Grain people: Andy Forbes.
Grain People is an occasional series celebrating the farmers, millers, bakers, researchers and seed keepers quietly shaping the future of grain.
Every wheat has a passport.
Spend half an hour with Andy and you'll discover that every wheat has a passport, a family tree and a story.
We first met Andy at the UK Grain Lab, somewhere between conversations about flour, field trials and bread. Whether it was Nottingham in 2021 or 2022 almost doesn't matter. What we remember is leaving with the feeling that we'd met someone who saw wheat differently.
There are people who know how to grow wheat. Others know how to mill it. Others know how to bake it. Andy happens to understand all three. Yet that's still not what makes him remarkable.
What makes Andy different is that, before he asks what a wheat can do, he wants to know where it came from.
Why is it called Blue Cone Rivet? Who first wrote about it? Where were the seeds found? How did they survive? Who saved them? How did they make their way from a forgotten field, or a seed bank on the other side of the world, back into British soil?
Most of us see wheat as a crop.
Andy sees a line of people stretching backwards through time.
Through Brockwell Bake—which he founded in South London in 2008, beginning as a community baking event in Brockwell Park before quietly becoming something far larger—Andy has spent years travelling, researching and growing heritage wheats. His work has taken him across Europe and beyond, visiting farmers, seed banks and conferences, always following another thread.
He also helped create the Wheat Gateway, a remarkable catalogue connecting information on more than half a million wheat varieties held in collections around the world. It sounds like a database. In reality, it is something closer to a map of human history, written through seeds.
That same curiosity also led to one of Andy's most important practical contributions: Miller's Choice. Rather than simply reviving an old wheat, he spent more than a decade selecting a diverse population for flavour, resilience and adaptability. Today it is grown commercially, but its real story is less about breeding than patience. It wasn't invented overnight. It emerged from years of observation, selection and conversation with the past.
The trial plots
Closer to home, Andy runs the wheat trial plots here at Duchess Farms, just a few steps from our pasta room. Every year those little plots become a gathering place. Farmers, bakers, millers, researchers and curious friends arrive from all over the country—and often much further afield—to sow by hand, harvest by hand and, perhaps most importantly, spend a day learning from one another.
We've watched people from Australia, Italy, France and beyond gather around Andy, not because he demands attention, but because curiosity is contagious. He has that rare ability to make everyone want to ask one more question, look a little closer and notice something they had never seen before.
Those days never feel like work.
They feel like celebrations.
Celebrations of people choosing to spend their time trying to make wheat, bread and farming just a little bit better than they found them.
A few years ago we had the pleasure of cooking lunch for one of those gatherings: fresh egg spaghetti alla chitarra made with Tumminia durum wheat flour from the Marche region alongside British-grown emmer. Around the table sat people from different countries, different professions and different backgrounds, all brought together by a shared fascination with grain.
The meal almost became secondary.
The real feast was the conversation.
The things we cannot measure
It's easy to think that the future of food will be shaped only by bigger machines, better genetics or cleverer technology.
Andy reminds us that another part of the future depends on something much older.
Memory.
Curiosity.
Generosity.
The willingness to ask where something came from before asking what it's worth.
Earlier in this journal we wrote about the things we cannot measure. Andy is one of those things. His work will never be fully captured in yields, protein percentages or baking scores. It lives in stories rescued from obscurity, seeds returned to the field and the communities that gather around them.
Because perhaps the greatest thing Andy grows isn't wheat at all.
It's curiosity, memory and the conviction that every grain has a story worth preserving.
Further reading
Notes
Andrew Forbes is the founder of Brockwell Bake and one of the leading figures in Britain's heritage grain movement. This article combines publicly available information with our own experiences working alongside Andy at Duchess Farms and through the UK Grain Lab community.
Any historical inaccuracies are ours alone. If you know part of the story we've missed, we'd genuinely love to hear from you.