were developed and launched in 1989 by the James Hutton Institute. A phone call and some explanation not only resolved any brewing issues but also soon turned into a conversation about the possibilities of teaming the namesake products to make something new that would create profile for both firms and for their respective industries. Micro-brewing in Scotland, as elsewhere, is booming and the scientists from the James Hutton Institute have a prodigious track record in developing some of the world's leading soft fruit varieties.
Jonathan Snape, Managing Director of James Hutton Limited, commercial affiliate of the James Hutton Institute, says, "It’s great to be able to create a product that teams many aspects of Scotland’s resources to make something new and of top quality - great fruit, bred and grown in Scotland, our pure, abundant water and our home-grown barley and brewing expertise."
Late in the growing season, Fife berry farmer Robert Simpson came up trumps with a large enough harvest of the Loch Ness blackberries to make a viable batch of beer. The result is a classic traditional Scottish 80/-, produced from a blend of five different malts to give a big biscuit and chocolate flavour. The addition of Loch Ness blackberries softens these malty flavours, and gives the beer a gentle sweet finish rather than the drier finish of the original LochNESS beer on which it’s based. Berry LochNESS is now available in specialist outlets.
Stephen Crossland of Loch Ness Brewery says, "We welcome the opportunity to develop new, niche brews for a market that is growing and evolving and think this latest recipe is one that will help win our beer new fans."
Researchers at the James Hutton Institute have recently started small scale experiments to see if it would be possible to create a variety of hops that could be grown viably in Scotland – much further north than its normal range – with a view to giving beer-makers the full set of brewing ingredients sourced from Scotland.
