THE GARLIC FARM 

At the heart of the festival is of course Britain’s most loved and pungent bulb, garlic! Grown right here on the Isle of Wight, in Newchurch by the multi award-winning Garlic Farm. Working with the farm we are able to offer a truly magnificent garlic experience. You’ll find it everywhere, to eat, drink and buy! With the farm just up the road, the garlic at the festival is travelling a matter of minutes to the festival site.

Natasha from The Garlic Farm says:

We think garlic is a gastronomic wonder; it tastes great, helps bring our other flavours in food and It’s also very good for you. The festival lets us celebrate all things garlic and gives a platform for a really fun day out. 

TASTE

Food is an adventure, not just a way of sustaining ourselves. The more experiment, the more we are rewarded. Some forms of garlic require bravery, the kick from a highly sulphurous, piquant raw garlic clove can be very strong. Equally, a great majesty of garlic is its ability to gently lift the flavour profiles of other ingredients, in other words, adding a small quantity of garlic to our caramelised onion chutney lifts the sweetness.

At the festival (as well as at the farm itself) we offer free tasting of our products so everyone can push their own envelope, sampling everything form the safe to the strong.

CHALLENGE

Garlic can take you on a flavour journey. At The Garlic Festival we are running our ‘heat challenge’ where we invite visitors to begin with mild flavours, move through tasting the stronger cloves onto our most fiery product; the ‘Vampire Slayer’. For the brave few that make it, we ring the bell for full garlic kudos!

GARLIC BEER, REALLY?!

What better way to quench the palate that an amber ale? But a garlic beer, how can that work? Well, as it happens our first incarnation of this product, decades ago, was an acquired taste… people often politely said “it’s a great cooking ale – lovely in a steak pie”.

Since then, we have re-worked the beer using the sweet, heat-aged black garlic. This gives a smooth, very subtle caramel note to the beer – it is a very, very gentle suggestion of the complex, almost vanilla note of sweet black garlic and very far from the frightening prospect of ‘raw garlic in a beer’. It has to be tried to be believed and will be available in cask throughout the weekend.