The story of Nutter's Butter

This all started years ago. I’d been living in Hanoi for a few years when one morning I was awoken at around 9am by what sounded like a party on my doorstep. Grumpy morning head on me, I stomped towards the door and flung it open to be greeted by the sight of a party on my doorstep.

Two old men were sat on plastic stools downing a shot of rice-wine each, chuffed with themselves. Shaking my head in disbelief I gazed out onto the internal, elevated yard I shared with my neighbours – the landlord and a legendary American-Australian couple, Glenn and Caitlin (a truly distinguished gentleman with a soul too soon extinguished…). The scene had something of an Escher image about it, the way the steps between levels cut back and around on themselves. Whatever curt phrase was on my mind, my face was saved by the face of jovial looking ginger guy smiling benignly up at me from a floor below, a wee baby in his arms and bemusement writ large across his features.

‘I guess this has something to do you mate?’ says I.

‘Och aye’ the response.

So ‘Scot?’ says I.

‘Och aye’ again.

And we laughed.

And so it began.

***

Me, Irish, mostly an English teacher, here on and off since September 2008, with stints in Cambodai and Peru too. I have also been many other things, such as football coach, paintball referee, cook, Minsk and Viet Celts gaffer, tour guide and translator. Coupled with the delectable Charlotte, Nutter's Butter's graphic designer and French influence.

He, a Scottish-English-German hybrid, married to my then landlord’s daughter. Her being Tra, who went to study in Germany when she was younger, they met when he moved to Berlin. Two kids they had, the second being the one in Steve’s arms earlier – Tien. The first, Tilly. So they’d come back to Hanoi for a couple of months, with an eye to a future return.

He was of course introduced to Minsk FC and the Defender’s Union, welcomed with open arms and big happy hugs, more of which would follow in plentiful supply as the bia hoi flowed and entire tables of food and rice-wine were devoured of a Saturday afternoon, among other afternoons and evenings, but especially of a Saturday afternoon after a match in our local league – the Hanoi International Football League, a mash up of teams of different nationalities and some Vietnamese teams, all playing 11 aside on a full pitch, refs, linesmen and a website (although everything was run by email back then).

***

After another short stint they came back to live in Hanoi for 2 years in September 2017 at which point I’d been talked into trying to make some kind of soft / life skills training course with a Vietnamese guy recently returned from South America. After a couple of false starts we were sat in a bia hoi beside Phuc Tan pitches, pondering our performance in the workshop and scoffing at the notion that we were actually suited to that type of work.

‘It’s just not us.’

‘That it ain’t.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Hmm.’

While in a scoffling frame of mind we devoured a few bags of peanuts and pints of Hanoi’s plain. At one point in the conversation Steve mentioned not being able to get good peanut butter.

‘I’m sick and tired of eating this toxic American imported peanuthingness, why can’t we get good peanut butter here in Hanoi? Look at all these nuts I’m eating! Why not?!’

It could be seen that he was passionate about it and the beer was pushing him towards emotional so ‘twas for the best to intervene at that stage.

‘Why don’t we make it ourselves?’ was what came out of my mouth.

And that, ladies and gentlefolk, was the lightbulb moment, a eurekan realisation that we existed for a purpose that had suddenly ben explained to us. As soon as it was said it made sense from all angles and we were both on board from that get-go ‘neath the geckos of Phuc Tan at the house of an angry-looking, wispily bearded, actually happy man dressed in leather and denim sat serving us our bia hois, alternatively snarling and smiling at all and sundry.

Nearly overboard we were with such surges of delight that they could only be quenched through further foaming bia hois. Inspired to abstract imagery many were the abstractions that were drawn across the pages of Steve’s notebook, annotated in slurred scrawls and glorious gibberish..

The first part of the plan was for Steve to go and buy some of the infamous Ba Van’s nuts from Ba Trieu street. I was afraid to go myself as the last time I’d been there, in October 2008, on my bicycle, with Ewan, we’d stopped to buy some nuts, given the lady herself 200,000d for 60,000d of nuts and she’d disappeared down the alleyway leading back to her house. So we stood there waiting a while, til a wailing screeching sound turned us back towards the mouth of the alley way to see the old woman dragging a young teenage girl towards us by the hair, cackling.

‘Will ye take her as change?’ was what we understood as we stood there astounded. ‘Take her out for ride and you can keep the nuts’ and another mighty cackle. I was for fleeing but Ewan stood his ground and demanded his change, the old lady eventually releasing her fierce grip on the girl’s hair, off like lightning down the street she was and we’d bought our nuts elsewhere since.

Thankfully Steve suffered no such similar savagery and made it back with a range of the nuts available. A mortar and pestle was our first mode of attack and while good progress was being made with that we started filling a couple of different blenders and whizzers and whirligigs with peanuts to see what would happen in each one. The little round circular one was the winner but as soon as we realised that we went full blast with it for a while and burnt out the motor. So first time was more like a lesson cut short but blenders are easy to come by here.

It was only as we scraped out the condensed peanut dust that had accumulated around the blade of the blender that we realised that we had actually made some real smooth peanut butter. There where it was closest to the blade it had been heated up and the oils had started coming out.

So the next time we got a couple of kilos of nuts from the market and went to work roasting them to start with. After a couple of undercooked and burnt batches we started to work out what a tray of properly roasted peanuts should look, smell and sound like. They glisten as the oil starts to seep out of them. They smell good until they smell burnt, it’s easier to tell they’re burnt by smell sometimes. And the sound, the unexpected addition to the sensual pleasures of working with peanuts, the light crackling of the skins as they dry after having been properly roasted.

Experimentation continued. We learned to stop blending when the blender started overheating. We decided to roast the nuts a bit longer. We did taste tests with black and white sesame, cinnamon, chocolate, nutmeg, coriander, sesame oil, vanilla oil, honey, salt with varying degrees of success. We got taste testers and started to work on our repertoire for talking about it all, although I still often struggle to remember if we call it crunchy or chunky. We started designing logos for the jars. We recycled jars from everywhere we could. We burnt out another blender.

We started to get quite excited about the whole thing. We gave some jars to mates and all the feedback was positive so we decided to step it up a notch. We bought a 5kg bag of nuts from a place beside Dong Xuan Market and roasting them in the 2 ovens we had. We bought another 20 jars from a shop near the same market. We asked Charlotte to design us a logo. We had endless conversations about the name. We returned to the original source of inspiration and eventually baptised ourselves Nutter’s Butter over a few more bia hoi.

We decided to make enough to sell to shops. We invested 5m dong each. We realised the importance of skinning. We roasted the nuts ever deeper. We set up a system for skinning involving an electric fan, a sideways mosquito net and a couple of basins. We started buying increasing amounts of nuts and jars. We got our first set of stickers printed. We approached shops we’d been shopping in for years and asked them to sell our peanut butter and incredibly a few of them said they would, once they were happy with the date of production, how long it would last and that we’d refund them if it didn’t sell. Happy days! Others said no, often without giving any real reason. Others said source your nuts, get registered, then come talk to us. Which became its own little mission.

Of course we asked a few mates to go in and buy some jars, but without much help from them the shelves in the shops were empty and we were already behind on orders. We outsourced the crushing of nuts to a man who soon realised that it was making an absolute mess of his machine so started refusing it. That in itself forced us to realise that we needed our own machine. So we started shopping around. We bought one machine that couldn’t really do what we’d expected it to do so ended up being a bit of a waste of 1.5m dong. We made a facebook page and a website for ourselves. We held meetings in bars and bia hois and restaurants with the wise men of Hanoi with their words of business wisdom, and they were plentiful, regardless of their own experiences.

We trialled more flavours. Black sesame was the original, original flavour. We talked chocolate to a friend at Marou and also got some cacao nibs to go with the 76% Ba Ria chocolate we use for our Choco Swirl. After some more machine research by our resident Machine we decided to go all out on a much bigger and better machine, requiring more investment. So we invested another 2.5m each (€100) and took 2.5m from company funds.

Then the summer lull. Then sales increased through autumn and we started to dream bigger, to making an actual peanut butter company. But we needed a proper base. We’ started in mine, then been working out of a friends café/language centre, then another house I lived in with a spare building beside it. Over the summer Ewan opened a new bar right between Steve’s house and mine so we had a chat with him and he was all for having us based there, we also worked out an arrangement for sharing staff and that took some of the pressure off us. Shops kept selling, our jar return scheme started working (5 empties = 1 free jar of choice). Our facebook community grew. We sold at markets, we delivered to people’s homes, we gave it away as presents, promos and our households ate their way through enough peanut butter each month to keep a baby elephant sated.

We mixed in all sorts of flavours, some of which worked, like Kampot Red Pepper, Sri Lankan Train Station Chilli Nuts and Rum and Raisins, but the satay we worked on tended to ooze out of the jars it was stored in so had to be discarded. The satay chicken and veggie banh mys we made at Vietlesson were glorious, as well as our banana bread and brownies. Learning that vegans begrudged us depriving bees of their honey was a surprise but we just made some non-honey versions then worked out we could still make a sweet vegan version using coconut oil and desiccated coconut. Later we ran everything from a building attached to a house I was renting with friends. That became a bit inconvenient so we then moved our base of operations to Ewan Anderson’s bar, the Shebeen. This was a masterstroke as it gave us a place we could make publicly, store everything, invite people, do open makes, chat to wise men, and chill out after working our way through 40-50kg of nuts in an afternoon.

But we still needed to source our nuts directly from farmers rather than the market. So an email was sent to a man called Colm Ross, who sent an email to a lady called Nozomi, who sent an email to a lady called Elisabeth Simelton, who saw the potential. She invited us in to talk to some researchers and field workers for World Agroforestry Vietnam and the International Rice Research Institute. Which we did, and it was fantastic. They identified some farmers in Ha Tinh who’d previously been growing sugar cane for a nearby factory but with its departure were open to growing an alternative crop. The initial idea was for them to grow nuts for us, the NGO’s approach being to leverage our willingness to buy nuts for Hanoi prices if they could guarantee the nuts were chemical free. The notion was that we’d then move towards some sort of organic stage once all the badness had seeped out of the soil.

A couple of months later, with Steve’s departure from Hanoi increasingly imminent, we realised we had an opportunity to work with the farmers and the NGO to keep Nutter’s Butter going into the future. So we asked if the farmers would be interested in also processing the peanuts for us. It was agreed that this was a good idea, we would try to make it like a social enterprise and work together to get it into more shops, paying everyone a fair salary for fair work, as well as some share of any profit that might be made. So a team was formed with us two as founders, Tuan from the NGO basically replacing Steve and connecting us to Ha Tinh, and Mr Hoa, a Ha Tinh man and, usefully, a member of the Ha Tinh Farmer’s Union.

We were quite happy with this latter association with another union as we do like unions and our own Defender’s Union was having a stout, resolute season of it on the pitch. At this stage Minsk FC was naturally sponsored by Nutter’s Butter, our logo emblazoned on the sleeve of every player, a jar for the winner of the Man of the Match trophy. As a club, we’d never won the league but we were leading the pack this year so a special feeling was building. Anyway, for more on that there’s an entire documentary online about it (link here) but the ultimate culmination of the whole season was the bicycle kick below, a stupendous effort at 2-1 down in a match we had to at least draw against the very team who would take the title from us if they could beat us. They didn’t !

Back off the pitch, a veritable maelstrom of Google Docs and Sheets and Folders and the Likes was being created, shared, duplicated, destroyed and ignored as we all worked through some of the various angles to the task we had set ourselves – to make a peanut butter that would sell in supermarkets around Vietnam, and possibly abroad. With Steve leaving and Ewan selling his bar it made sense to move everything to Ha Tinh – with our beloved machine being the main thing that had to be transported to its new home. Apart from that it was all logistics, prices of nuts, where to buy jars, how to incorporate transport costs, who would do what. At his stage Tuan from World Agroforestry and Hoa from the Ha Tinh Farmer’s Union joined the team and we registered the company as a Vietnamese business in June.

In May the move was made and we went down to Ha Tinh with the machine, a few of the World Agroforestry Vietnam team, boxes of jars, bags of stickers, bottles of ingredients and a spring in our step. The actual farmers being of an older generation, another crack unit of peanut butter operatives was assembled of four more middle-aged men who’d do the processing. Our first make was a success, as documented in the photo video below.

Then we left them to make with the nuts they had grown for us. It was not without tredipations we were when those first jars of 100% natural, chemical-free jars arrived up but in all honesty it even tasted cleaner. The fact that they had used a different nut came as something of a surprise but it also immediately made sense so now 150+ of those jars sit in my home awaiting delivery to a couple of shops in Tay Ho. That those shops do not yet know they will soon be hosting Nutter’s Butter on their shelves is our next challenge.

Along with getting our food safety certificate, sourcing and buying another machine, finding machines to make other parts of the make easier, ordering 1000 laser-printed jars and getting the designs spot on for said jars, opening a company bank account, transferring ownership, bitcoin and money, trust, excitement, delicious tastes, moments of clarity, learning, shared delights, problems that afterwards were never problems or at least just burst balloons and soon we were up and off and sailing again, plotting our own course, creating a language for what we do and defining ourselves against and within and as part of the world we inhabit, trying somehow to mould it into a better version of itself!

So keep on roasting, spread the word, and if ever you feel anything is missing just add more nuts.