The Golden Spurtle: The real story behind the quirky World Porridge Making Competition

Every spring, the Scottish village of Carrbridge comes alive with an influx of visitors from around the UK and the world, as far as Australia.

They come and they gather, and they make and they eat porridge.

Only three humble ingredients are allowed – oats, salt and water – but the nuances in taste and texture are all the hands of the competitors until one is crowned the winner.

Those tasked with the decision are three judges, who base their scores on blind taste testing, each serve anonymously presented in a non-descript white bowl. They take their jobs very seriously.

“Getting into that judges’ room was like trying to get into the War Room in the White House. There were almost bodyguards standing out the front,” filmmaker Constantine Costi recalled to The Nightly.

Costi experienced the whole journey of the competition, charting it for his documentary The Golden Spurtle, which is released in cinemas this week. On the surface, the subject is this quirky and singularly focused contest, but the real story is this community.

The Sydney-based Costi discovered its existence when he met Australian taco chef Toby Wilson through a mutual friend. His curiosity was immediately piqued, and at that point, he wasn’t even thinking about it for a film.

The natural reaction to, “so I’m going to compete in a porridge making contest” is “tell me more”. Soon afterwards, Costi was working in Europe and decided to take a trip to Carrbridge, three hours north of Edinburgh, just to wander around and check it out.

“Something in my subconsciousness was leading me to the porridge capital of the world,” he said. “I became not only enamoured by the village and how beautiful, picturesque and dreamlike it is, but mainly the porridge-making community.”

Chief among them, literally the chieftain, is Charlie, who was in charge and about to run the 2023 competition, his last time in the job.

“They were Scottish people of a certain generation, and they aren’t known for small talk or bullsh-tting, they tell you as it is,” Costi recalled. “When I first went up to Charlie, one of his first questions were, ‘what are your intentions?’.”

The Carrbridgers wanted to make sure that Costi and his small crew weren’t going to mock them. The fact they were an Australian crew from the other side of the globe only sparked greater hospitality.

The resultant documentary is one of care and warmth, and that only translates when the filmmakers genuinely love their subjects, and want that reflected in the story they tell the world.

There would be villains and the biggest drama was the biblical storm that blew on the day of the competition, which meant the town parade was cancelled but provided a point of suspense for the documentary.

There’s the overall structure of the contest and plenty of scenes of contenders stirring gloop in a pot while explaining their culinary expertise, but the competition was the Trojan horse.

“(We wanted) to tell a wider story about ambition, obsession and the bittersweet reality of having to let go of something in the way that Charlie has to let go of his chieftainship,” Costi said.

“What we weren’t expecting was the emotional element of the film when we’re dealing with Charlie who’s not in good health and the way that he would accidentally, almost start waxing lyrical, and philosophically gazing out a window in ways that were completely unprompted.”

Charlie wasn’t the only one with health struggles but Costi noticed that they were all trying to express something about themselves through a porridge competition, something that could easily be written off by some as strange and inconsequential, but important to this community.

Throughout the process, Costi ate more porridge than anyone else could in a lifetime, and he had to go on an oat detox not long after the competition.

After The Golden Spurtle premiered at the renowned CPH Dox film festival in Copenhagen, he flew back to Carrbridge to screen it for the town, in the same hall the competition still takes place every year.

“It was such a beautiful night and we all got drunk at the pub afterwards, and I was presented with a handmade Scottish passport,” he recalled.

He spoke with Charlie just last night, who told him a Golden Spurtle from the Sydney suburb of Croydon had mailed him a knitted beanie. The relationships forged will continue, as will the porridge making competition that is gearing up for its biggest year on record.

The community are adamant it will still place in the little village hall, but it’ll be shoulder to shoulder.

“They’ve been approached for satellite events in The Netherlands, Sweden and Norway, where they want to do their own local heats and then the winner of that will fly to Scotland to compete.

“It’s becoming like the Olympic Games”.

But tastier.

The Golden Spurtle is in cinemas on December 11