Beet wine and better days

By all measures, April has been a really unproductive month. Just took a walk with the husband and all we could say for ourselves was that May is coming. With any luck we're through with the chills, the monsoons, the constant cloud cover shrouding our spring. With any gumption I'll shake the tangles out of my head regardless.

I was born 2 months shy of my mother's 30th birthday, so when I'm really in the mood to give myself what for, I compare whatever it is that I'm failing to accomplish with what her daily duties were like--or in an even more extreme mood, those of my grandmother--when she was my age. I grasp the obvious stuff right away--like the fact that I've never had to potty train a toddler, let alone do so in an outhouse in Minnesota in the winter, or follow it up by warming water on the stove for a succession of baths--but a letter from my friend who's still waiting for her mohair straightjacket this past week really gave me insight into how even in the kitchen, where I'm pretty proficient, I can't begin to match what previous generations of women considered routine. M had been out at the farm visiting her elderly mother-in-law, and came across an old recipe box. In it was a recipe that she thought (in the spirit of this blog) I needed for beet wine (& it is true that I was drowning in beets from our weekly CSA farm shares last summer) that goes like this:

5 lbs. beets
3 lbs. sugar
1 lemon sliced
1 orange sliced
1 lb. raisins
1 yeast cake

Cover beets with water and boil until done. Take out beets and add just enough clear water to make a gallon. Put in jar and add sugar, lemon, orange, raisins and yeast. Let stand 28 days. Stir every day. Strain and let stand 4 or 5 more days to settle. Put in jugs or wine bottles.

The real kicker, though, was the list she turned up on another recipe card of what this woman canned as a young bride in 1940. My friend's note puts it mildly: "It makes me tired just to read the list...and she didn't have electricity & the water was hand pumped." In a later conversation she told me that the carrot pickles had apparently been made from the little skinny ones pulled out when thinning the rows, so that truly nothing was wasted. It's a list I'll keep on my desk and read daily in May, if I have to. Onward!

1940 canned:
Beans 25 Qts.
Carrot pickles 8 pts.
Beet pickles 10 pts. 2Qts.
Peas & Carrots 4 pts.
Bean pickles 1 Qt. 2 pts.
Strawberries 20 Qts.
Cherries 10 Qts.
Apricots 12 Qts.
Sauerkraut 5 Gallons
Mixed veg. 12 pts.
Rhubarb 24 Qts.
Strawberry jam 10 jars

A Grandmother's Grief

I started this blog when it looked like I was about to hit a dry spell work-wise, as a means of evading panic and of focusing on the things that keep my heart beating. That dry spell got rained out, and now the trick is finding time to post. Part of the hold up has been that I've been off on an uber-belated luna de miel with the husband in Mexico. While we were away, a letter came from my 97 and a half year old (Nederlands-sprekende) grandmother, whom I adore and who, if you ask me, is the real writer in the family:

I'm interested in your website. Not that I'll ever use it, but you call it "Thuisgemaakt" [ed. note: this means 'homemade']. How did you pick that? Does that have to do with your beer making? I'm horrified that you are into making it....I'm glad [BrewUnc#1] and [BrewUnc#2] finally gave it up. When [BrewUnc#3] comes next week...I'll have a talk with him too.

Oh, Grandma. The beer making continues. A week or so before our trip, the husband and I went on a brewery tour at Sixpoint Craft Ales in Brooklyn. If I didn't already know the basic process, I would have walked out of there pretty confused--our guide, Shane, was an extremely likable, extremely scattered guy who spent a lot of time wrestling with a dubious looking animal he claimed was an Australian Shepherd--but he did take us up into a rooftop storage silo to sample a bunch of different malts, which was helpful.

Unless you really don't drink the stuff, you're probably aware that barley is far and away the foundational beer-making grain within the Western brewing tradition. Malted barley is simply barley that has been moistened and allowed to begin to germinate to tap the rich sugar stores that are within each seed. Before the hull cracks and any sprout emerges, though, the water is drained away and the malted barley is dried, often in the presence of heat. Some temperatures produce just a nice, toasty flavor and warm color; if you pop a few of these seeds in your mouth they taste and crunch a lot like Grape Nuts. To get a darker beer, though, you really have to caramelize those sugars. Seeds of crystal malt, for instance, a key ingredient in black beers, are like sooty little diamonds--but they taste like the sweet crust of creme brulee, not charcoal. These got the husband hankering for something dark, so he suggested I mix up a nice German Bock next, which I did. It fermented while we were away, and last night I kegged it. Attached are pictures of this siphoning process, as well as an important reminder for anyone tempted to ignore the little ones while brewing.

You can see from the side of the fermenter that there's a lot of sediment involved, mostly spent yeast at this point. To get a clearer beer and eliminate that telltale homebrewer's silt, many people siphon the beer off of the sludge and into a second fermenting bucket halfway through the fermentation stage. Then they do it again at kegging time, leaving still more sediment behind. I don't understand this, anymore than I ever understood my friend Carmen's reluctance to leave any stray threads or unbound seam allowance that might betray a garment as homemade. (Granted, Carmen is an exceptional seamstress from a long line of exceptional seamstresses, and like these two-staging brewers probably left the ranks of hobbyists before she hit double digits; still and all, like any other mere mortal I enjoy claiming kudos where kudos are due.)

The upshot is that both of my finished batches have been pretty cloudy so far. The one on the left is the Belgian Dubbel; it's been really fizzy from the beginning and is increasingly so as we near the bottom of the keg. I'd been monkeying around with the CO2 feed in the back of the bar and otherwise jostling the kegs as I hooked up Batch 2 (the IPA) on the right, such that the first post-homecoming glass was almost totally opaque and really pretty disgusting. That made me a little more careful to keep the siphon well clear of the bottom as I kegged the Bock. Then, once I'd finished that, I just barely restrained myself from reaching into the bucket with both hands and smearing the sludge over my face and hair. It is so lush and abundant (and of course yeasty smelling) that it has to be good for you. I'd probably wind up with thick, curly black hair if I was consistent about it. And then life would be sweet.

OK, one last note on the kegging process. Before you set the closed keg aside to age, you first hook it up to the CO2 line. There's a little pressure release valve on the top of the keg which you pull after a minute, repeating this process several times to make sure you've expelled all the oxygen that any intrepid little bacteria that may have made it into the brew need to survive. (Botulism is an anaerobic pathogen, but I'm told I'll live longer if I try to avoid this kind of thinking.) We just got back from Mexico, you remember, so what I thought of this time as I pulled the release and the pressurized air squealed out of the keg was nothing less than my favorite sound: you might be curled up on the couch with a book, or strolling around a sultry square at dusk when a passing camote vendor--selling a freshly steamed kind of sweet potato--pulls a similar kind of release, and the whole cart whistles like a train. And then I defy you not to come running.

The sound of one needle clacking

Here are photos of some of the most hardcore Booze & Yarn members, taken during a rare daylight gathering last spring for the Knitting Olympics.

The real Knitting Olympians began and completed projects in the time between the opening and closing ceremonies, and then donated them all to a women's shelter. Me, I'm just trying to get points for homemade birthday presents. Right now I am knitting a powder blue mohair straightjacket for my oldest, dearest friend. I have been doing so for a very long time, and the sad thing is that I took it on for the promise its big, loopy brioche stitch (a lace style popular in the Victorian age, says C. the knitting goddess) held for relatively instant gratification.

More than two years ago I got a 1940s pattern book (to which I've lost the first couple of pages so I can't tell you the exact date of publication or quote a few choice bits about virtuous huisvrouwly behavior) and started a handsome sweater vest/hairshirt in a color the husband refers to (happily) as feldgrau. Think brownish-greenish moss. It features a very subtle, elegant 'beehive' pattern of twin knit stitches punctuating a field of purls, and is the kind of thing other knitresses ooo and aaah over but that the general public (including the man for whom it's intended) just can't appreciate because it's not flashy or cable-y and because they've never gone back and forth, back and forth across rows of 160 stitches at 9 rows to the inch. I'm still finishing up the back half right now and hope to have it done in time for our seventh anniversary. Then it will be on to the bellywarmers, just in time for a hip senescence.

Anyhow the really bad news about the straightjacket is that my outside deadline for finishing it was M's birthday two days ago. And about 4 or 5 weeks before that, I lost one of the needles. (I was knitting in church--that'll learn me!) For awhile I just switched back to working on the hairshirt, but then finally stopped into School Products to buy a new mate. There, the size 13 needles looked right, but my instructions said 11, so I left them be. Yesterday I finally went in with the piece itself and discovered that I have indeed been knitting on 13s, never mind the instructions--calling the fit of the whole thing completely into question--and that the 13s in the acrylic needles I find I must have to work with such fine mohair are now out of stock. I looked for awhile at the circular needles because their tips look quite sharp, but decided that that would be lunacy because I'm an old-school armpit knitter--I have to clamp the left needle securely under my arm to get anywhere at all. I came home with wooden needles and a lingering sense of doom.

Meanwhile I'm getting totally backlogged on my DIY projects and this blog because I've suddenly got a pile of real work to do. We're going to be away next week but I hope to update you on the Belgian ale and the IPA, as well as tell you about a tour of Sixpoint Craft Ales before I leave.

Bierkraft!

Last night was the weekly free tasting night at Bierkraft, a veritable wonderland that up until now I'd managed to miss, despite the fact that it is right around the corner on 5th Avenue from a cooperative writing studio I joined when I first moved here. Come to Brooklyn and I'll take you there, whoever you are. You'll love it: they've got 900 varieties of beer, arranged by country, region, and style; 250 kinds of artisanal cheeses (& sausages too), from a hunk of Gouda aged to the color of papaya to cheeses infused with honeycombs of dark, creamy Porter; and fancy, largely local chocolates with Deco blue stencils or intriguing savory ingredients. It's the kind of place where you realize that there are people all over the place sufficiently fired up about beauty to devote their lives and livelihoods to churning out their own idiosyncratic expressions of that ideal.

Anyhow I was so amped up when I got home that I called the husband (who's traveling this week) to testify to the astonishing beauty and grace with which I'd just parked the car in a tiny little space. (In retrospect I'd probably better take the subway next time.) He is accustomed to these sorts of calls and let it go to voice mail. Then I fried up a bunch of mushroom and sourkraut pierogis with bacon and red onions (& am heating up the leftovers now, which I'll eat with a glob of artichoke dip) and sat down to write but it just didn't work. I have a hard time wrestling words into place without adequate sleep.

So with bright eyes and a clear head I'm now ready to report that the tasting was held in the basement in a narrow corner of the storeroom lined like a chapel or a jetliner with six rows of two seats on either side of a snug center aisle. We were led in the beer discussions by Tim Esnor, the storeroom manager, a skinny guy in a Sonic Youth t-shirt with round glasses and a shock of composer's hair that made me suspect he plays in an alt-Klezmer band in his free time. He'd chosen 6 oak-aged brews with more or less subtle overtones of bourbon or whiskey to complement 6 liquor-infused chocolates from the Brown Paper Chocolate Co., selected and described by Garvin Mitchell. Garvin was another classic Brooklyn type, a kid whose slow and sultry island voice was set off beautifully by the exacting joy with which he spoke about the confectioner's method, the attention to detail that he extended even to the '1960s classic style stamp labeling' of the packaging.

I expected nothing but porters to pair with the fudge-textured chocolates, but in fact had just two stout porters, an Arcadia Shipwreck Porter from Battle Creek and a Weyerbacher Heresy Imperial Stout from Pennsylvania. Both had derived a syrupy smoothness from their aging, which in the case of the Weyerbacher had been in Jack Daniel's barrels that gave the beer a soft whiff of a paper bag, as opposed to the harsh nail polish remover overtones that can plague the style. One of only two imports on the bill was Harviestoun's Old Engine Oil from Scotland, a whiskey barrel aged brew with the salty smack of soy sauce. Garvin paired this one with milk chocolates made with caramels steeped in Jack Daniel's and punctuated with bits of raw cashews. He said that was his favorite chocolate per se, but the best duo, he agreed, would come later with the pairing of dark raspberry-and-macadamia-nut chocolate and the other import, a Belgian sour called Rodenbach Gran Cru ('funky, funky stuff,' cautioned Tim, 'so don't pound it. It's like carbonated vinegar and cherry juice.') I loved the combination and will undoubtedly think of it next time I need a great birthday gift.

My favorite beers? Always, it seems, the sometimes cidery, sometimes creamy Belgian styles. According to Tim, the 'biggest, baddest, nastiest beers possible'--and he meant this in the kindest possible way--are all coming out of the States, thanks to the American penchant for taking a traditional style like a Belgian ale and blowing it out by doing something like aging it in liquor casks. The Weyerbacher Prophecy, for instance, was essentially a fruity Belgian Tripel that had been put into bourbon barrels ('I mean, who does that?!' remarked Tim with obvious appreciation). Best of all was the strong (10% ABV) but very smooth and creamy Allagash Musette from Portland, ME with a mild scent of apples and a nice bit of head.

OK, I've got to get to work now. Tonight I'll be switching gears and knitting and drinking with the lovely ladies and occasional gentlemen of Booze & Wine. Stay tuned.

the most feminine of beverages

From a NYTimes obituary, Feb. 2007:

Mr. Eames called himself a beer anthropologist, a role that allowed him to expound on subjects like what he put forward as the world's oldest beer advertisement, dating to roughly 4000 B.C.

In it a Mesopotamian stone tablet depicted a headless woman with enormous breasts holding goblets of beer in each hand. The tagline, at least in his interpretation, was: ''Drink Elba, the beer with the heart of a lion.''

Mr. Eames, who followed the golden liquid to 44 countries, often told about his perilous trek high in the Andes in pursuit of an ancient brew made from strawberries the size of baseballs. Or about Aztecs forbidding drunkenness except among those 52 years of age or older. Or about accounts that said Norse ale was served with garlic to ward off evil.

Mr. Eames's favorite and perhaps most startling message was that beer is the most feminine of beverages. He said that in almost all ancient societies beer was considered a gift from a goddess, never a male god. Most often, women began the brewing process by chewing grains and spitting them into a pot to form a fermentable mass.

Ah, the resourcefulness of women! I heard from S. this morning that when she was in the Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea she'd repurposed government-issued condoms from the medical kit as fermenting vessels for 'wine made out of anything growing from the ground.' When pressed she admitted that they'd exploded (like beer bottles do if you get a little crazy with the priming sugar) for lack of a little hole poked in their tops.

I'm going to stick to kit beers until I get the hang of this. Batch #2 is an IPA. Historically, India Pale Ales were stronger to allow fermentation to continue at sea, with lots of hops to prevent spoilage. After bringing the malt extract and the grains to the boil, I pulled out the muslin bag of sodden English barley and tossed in two kinds of bittering hops. Later came a plug of fuggle hops, first propegated by one Richard Fuggle and known for their soft, resiny, aniseedy, almost tropical notes.

This time I was all set to go and easily strained the wort into the fermenting bucket using my knees to grip the pot, leaving my hands free to hold and swivel the strainer (actually, a splash guard for frying--gotta think about upgrading some of my equipment) so that it wouldn't clog. There's a lot of sediment involved, mainly boiled, greenish-brownish hops that look like wet henna and smell about as bad. (Open up a beer and boil it for yourself to get a sense of how wrong this is. Now imagine that there's a whole lot of plant matter in there that hasn't been strained out yet.)

Fermentation kicked in about 5 hours later; that was about 5 days ago, and in keeping with option #2: finishing hops: dry hopping step described in the kit instructions, I've just put in a muslin bag--you betcha, I sanitized it!--containing a second fuggle plug. Dry hopping, as opposed to adding the finishing hops to the boil about 2 minutes before the pot comes off the stove, apparently produces the aggressively hoppy aroma associated with the best IPAs. Now that I think of it, I think the directions said they were supposed to spend 4 or 5 days in the brew at the start of the primary fermentation, not the secondary fermentation as I've just done. But I'm much calmer following the whole Batch #1 crisis. How bad can it be?

And now, a moment for some tangential ranting

When I began culinary school I got a great gig writing recipes and articles about cooking for people enrolled in grocery store loyalty programs around the country. I still do food writing and recently, my friend S. put me on to a daily news digest specifically covering the grocery industry. That's where I found this post:

A while back you had an article about female bosses and sexism in the workplace. You mentioned a party invitation from your daughter’s middle school, where the girls’ (pink) invitation was for a Sweet Dreams Pajama Party and the boys’ (brown) invitation was for a Poker Party. Obvious gender stereotyping.

My daughter is a high school junior. The other day she received a brochure from the School of Engineering at a major Midwestern university. They are offering separate engineering-oriented summer camps for high school "guys" and "girls." The male version (green block print) was called was called "SURVIVOR: ENGINEERING OUTBACK (Guys-only Engineering Camp)." The female version (pink with curlicues) was called "Project Discovery (it’s a Girl thing)."

The Guys "complete an intensive engineering project including field work led by our professors". The Girls "attend hands-on lab sessions."

The Guys "explore engineering specialties hands-on" while the Girls "gain an understanding of what engineers do."

The Guys "see engineering in action on a mid-week field trip" while the Girls "tour engineering facilities with our faculty."

The Guys go "GPS geocaching, rock climbing, and other fun stuff" while the girls "develop problem-solving skills through team-building exercises."

The contact for the Guys’ Camp was the Director of Recruitment, while the contact for the Girls’ Camp was the Director of Diversity.

Guess which college my daughter crossed off her list!

OK, now here's where things get tangential, but this is a blog about creative endeavors written by a MidWestern girl (who can see 40 looming on the horizon but who actually just rejected the word 'woman' because it sounded uptight, maybe even discreditingly so), after all; please bear with me.

One of my nieces is also a high school junior. Until recently, she's wanted to be an engineer. Now she's not so sure. Likewise, a younger cousin showed tremendous capacity for engineering--her senior project was awarded a U.S. patent and she solved a thorny design problem on one of her first days at a German automotive company by very intuitively correcting a drawing so that a brake part 'looked right'--but quit and became a math teacher, in part because she didn't feel comfortable in a dominantly masculine work environment.

As for me, I've just spent a weekend visiting with a friend who I realized has played a very important role as a model for me over the years. She's half a generation ahead of me and is a teacher, as I was until 2003. She's also a sojourner, a risk-taker, a mother, an entrepreneur, and a tremendous believer in human potential.

My grandmother had to quit school at 14 to help out on the farm. My mother was the first in her family to attend college, and felt she could choose between being a nurse and a teacher. Me, I'm overeducated and underengaged. I taught for 12 years partly out of love and commitment to social justice, but partly because I didn't know what else I could do, and was afraid to find out. Now, four years into that discovery process, I am still my own biggest enemy. It's too easy for me to write off (or more critically, to not write of) my interests and talents as being inconsequential.

As a teacher, I hope that I helped some of my young students to appreciate their worth. I hope that whatever my nieces decide to pursue, they will know the pleasure of being crazily in love with their creative process. I am grateful for friends--and now my husband, too--who keep showing me how it's done and insisting that I do it, too. And to you, if you're still reading this. La la la.

Batch 1: Brewing Basics

Hallelujah! Just had a quick taste and I haven't ruined batch #1. Let me explain:

By all accounts, beer making is a forgiving process. And that makes sense: people brewed beer for centuries because all the boiling made dubious water fit to drink. Around the 12th century, says BrewUnc #1 (who just happens to be a medievalist), brewers around Frankfurt began substituting hops--first described in this employ by Hildegard von Bingen (love her!) I think--for the fennel, juniper, and other herbs commonly used to disguise off tastes, and got themselves a natural preservative to boot. There aren't a lot of beasties that can live in alcohol anyhow.

So why was I worried? Well, after the cooking stage I'd transferred my first 5 gallon batch of Belgian, Westmalle Dubbel-style ale--a purportedly chewy, malty brew that has a nice coffee aroma when kegged--into an obsessively sanitized fermenting bucket equipped with a nifty, Vinty-style airlock. I'd been told to relax repeatedly by BrewUnc#1 during the course of a telephonic play-by-play, and called him back just 3 or 4 hours later, ecstatic to report the CO2 bubbles that were making the airlock's inner, floating cap tick like a metronome. I worried again the next day when those bubbles slowed, then stopped. The husband had opened the window and the temperature in our living room where my beer was fermenting had dropped a good 10 degrees--potentially causing a catastrophic yeast die-off, I figured. "Nope," said BrewUnc#1. "That just means the main fermentation stage is over. What happens when you put a little pressure on the lid?" It burped a bubble into the airlock like Tupperware. "You've forgotten the mantra again," he told me. "Relax, have a homebrew." Easy for him to say. He had two finished batches on tap to choose from.

For the next ten days as my beer clarified and matured, I relaxed. I really did. So much so that when it came time to keg it and put it under pressure for a final aging period, I didn't consult the directions, the BrewUncs, Charlie Papazian, or Jess, the kindly sage at Alternative Beverage: I just poured in a little of the priming sugar and...uh oh. Potentially contaminated my beer. You're supposed to boil it for about 5 minutes first, both to dissolve and pasteurize it. (The addition of priming sugar to bottles just before they are sealed is what carbonates them; the real kicker was that this step is optional when your kegerator has a CO2 tank.) All the aforementioned sources told me that it would probably be OK, unless of course it wasn't, in which case no one would die anyhow because the beer would be completely, unmistakably undrinkable.

...Which brings us at last to the hallelujah part. Jess told me to wait until the weekend, then have a taste. I drew off a glass last night as I was cooking. It had a thick, cream-colored head (the priming sugar is doing its magic!), a fair amount of sediment that will get tossed out with the first couple of glasses when we tap it in earnest next weekend, and a complex caramel-y flavor. No skunk taste. No beasties.

Piece of cake.