Northern Cereals Project partners convene in Orkney next week

The Agronomy Institute, based at Orkney College UHI, will host 15 visitors from Iceland, Faroe, Northern Norway and Newfoundland, Canada next week, as they come together for a meeting of the Northern Periphery and Arctic Programme Cereals Project.

The visit will include a series of meetings, followed by a day-long conference with a series of presentations focusing on developing new markets within the North Atlantic region.

Guests will hear from users of local cereals such as the Highland Park Distillery and the Birsay Heritage Trust, who produce the Orkney Beremeal. The visitors will conclude their trip with a tour of Orkney on the Saturday, including visits to Barony Mill and the Highland Park — where the focus will be on the distillery’s floor malting process.

Erik Smith, production team leader at the Highland Park said: “We are very proud to be one of the few Scottish distilleries which continues to use its own floor malting facilities and believe this is a major factor in the high quality of our single malts.

“It is very satisfying to see that there is still a lot of interest in other northern countries in this traditional malting process and we are very pleased to be able to show our visitors how we do this.”