A beginning winemaker wrote in the other day asking about my Master Vintner wine kits, and his questions were the kind of direct ones that merit good answers: seasoned winemakers with a bunch of kits under their belt may have already had these answered, or they’ve got big stuff on their minds, like how to fit another wine rack into the basement.
Hi, thanks for taking the time to read this. I’m Dave and I live in Oregon. I have 40 grape vines, enough to be a wannabe wine maker. I also use the master vinter and sommelier kits. My questions are about the juice in the kits:
Is the grape juice concentrated, reduced or pasteurized.?
What type of chemicals are added?
Is the grape juice concentrated, reduced or pasteurized.?
What is the juice in the kits treated with?
Are there any unfermentable sugars added?
Is it ok, instead of filling up to 6 gallons to fill up to 5, to make it more flavorful?
I’d appreciate your response, I’m a budding wine nerd!!! Thanks Oregon Dave
Oregon Dave,
Thanks for writing–all good questions and since you’ve made wine, you’re not a ‘wannabe’. You’re part of the family of people who make and enjoy wine–and nerds are our favourite!
Master Vintner kits are made from a blend of concentrates and fresh, single-strength juices. Keep in mind that the concentrates themselves are made from single-strength juice that has had the water removed through one of the common concentration processes
Vacuum distillation
Reverse Osmosis
Spinning cone
Different producers use different processes, but all come down to carefully removing the water without stripping the flavours and aromas of the juice.
There are a couple of good reasons to use concentrate in a kit, and one very important one.
Concentrate weighs less and ships lighter than single-strength juice. That saves money not only on the front end, when we buy our raw materials, but also on the back-end when we ship it to you.
Concentrate is shelf-stable at room temperature. With the high sugar level and extremely low pH, it doesn’t allow spoilage organisms to grow, and is very resistant to oxidation.
Most importantly, that low pH/high sugar effect carries over when concentrate is blended with the juice. Fresh, single-strength grape juice can’t be held or shipped at room temperature, and even at refrigeration temperatures (4-8C/36-40F) it will still spoil in only a few weeks. But if you blend it with concentrate to a minimum specific level of sugar and pH, it will last 12-18 months on a shelf. Concentrate is what makes wine kits possible!
Once the juices for the kits are assembled (blended, adjusted for acid and pH, etc) they are flash pasteurized and sterile packed. This process involves heating the juice to 70-82C (160-180F) very quickly, then cooling it to room temp again, all within a cycle of under 90 seconds. After that, it’s weighed out into sterile bags and capped. Other than very low amounts of sulfite, no other chemical additives are used.
Sulphite is your friend, and wants you to be happy.
Juices aren’t treated with anything that isn’t already in use in the commercial wine industry. They can be amended with grape acids (tartaric and malic acid) or tannins, but that’s it.
It’s very rare for wine kits to use any added sugars: they don’t integrate well into the flavour profile if used in any quantity, but if they are needed to boost ABV in the finished kit, it will say so on the label on the side of the box.
Unfermentable sugars, such as lactose, are not used.
Nossir, not a thing!
It is very specifically not okay to make a kit to 5 US gallons (19 litres) rather than the specified 6 gallons (23 litres). That will throw off the acid, pH and flavour profile completely, and it’s kind of like making your frozen concentrated orange juice up with only two cans of water instead of three: is that better orange juice, or just a thick glass of acid, too-sweet goop?
Big kit, big flavour, big wine
If you want to boost the character of your wine kit, buy one of our premium kits, like Sommelier Select, which contain more, and more expensive-to-source juices. They’re not ready to drink as early as the smaller kits, but after a few months, You’ll see where the extra money went–into higher-cost, higher-demand juices that cost more to use. Rather than cut down your yield by 25%, spend 25% more money, get your extra six bottles and delicious wine to boot!
Thanks for writing Oregon Dave. I hope this helps out, and wish you many years of happy winemaking!
hereticn. One who holds and persistently maintains an opinion or a doctrine at variance with the accepted standards of any school or party, and rejected or condemned by it; one who rejects a generally accepted belief.
All of these plants were cloned from a bunch of basil purchased from the supermarket!
I have pretty good success with basil in my garden. I usually plant six or eight bushes and get a good harvest from them. This year I was a little behind the clock getting the garden started–I had to rebuild my garden boxes, and that took weeks longer than I had budgeted, what with a bad case of the flu and then the whole plague thingy holding the whole project back.
When I finally got everything in the ground, only four of my basil clones were suitable for transplant (you don’t have to buy expensive basil starts or even seeds. Check out this video for the fast and easy cloning procedure). But that was no problem: the yield was still pretty good.
You can deadhead the plant for a week or two, but much longer than that and the leaves start to get tough
By the last week of July the plants were fully grown and trying hard to flower. I felt like a jerk brushing the bees out of the way to deadhead them (I swear, one looked at me, ‘Hey, I was eating that!) but by start of the second week of August, they were ready: time to harvest!
Hard to convey just how much this is: it completely filled a large shopping bag!
The four plants yielded pretty well and the smell in the house was fantastic.
Just the leaves and tender stems.
This much basil at one time just can’t be used up–I made a nice caprese salad, and threw some leaves in a tomato sandwich, but once stripped from their branches, these leaves were destined for greatness: they were going to be my yearly Heretic Pesto.
The right way
I call it that because it’s not pesto alla genovese at all, but rather a sauce made from basil, olive oil, garlic, and parmesan. The difference is that I use a blender instead of a mortar and pestle to make it. which pretty much enrages people from Genoa. Italian cooks are staunch about the ‘right way’ to cook anything, to the point where villages are convinced that the people who live ten kilometers away in the next village are insane because they use garlic in a recipe instead of the ‘right way’.
Which is pretty funny, since basil is native to India, the original sauce is from a Roman dish called moretum, made by crushing garlic, salt, cheese, herbs, olive oil and vinegar into a paste, and an early Genovese recipe for pesto calls for marjoram or parsley and Dutch cheese.
When I was a chef-de-partie I made 20 litres of Hollandaise, every single day. Never touch it, now.
Nevermind. I just like calling it Heretic Pesto, and my version is an emulsified sauce rather than a crushed paste. Emulsification is when two normally unmixable things, like oil and water, are brought together with an emulsifying agent that allows them to form a smooth, evenly distributed mix of the two, like homogenized milk or Hollandaise sauce.
Five litres or so of boiling water will do the job
To get my pesto to emulsify I have to blanch the basil leaves. This not only breaks down the cellulose, but also sets the colour of the leaves, keeping them a beautiful bright green. The colour never oxidises after the blanch, so it never goes black or brown and stays gorgeous even after freezing.
Toss the garlic into olive oil and put on low-medium heat until it starts to bubble, and then turn to low for 20 minutes.
There’s another trick I do with this sauce: because it’s emulsified, it’s lighter in flavour and hits the palate differently from the traditional kind and raw garlic really overpowers it. So I poach the garlic–lots and lots of it–in high-quality olive oil, until it’s soft, but before it picks up any colour. It makes for a rich, but deeply earthy and sweet garlic character, rather than the bright, punchy taste you’d get by putting garlic into a blender.
Once the basil is blanched and cooled, and the garlic is poached, it’s time to assemble the other players and made one more heresy happen.
The other players: parmesan, galic, salt, pepper and nuts.
Expensive, aged Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, check! Garlic, poached and on deck, check! Sea salt and fresh Malabar pepper, check! Pine nuts, no thank-you!
I hate pine nuts. They’re greasy little wads of no-flavour, cost like plutonium, and I have never managed to buy any that weren’t at least slightly rancid. Plus, they are extremely neutral in flavour, much like the over-hyped and tasteless macadamia nut.
In their place, I use flaked almonds. Almonds are nutty, slightly sweet and mildly woody, a perfect foil for this sauce. Your mileage may vary: you might adore pine nuts (ick) you might be able to buy them for less per pound than printer ink (good luck) and they may be fresh where you live. Good for you, I use almonds and love it.
A sturdy, high-powered blender is essential to the process.
The final player on our stage is a really good blender. Many home blenders are designed to be used for 30-90 seconds at a time only, and long usage really tires them out. Buy a good one and you’ll never run out of Margaritas or excuses to drink them.
The process–could have saved you a long read by just posting this, but I enjoy typing words.
The sequence of making emulsified pesto goes like this: add about 1/3 of your blender’s capacity of blanched basil leaves. Whiz on high speed, adding just enough water to allow them to turn into teensy particles and form a smooth paste. Toss in about a half cup of nuts, gloop in a bunch (half a cup?) of olive oil, some poached garlic and a bit of the garlic oil, salt and pepper and keep whizzing until it looks great. Adjust with more salt/pepper and give it a final whizz. I’d be more accurate with the recipe, but there isn’t a recipe, just a process for turning blanched leaves into delicious sauce. Follow your heart.
It’s a fine batch of pesto, enough for the fall and early winter.
One more trick up my sleeve: if you have enough basil that you need to make more than one batch in your blender like I do, don’t pour your containers full as you go: dump it all into a large measuring bowl and give it a quick stir to make sure all your pesto is evenly flavoured and homogenous-you can even adjust the salt and pepper a final time when you do that. Then you can fill freezer containers and chortle with glee at the bounty you’ve generated!
Perfect summer meal
And there’s always enough left from the process to make a bit of pasta for that night’s dinner. But pesto isn’t just for pasta–try it on roast potatoes, as a sauce on a grilled steak, put it on your fish before you grill it, throw a dab on an oyster and put it on the barbecue . . . hmm, looks like I need to make more pesto.
Sealed tightly it freezes well for at least six months.
I can’t help it. Every time I come over the crest of 148 street down towards the beach I breathe a sigh as I look out over the bay, and marvel over the place I’m privileged to live in. It’s a blessing to be in a place with so much beauty and so many wonderful people.
And there are some great things coming up. I can’t wait to dive right into 2019 and take great big bites of the future.
Man does not live by wine alone. Not even with beer to help him out. No, there are times in a fella’s life when he needs a garden to bring him peace and happiness.
The garden has been really productive this year. Between a stretch of good weather early on, a long dry summer and a new fertilizer regimen I’ve managed to harvest huge volumes of peas, zucchini blossoms and marrows, basil for days, cabbages, cauliflower, artichokes, cilantro, peppers, broccoli, carrots, spinach, currants, apples, et cetera, et cetera. Imagine the beauties you can make with this and the best puree food blender, great recipes, super easy and healthy.
Photogenic vegetables! Yellow zucchini, cauliflower and flat-leaf parsley.
There is one crop that often eludes me: tomatoes. We’re technically zone 8, but the garden is right on the water just off of Mud Bay in Crescent Beach. This means we get a lot of cool, damp nights in late summer, right at the moment when we need one last push of heat to finish ripening our tomatoes. This usually means blight, right when you’re hoping for a good crop.
Dunsmuir Gardens. I’ve had my plot for 17 years!
The only two cures are 1) planting the earliest-ripening tomatoes you can find, and 2) good luck with the weather. This year we had both, and the tomatoes are coming in thick and fast–and ripe.
They were carefully staked, but blew through the ties and went sprawling
Mostly heritage varieties, the crop also includes some black varieties and yellows
First things first, you gotta have some toasted tomato sandwiches.
Homemade bread, mayo and the green stuff is homemade pesto from my basil. Flaked Murray River salt and cracked pepper is exactly right. No bacon on this one as I was starting to get a curly tail and a snub nose . . .
But after a couple of dozen sandwiches (and so much bacon) with the tomatoes piling up, it was time to make some sauce.
Picked all these in one day
The classic Italian pomodoro is quick tomato sauce that’s ready in less than half an hour, but it it uses canned Roma tomatoes, which are already very well-cooked during processing. For a sauce from fresh tomatoes you need a little more time and planning.
Step one, saute some onions and peppers until completely soft.
Small dice sweet onion and red peppers.
This takes a lot longer than cookbooks or internet recipes tell you. I’m not sure why everyone lies: “Cook until soft, 10 minutes or so.” No Debra, it’s more like a good 30-40 minutes to get onions thoroughly soft, and it’s crucial: if the onions aren’t soft before the tomatoes are added, the acid in the tomatoes will set the onions and they’ll stay disconcertingly firm no matter how long you cook the sauce. Olive oil, medium heat, lots of patience.
While they’re cooking down, cut up your tomatoes. They don’t have to be tiny, but you want to get them chunked up to expose their inner liquidity. Most recipes will tell you to remove the skins, but I can’t be bothered: they cook down to nothing, and I usually use this in a very rustic sauce (more on that below). If I was going to make it into tomato soup (easy, with a little cream and herbs) I’d put it through a blender and push it through a strainer. But I’m not, so I won’t, and this is what I got:
Chunked up and ready to go
Once the onions are completely soft, add them to the pan.
Pardon the dirty stove-top. I cook a lot, clean a little less.
Time to bring the heat
The little brown things that look like Kalamata olives are actually black cherry tomatoes. They’re really bright tasting and very zippy and sweet. Even a few adds a lot of flavour to a sauce. The only other thing needed at this point is a a whole head of garlic chopped fine, and a healthy pinch of kosher salt–about a teaspoon. The salt at this point helps break down the tomatoes and bust cell membranes, releasing juice. It will need more salt before it’s used, but a pinch now is the way.
Perfect: liquid reduced, sugars caramelized and everything soft and luscious
This has to cook down a long, long time, at least three hours. I was able to roast three batches of coffee, finish my business correspondence, edit an article I was working on, fight with a seagull and do some vacuuming while it cooked. You can tell it’s done when the clear liquid is reduced and the raw tomato taste is replaced by a sweet intensity of flavour.
That’s the way to store Summer for the Fall.
Then it’s ready to eat or freeze: it’ll keep for about three months tightly sealed in a freezer. As a base tomato sauce it’s fantastic on pizza, in lasagna, or adapted to a soup or any number of others. But for me it shines best in a simple kjilkje. The food of my people, kjilkje is homemade noodles, usually served with bacon or sausage, a tomato sauce and lots of other Mennonites crowded around to eat vast plates of it and chase it down with hot, sweet tea.
A bit fancier than my relatives would make it, but I never do anything that I can’t overdo instead
This time I diced and fried some of my guanciale (Italian pork jowl bacon that I make) and topped the noodles with that, sauce, a bit of Parmigiano Reggiano and some fresh chopped basil.
The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.
— Michael Pollan
In all the years I lived in my parent’s house, I was a garden slave. I had to work like the lawn care near Denver, NC! My father had back problems and wasn’t able to do heavy work. Throw in the fact that I’m the size of a moose and while poorly inclined to manual labour, was capable of it if pressed, and I spent part of every summer adding endless loads of sand and peat moss to the leaden clay soil of our backyard, digging and shoveling.
When I left home I swore I’d never pick up a shovel in anger again. Gardening? Bah, that’s for chumps.
So, when I settled down in White Rock the very first thing I did was get a community garden plot and set to digging and shoveling.
Community Garden at Blackie Spit, 17 years on.
Gardening doesn’t just get under your fingernails, it gets into your soul. Every year I learn something new, every person I meet in the gardens tells me something important, every season brings challenges and surprises, and wonder of wonders, I really enjoy digging and shoveling. Go figure.
I did take away some lessons from enforced servitude at my parent’s plot: after a few years of amending the heavy clay of my community plot I gave up: even 10 cubic metres of peat and sand didn’t leaven the brick-hard yellowish clay (probably stratified clay related to the Puyallup Interglacial deposits all around the Lower Mainland) so I built boxes and filled them with light, airy topsoil, so friable and free-running it’s like cake mix. It was after that that I made real progress growing crucifers, carrots, peas, tomatoes, potatoes, herbs, lettuces, rhubarb, artichokes, berries, apples, et cetera.
Raspberries and blackcurrants
One of the things I’ve learned in the last few years is recognising that not everything you didn’t plant is a weed, and not all weeds are pests. A case in point is purslane. For a decade I cursed the stupid weed, having made the mistake of rototilling it to get rid of it. It can root from a stem, and torn-off stems can remain viable for decades, so a rototiller is the best way to spread it. Oy.
Shiny happy weed
A few year’s back a friend of mine was looking at my garden and openly admired my purslane. When I goggled at this, he goggled right back and asked why I wasn’t harvesting it for the table. Cue the light-bulb: not only did I not have to weed it anymore, I could just go ahead and eat it. That’s my kind of weed. It’s lightly tart, a bit like sorrel that way, and is a rich source of omega-3 oils, as well as a polysaccharide character–that means it’s kind of slimy, but in the same way that okra is, providing a lot of soluble dietary fibre. It wasn’t long before I was tossing purslane into salads and stir fries, and I began looking around for other ways to use it.
One of the dishes is a pork and purslane stew with tomatillos. It was a recipe I found in Taunton’s Fine Cooking magazine, but as with any recipe I ignored the fine print and applied my own cooking preferences to it. It may not be authentic to the original Mexican cook who made it, but it’s a big hit around Chaos Manor.
Gotta get off all that good soil
Step one is to harvest and wash the purslane, and then pick it over. You want mostly the leaves, and the tender little stems near the tip of the plant. You can eat the thicker stems, but they’re a little woody and tend to be bitter.
That’ll do, pig
Step two is to get a big honkin’ pork shoulder roast. It needs to be nice and fatty. Seriously people, stop eating so much lean pork. It doesn’t have good texture and it’s nearly as bland as chicken breast when it’s too lean. Fat is where the flavour and the fat-soluble nutrients are, and eating fat is really good for you. I found a nice-looking four-pounder at my butcher and proceeded to chunk it up in 1.5 inch cubes.
Salt and pepper go together like . . . a mineral and a dried berry?
I got a pan smoking hot, tossed the pork cubes with a generous coating of salt and pepper and proceeded to brown it off in small batches.
I’m awfully fond of this
The trick to getting good flavour out a cut of meat is to brown it well, developing all the richness that Maillard reactions (caramelizing, sort-of) bring to it. That brown goo on the bottom of the pot is rich, tawny gold. The French call it ‘fond’ and it’s the basis for a deeply meaty experience. Don’t waste a speck of it.
While I was browning off the pork I assembled the usual suspects for this dish.
Onions, cilantro, cumin, tomatillos
I was in great good luck the day I decided to make this dish: my local greengrocer had fresh tomatillos in stock, for the first time this year. I even had to explain to the nice-but-terribly-young lady at the checkout what they were. No matter, she was truly interested in what the weird old man was cooking up this time.
Medium slices: they’re going to cook down to nothing anyway.
Onions get sliced up, and the garlic gets finely diced. Because I brown the hell out of my onions (more below) I saved the garlic aside to add after they were done, because garlic gets bitter if it’s the least bit burnt.
Brown them hard
I cooked the onions until they were dark brown and completely soft, using the liquid that came out of them to loosen the fond off of the bottom of the pot and bring it to the party. The sugars in the onion will caramelize a long, long way and you can cook the living whee out of them and they’ll add more depth and colour to the stew.
Unwrap and wash before use
While the onions were cooking way, way down I de-papered and washed the tomatillos. They do look like a really green tomato, but they’re quite different. the flesh is much firmer and less watery, and they’re more citrusy and resiny-sappy than even the greenest tomato.
I rarely have less than three gallons of chicken stock on hand. One never can predict chicken-related emergencies.
When the onions had fully submitted to my will, I added about a litre of homemade chicken stock. Getting homemade chickens is the hardest part of making it. I scraped and stirred to make sure the pot was fully deglazed.
Godspeed my little green friends
With the heat turned to high I slid in the tomatillos and (not shown) the chopped garlic and the toasted and ground cumin.
Seared and crispy
I added the pork back. I tasted a few pieces and seriously? I could have sat with a fork and a little hot sauce and eaten a pound of that pork, it was so crispy from the fat being well-browned. I could tell even before cooking this was really going to come together.
Happy green weed
You can see in this picture that the purslane has been relieved of thick stems and nicely cleaned up. The pot is getting full, but the purslane will cook down and I was planning on boiling off at least 1/3 of the volume.
Plantains are the grown-up of bananas, kind of starchy and boring unless you know how to spice them up.
While the stew was cooking down I put on a pot of rice and prepped plantains. They’re kind of a cross between an actual banana and a starchy vegetable. Fried in butter and hit with salt, a little brown sugar and some lime juice, they’re really tasty. I usually add some allspice and nutmeg and chopped Scotch Bonnet pepper, but this stew is Mexican (ostensibly) not Jamaican, so I held off.
Fried bananas anyone?
Once the plantains were planted in the pan, it was time to check on the stew.
Reduced and raucous
It had reduced to a wonderfully deep and rich stew, thickened by the purslane. The flavours are complex, but clear. I have a bug about dishes with too many non-complimentary or non-contrasting/counterpointing elements. They seem muddy to me. This stew has the richness and savoury development of the pork cut by the acidity of the tomatillos and the purslane with a bit of a bass note from the cumin and sweetness from the onions, pretty much the way I like my flavour profiles.
Then, to the plate.
Yes, it’s a hearty portion, but I was in the garden all day!
A handful of chopped cilantro, a squeeze of lime, a daub of thick yogurt and a dab of habanero sauce and it was a little bit of heaven. There’s enough leftover to freeze for future meals, and I put a bit aside for Hot Tub and Nacho Night. It will make a great topping for nachos, with the addition of some pickled jalapenos to spice it up.
That was the meal that was. Now that I’m back to freelancing again (need a brilliant copywriter? Shoot me an email. I also do education, brand championship, marketing, strategic consulting, and promotions. Let’s talk.) I’ll have time to do more blogging and catch up with some issues and ideas that I have been itching to cover. See you soon.
The grape variety is a cross between Sauvignon Blanc and another non-grape fruit, Pollia Condensata, commonly called the Marble Berry.
The metallic colour of the fruit comes from quantum effects rather than pigment
Back in 2008, Conjectural Technologies’ lead scientist, Professor Corey Irwin was looking at the reflectivity of wine grapes when he accidentally included a sample of the tropical plant in his magnetic resonance cylcotron.
The world’s only Magnetic Resonance Cyclotron
“Frankly,” says Professor Corey, “They were part of a table arrangement in my office that caught in the sleeve of my lab coat. I didn’t notice them because the berries are tiny and the colour is so strong that they don’t actually look like real fruit, more like crazy ball-bearings.”
But the results from the test showed otherwise, and the fruit’s surface reflects nearly 50% of the light that hits it–vitis vinifera grapes reflect between one and two percent–due to the surface composition of the skin. “It’s as though the fruit is composed of nothing but tiny little mirrors, all over it!” explains the Professor.
Sensing the potential for a revolution in the appearance of wine, the team at Conjectural Technologies launched into a genetic cross-breeding program, using Crispr-Cas 9 genome editing technology. With CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) “spacer” sequences are transcribed into short RNA sequences capable of guiding the system to matching sequences of DNA. When the target DNA is found, Cas9 binds to the DNA and cuts it, activating the targeted gene.
Chief Disruption Officer and Lead winemaker at TVCC-Kitworld, Tim Vandergrift is delighted with the results.
CDO Tim Vandergrift, looking over his experimental vineyard
“This is a real game changer. For thousands of years wine has been red, white or pink. Well, brown too, if you forget and leave the top of the fermenter open. But now we have the ability to change its colour, not with dyes or pigments, but with the harnessed power of quantum physics and Genetically Modified Organisms!. By using gene editing and forcing together the sequences of pollia with Sauvignon Blanc and certain key sequences of hagfish and African land snails we were able to produce a grape that not only reflects more light, but has the viscosity to hold the reflectivity in suspension, so it doesn’t just fall out during fining, or settle on the bottom of the glass.”
Vandergrift admits that the wine is slightly different from standard grape wines, including a textural change. “The hagfish and snail genes are there to provide a colloidal gel that keeps the reflective particles from binding to anything else. It does make the wine viscous, but it’s not too gooey–it has exactly the same viscosity as transmission fluid, and once you get used to it, it’s really nice.”
The new wine, tentatively called ‘Quantum White’ will be available for commercial release on April 1, 2019. Expect it to be in high demand, as in addition to providing a pleasing flavour and aroma, it is expected to be an excellent substitute for Dexron III transmission fluid.
The Further Adventures of Attention-Surplus-Disorder Man
If you read my blog for a while you’ll come to understand that I have a pretty serious problem getting fixated on projects, whether it’s brewing, winemaking, cheese, marksmanship, motorcycles, gardening, powerlifting, whatever. It’s gotten particularly bad in recent years with brewing beer: when I find out about a new style or a beer I’ve never heard of, I have to research it and make it until I feel like I have a grasp of it. You may click here to learn more about our cellar cooling system.
With that in mind, I was watching a travel show and the host hit a cafe in Northern Vietnam and sat around drinking something called Bia hơi. At first blush, it looks like a light industrial lager, common in hot countries. But then they poured it over ice and my ears perked up.
Icy cold! Photo from Wikimedia Commons
Street scene. I’m sweaty just looking at it.
It turns out this stuff is a sort of jackleg homebrew, brewed quickly and matured almost not at all, and delivered daily to bars and street-corner dispensing spots in jerry cans and kegs. Production is described as ‘informal’, with no government oversight or monitoring, and it’s meant to be drank absolutely ice cold, or even over ice, and the alcohol content is 3% ABV or less.
All of this makes perfect sense in Vietnam, which is not only incredibly hot but also terribly humid. You could drink rather a lot of beer like this and stay hydrated and refreshed without actually getting blotto, with the added bonus that it sells for something like 15 cents a glass.
After a bit of research on the interwebs, I asked around for people who’d actually been to Vietnam and tasted the beer. I lucked out in that a friend of mine who is a very discerning BJCP judge had been there a few years ago, and he was willing to share his opinion.
“Undrinkable swill full of acetaldehyde, sourness and mostly off-flavours. You’re an idiot if you want to make that.”
I get it: when you’re charging less than a buck a gallon for your beer, Quality Control is way down the list and you can’t throw a batch away just because it’s off–look, there’s a surly tourist, he’ll drink anything, get the bucket! It’s inevitable that the quality would be variable. I wanted to make my own, and I was pretty sure I could do a little better. It would have to be more expensive than fifteen cents a glass, but honestly, not that much more.
I flat-out pulled a recipe out of my butt. I chose to emulate a rice-adjunct lager with a starting gravity below 1.030 and hops around 15 IBU. I immediately ran into an issue: in order to get a moderate hop character I was going to have to either alter my regular brewing style (more on that below) or substantially decrease the amount of hops in the recipe: hop utilisation is affected by the density of the wort (yes, it’s lots more complicated, please don’t write me screeds about it) and a really low gravity beer like this is hard to make without over-bittering for style.
Another issue I contemplated was volume: if this stuff was good, and as low in alcohol as I was planning, I was probably going to enjoy more than one glass a night–it might replace most of my water intake. Making a single 19-litre keg would have me out of beer in ten days at most, and if it was really good, I would then become despondent until my next batch was ready. It’s summer here at Chaos manor, and it’s pretty warm for Canada.
It’s Canada: where’s the snow?
The answer to both quandries lay in the techniques of industrial brewing: high gravity. The beer we mostly see advertised on television is Industrial Lager. Megabreweries make a batch of beer at very high gravities (usually over 1.070 to start), finish fermenting, and then add water to hit their target alcohol content. It’s actually a very intelligent use of resources: you can ferment twice as much beer with the same amount of tanks. This sort of efficiency makes accountants very happy, and it’s not that far off of the parti-gyle brewing systems of olden times. My plan was to brew a 30 litre batch of beer at high gravity and water it back to two batches of 19 litres, then ferment each separately with a different yeast. Not only could I brew a lot of beer quickly, I could use the higher gravity wort to moderate hop utilisation. Or so was my plan . . . I whipped out Beersmith and loaded my Grainfather profile.
Pretty spritely for a Grainfather
If you’ve never used one, it’s an all-in-one mash/lauter/boil unit with a recirculating pump. I’ve had literally every system there is and I like this one because I can brew from home, in my kitchen, while I work at other things. It’s Bluetooth controlled, programmable for step mashes and has timers and such. It’s really pretty amazing.
Sadly, for what I wanted to do the Beersmith profile was a bit crap, so I back-of-the-enveloped it. I figured in Imperial units eight pounds of Pilsner malt, one pound of 10L Crystal malt, two pounds of rice, and two ounces of first wort hops and two ounces for a 20-minute whirlpool, to make around 5.5 gallons of finished wort to be watered back into two four-gallon batches to fill two kegs. If I wasn’t too screwy and my efficiency was low but okay, I should get an OG of 1.025-ish at pitching and get 22.-2.5% ABV and 15-ish IBU’s.
But there were a lot of departures in my plan. Most recipes would use flaked rice, but I wanted to do a cereal mash. That is, I wanted to take plain white rice and cook it to mush, and add that to my grain mash. Why? That’s the way the macro brewers do it, and I had planned on doing a three-step mash for maximum fermentability: 122 F then to 134 F and then to 149, using the boiling rice mush to drive temp to final mash.
You can see, I don’t like the easy way.
Onward to brew day. First step was to cook the rice. I got up early and put the rice on in a huge pot with three gallons of water on low.
Looks like congee, but not as tasty
You have to be really careful wih this step: it’s very easy to scorch starch as it breaks down to moosh. Even the faintest hint of burnt character will completely ruin the beer, so you need way more water than you think you do, and you need to keep it low and slow, and stir frequently, and it’s going to take much, much longer than you think. I started the rice at 8 am and it was just ready for the pot by noon.
As it cooked I milled my grains.
It’s no monster, it’s just misunderstood
I have a three-roller Monster Mill and I can’t recommend it enough. Mine is set to 40 thousandths and it’s perfect as can be.
Perfect and utterly consistent. A good crusher makes a huge difference.
Next step was to set up my Grainfather. With my system, as with everything I do, I did not leave it unmodified. My first step was to throw away the trub/hop filter: it’s useless. In its place I put a Titan false bottom.
Mirror stainless, right angle bend, great engineering.
Nifty fit, too. This picture from a previous batch, thus all the hops and trub.
Not only does this catch goo better than the GF screen, it also has almost no dead space underneath–less than two cups of liquid escapes the pickup on the bottom. The build-up of hops makes the screen tighter and more efficient and the wort coming out is super-clear.
But you can’t use the grain basket from the GF with the false bottom in place unless you use some serious spacers. But, I had a different mod: a bag.
Spring clips work great to hold the bag in place
Yes, my Grainfather is now a Brew In A Bag False Bottom HERMS unit, running off of an Android phone over Bluetooth. 14-year-old me, with an old canning pot and a clapped-out electric stove would be awestruck and envious. (He’d also look at the size of me and ask, “Dude, just how much beer do you drink?”)
To make a long story short, I did my usual short and shoddy brewing methods: I doughed in at 122F, immediately ramped to 134 for twenty minutes, and then added my boiling rice goo to drive everything to 149. I mashed for 30 minutes–I usually do 20 because efficiency is for drones from Sector 7G, but I wanted to clear all of the rice starch. An Iodine test at 20 minutes was clear, so the extra ten was for luck, mostly. I did a bag sparge in another bucket with around 15 litres of water at 170F and topped the GF up and tossed in my first charge of hops as it heated to the boil.
Shot before I topped up with bag sparge
After 20 minutes of vigorous boiling I shut off the, popped on the lid, threw on the heat exchanger and started cooling the wort, recirculating it back into the Grainfather.
Counterflow chiller setup. Works very well, kind of surprisingly so.
When it got below 180F I tossed in the rest of the hops, shut off water to the chiller and left it to recirculate for 20 minutes. Then It was time to run it off to the primaries.
My groundwater is very cold, even in summer.
I took a gravity reading of the wort straight from the chiller.
Temperature corrected to 1.050
I split it into two fermenters, yielding a little under three gallons each, and then topped up with treated water to 5.5 gallons. I treat it by adding metabisulphite powder to plain old tapwater, to bind out any chlorine that my municipality may have added. I have brilliant water–some of the best in the world, and it doesn’t need another thing. After it was topped up I noticed how much protein break I got. Good stuff!
Lookit that break!
When it was divvied up I took it to my fermentation chamber, aka the second bathroom. I forgot to take a picture of the SG reading of the watered back batches, but it was 1.028
It’s a shower stall, very convenient for blow-offs and cleaning.
One of the beers I hit with US-05, and the other I chilled with my groundwater again, by virtue of letting the shower hose dribble into a bucket containing the fermenter run very slowly, getting it down to 62 F overnight, after which I pitched it with Safeale S-189.
Fermentation was vigorous in both, and completed after ten days.
And that’s final.
I let the beers settle and racked them to kegs. I stoppped to take an SG reading and it was corrected to 1.004 This makes a start-finish difference of 18 points. Multiply that by the ABV conversion number and you get 2.36, just under 2.5% ABV, good enough for my purposes.
After they had both chilled to 38F I burst carbonated them and let them carb under pressure for a few days, then tasted them, and shared with some friends. How was it?
Poor man, that beer must be terrible. After two weeks the beer dropped star-bright, looking like it had been filtered.
The lager version is better than the US05, but only subtly so: both beers are incredibly light, have just enough hops to balance the grain character and the crystal malt fights the carbonic acid with great precision.
I drank most of a keg in two weeks, pretty much a record for me. It’s like fabulous Gatorade, refreshing and deliciously beery, and yet the alcohol is so low I can have a pint with my lunch and continue working.
I’ve always disdained macrobrew lagers. They have all kinds of off flavours and aromas and don’t satisfy me in any way. This is different: it’s beer-flavoured beer, and hits the spot without overwhelming. I dare say it’d be easy to screw up, because the style is so light that it would show flaws instantly. But when it works, it’s really great beer. And that is the beauty of homebrewing: I can do whatever I want
Next up, I’m going to make a Belgian Kinderbier, a dark ale at 2% ABV that should have enough roast and caramel to make it richer and more interesting, while still being suitable for lunching.
If you’re looking for the best beer delivery Pimlico London has to offer, check out Booze-Up. A great 24/7 alcohol delivery company that can bring your any alcoholic beverage you want anytime, anyday!
Hey, if you’re in Vanbrewers and were at the June meeting you may have tried an early version of this recipe without the 10L crystal and with different yeast. That stuff was okay, but this is the bomb, I swear. There won’t be any of this to share at future meetings though, until I work out a brewing schedule that can compensate for me drinking a whole keg every two weeks.
Understanding allows people like us to tolerate a person like yourself
I’ll admit it: I am a victim to clickbait. This headline popped up in my newsfeed:
Are You Making This Big Mistake with Wine Corks?
and like a dope, I fell for it. But you won’t believe what happens next!
What happens is, I’m not going to link to the article. It doesn’t deserve my help generating clicks. You can find it yourself if you like, but I’m going to take some care to interpret it here for you in case you hate clickbait too.
Pimped out as their ‘Wine Wise Guy’, their author wrote an article that illustrates everything wrong with the concept of the modern sommelier and showed himself as a prime example of the self-important, narcissistic jackassery that follows it around like a foul stench.
What’s wrong with sommeliers? Nothing actually. Sommelier is a job description, and it means ‘guy who sells wine in a restaurant’. It’s as descriptive as ‘receptionist’, or ‘usher’, or ‘sanitation engineer’.
It doesn’t mean a damn thing more: guy who sells wine.
Unfortunately, in our celebrity and reality show obsessed culture the concept of sommelier as something ‘other’, something aspirational, something to be revered and worshipped has taken hold. Several things have conspired to create a cult of personality around ‘somms’, not the least of which are the sommeliers themselves. But they’re not the worst offenders: the worst offenders are the schools that offer sommelier ‘courses’, offering to teach everything about wine and to turn you into a wine professional.
These courses force a hapless student to memorise thousands of facts about wine regions and styles, most of which might be interesting in a Jeopardy Daily Double kind of way, but are useless in the real world, and are tarted up as trick questions, the better to exclude people who haven’t paid the tens of thousands of dollars for the course, or memorised a stagnant morass of factoids like an obedient Labrador Retriever doing tricks.
They tag the most pretentious wine gits with these medallions so you can see them coming from far away
The thing to remember about sommelier programs is that they’re not actually recognised as an official education by anyone who matters. Sure, doing your time in wine prison is like a union card to enter the world of selling wine in a restaurant, but unlike a Red Seal for a Chef (transferable around the world), there is no formal recognition of this nonsense, and different schools of sommelier-dom don’t teach the same things.
Lest any somm-worshipper out there get in a flounce and accuse me of sour grapes (haha, see what I did there?) because I don’t hold that job description, let me reassure you: I am a recovering sommelier. At one point in my life I sold wine in the most overblown, pretentious, expensive restaurant you could name. Back in the early 80’s the soup was twenty-five bucks.
This is the first time I’ve admitted to doing that job in decades, because even back then it was a soiling experience, mainly because the owner was a fraud who kept the wine in a furnace room or a walk-in cooler, and 80% of the bottles that cost more than $40 were at our ‘other cellar’, which was the liquor store down the block, where the owner would sprint down to pick up a bottle as it was ordered. I did the job for a month before I quit in disgust to become a dishwasher instead.
When I had my first gig as GM of a resort hotel I took over the sommelier role and loved it. I got to help people enjoy wine by asking what they wanted and doing my best to give them exactly that. There’s no wrong way to enjoy wine, only the way the customer wants it. If they wanted red Bordeaux over ice, then I brought them ice. If they wanted Port with their fish, I made sure they knew what they were ordering and I served it. I had a bunch of backpackers come in who wanted kalimotxo, and when I found out it was cheap dry red and cola, I made up a pitcher. Why? Because I am not the arbiter of human taste or fashion: I am a service professional!
Which brings us back to the article. In it, the author first waxes his ego by mentioning in order a) how hard the exam was, b) how intimidating the examiners were, c) how obscure the questions were, and d) how much he hated serving wine to stupid peasants who came to the restaurant and expected him to serve wine.
Personally, I bundle most of these maneuvers into what I call “the frippery” of wine service: stuff that makes most people I know slink down in their seats in hopes that the sommelier will call on someone else to taste the wine.
Really? A quaint old ceremony, one that is the essence of the job makes him squirm? I wonder how he feels about the people who are paying him to do the job?
But then I see that person: The Imbiber. He’s the one—and it’s always a man—who relishes the pageantry of it all, the pomp and circumstance, who imagines that everyone else in the room is intently watching this noble ceremony take place. And when the sommelier places the just-pulled cork on the table to the right of the glass, The Imbiber picks it up ceremoniously, rolls it between his thumb and forefinger, and takes a deep, satisfying sniff.
The Imbiber deserves to be dunked in a barrel of wine.
Rolling a cork—which is just a piece of bark from a cork tree, after all—between your thumb and forefinger is just plain silly. And sniffing it? Sillier. That is, unless (and this is an important unless) you’re the person pulling the cork.
Yes, murdering customers because they expect you to do a job, preciously described as being so haaaard is a completely reasonable response. After all, why make them happy when you can measure your manhood against theirs and make fun of them?
Know this: I like corks. I know a lot about corks. In my time in my industry, the companies I worked for made (aggregately) enough wine to fill more than a fifty million bottles per year, and we bought corks for them all. Over the course of a thirty-year career, that’s a lot of metric tonnes of cork. I’ve toured cork forests, cork factories, cork warehouses and dealt with almost every cork manufacturer on the planet. I know more about corks than the author of this article ever will, or can ever hope to. I not only examine, roll and sniff the cork from most bottles of wine that I am served, I habitually carry a razor-sharp knife and cut the cork in half to examine the inside for flaws and density.
Razor sharp is important or you’ll never get a really good cross-section. From today’s lunch.
Even if I weren’t a professional with a deep interest in the world market, I’d probably still be interested in the cork. It’s the only thing standing between the wine inside the bottle and a harshly cruel environment that wants to spoil it. If the cork looks compromised or has an odour (more on this in a minute) then I’m going to sit up and start paying attention to the process at hand: trying the wine to see if it’s a) what I ordered and b) in good condition.
The author goes on to pontificate why the consumer has no business assessing the cork. First, of course, he has to explain to us peasants what a corkscrew is and how it works, since as a professional, he’s sure that’s quite beyond us. Then he warns that he might not deign to hand you the cork at all:
It might fall apart because it’s too old; it might snap in half because it’s brittle; the center of it might disintegrate, because it’s soaked through and crumbly. If any of those things happen, there’s no cork to present to The Imbiber.
Wrong: if the cork crumbles, you immediately show it to the customer, perhaps carefully assembled on a napkin to keep the bits together. Why? Because he is buying that bottle of wine, and it’s his right as a consumer to see it. But he doesn’t see it that way: the mark he’s sneering at has no right to his own wine, just to the almighty somm’s opinion about it.
If I’m the server, yes, I’ll immediately smell the wet end to see if there are any “off” odors that might indicate the wine is flawed, damaged, or just plain dead. The wet end of a cork is still moist and porous, but the liquid at the tip either absorbs or dissipates pretty quickly. And a few seconds later, the cork smells like… cork.
This is an easily dismissed falsehood: if the wine is contaminated by cork taint, the cork will smell like it, practically forever. This taint is 2,4,6 Trichloroanisole (TCA) and is caused by an interaction between chlorophenol compounds and corks or wood used in elevage, or processing wine. It’s a lot less common since cork producers stopped using chlorine to bleach corks, and started keeping sheets of cork bark off of the ground post-harvest/pre-processing (they can pick up a fungus off the ground that makes TCA contamination a lot more likely). Even in minute amounts (below the microgram level) TCA can ruin a good wine.
To sum up this whole sordid pile, articles like this, written by people who have an overweening, narcissistic view of their own worth and status are why I avoid modern sommeliers and their cult of celebrity. The job is exactly the same as the one done by the person who serves the bread, or the nice lady who takes the reservations.
If the bread guy started rolling his eyes, writing articles about how stupid people who eat bread are for asking for white or rye, or the reservation lady wrote snide blogs about how people who made reservations were dumbasses who really should let her handle things because they’re unqualified, the consumers who patronise those restaurants would lose their collective minds–as they should. But because some people buy into this cult of sommeliers and assume that they are the final word on how to drink wine, they get away with smug, nonsensical crap like this.
What’s the answer? I don’t have one, that’s for sure. However, a good first step is to avoid any restaurant that this guy works for. Also, if there’s a celebrity sommelier in a place you’re thinking of going to, don’t take any guff from them: you are buying that wine, and if you want to drink it out of a coffee mug, or eat the cork with a dab of mustard, you damn well do so.
I have been saying this for thirty straight years, and I’ll say it again: nobody can tell you how to enjoy wine–if they’re offering advice, trying to help you find a good match or something tasty in your price range, then they’re a good person, doing a good job and they deserve thanks. But if someone tries to tell you that you’re doing it wrong, or you’re not qualified to know your own mind and enjoy the things you like, as you like them . . . put your hand on your wallet and back out of the room, because they can’t be trusted.
One last thought, because as the man says, there always is one:
. . . unless you really like having sommeliers think you’re a twit. In that case, go right ahead, smell all the corks you want.
Dude, I’d rather you hated my guts than change anything about the way I enjoy wine to suit you.
All right, here’s the stupid article, if you must. Do me a favour and open it in an incognito browser. I don’t want to get this blog all sticky.
Canada doesn’t look too bad for one hundred and fifty.
It isn’t that it’s a perfect country. It is definitely not: we have a lot of problems, and we have a lot of issues we need to address. Income disparity, social justice, political polarisation, the treatment of indigenous peoples and many other things are part of our national dialogue right now, on this day.
But that’s our strength. That’s where we can be proud: we are having these dialogues–these and more. Just fifty years ago the mere idea of addressing these things would have been the talk of fringe kooks and political outsiders.
I know, because I was there fifty years ago to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the BNA act, which united the colonies of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick into a single Dominion within the British Empire called Canada. It was even called ‘Dominion Day’ at the time.
I can remember the excitement of the day: there were ceremonies, marching bands, RCMP members on horses, people in costume, dances, food and fireworks. As a very tiny boy I was terribly impressed by it all, especially the horses, one of which chose to leave a massive load of manure right in front of me. There was literally nothing on that day which could have pleased me more, and that memory is one that fixes my feelings about Canada perfectly. So much beauty, so many people moving in the same direction, wanting the same things, having the same aspirations, sharing the same joys, but there being a completely down-to-earth reality to who we were.
I’ve grown up and grown older in a country that invented the concept of peacekeeping. That has universal health care. That welcomes refugees and immigrants as a source of strength and joyful diversity. That continues to value justice and decency.
But I’m a political creature. I can’t help it. I worry about our economy, our society, our place in the world, our relationship with our partner/neighbour/ally/friend/brothers-and-sisters to the south and I worry about whether we’re doing enough to care for each other and the rest of the world.
That worry is offset every time I look out my front door and I see my friends, my neighbours, my countrymen. We are a broadly decent, open and just society, making our way better every day, with a long way to go before we can rest on any laurels. To paraphrase Dr. King, the moral arc of Canada may be long, but it trends toward justice.
I’m proud of you Canada, and I’m proud of your citizens, your ideals and your national character. And if I am here to see you at 200, I hope to see more of the same, still striving for a better nature and a better country.
May you all be blessed with peace and plenty this day, and family and friends to share it with.
After initial hostilities and threats to my person, traditional mead makers seem to have accepted my presence in their midst, and I have come to see the interplay of their dominance battles within the tribe and the constant quest for honey and authenticity with the detachment of a rational anthropologist. I can only hope to retain the trust of these gentle, beautiful creatures in the future.
It’s held in Vancouver Washington, which is immediately north of Portland Oregon, where most of the brewing clubs and a lot of the brewing action in the Pacific Northwest happens.
Why hold it in Washington if Portland is so darn awesome? Money: doing it in Portland would probably double costs as with popularity comes great price tags. Still, although Vancouver is a tiny little burg it’s not a bad place at all. Best of all it’s only about a 5-1/2 hour drive from Chaos Manor, just over the border from Washington in Canada. With a car full of jockey boxes, CO2 apparatus, kegs and bottles, I wedged a suitcase and a spouse in there for the journey.
That much happiness can only occur in the presence of donuts
Portland is not without its charms, and I killed a couple of days hitting Voodoo donuts, parks, museums and shopping. I was also lucky enough to have time for my friends Emily and JT, a delightful couple of Oregonians who not only make great beer, but are also cool in many other ways. That’s pretty much the best part of working in the industry I’m in: you meet so many wonderful, gracious and lovely people, and long after businesses are gone and deals are done, they’re the ones you remember.
Eventually I had to put the beer down and go to work. The seminar was a success, with a couple of dozen folks listening to my lecture (you can check out a copy of my presentation here), enjoying Ancient Fire Mead and my own creations. Everyone agreed that Ancient Fire‘s meads (generously donated, if you recall, by Jason and Margot Phelps) were superior examples of the craft, while my bone-standard traditional mead was (generously) described as ‘icky’.
The Barkshack was very well-received, with some participants asking for thirds, a very gratifying circumstance. I had a lot of really great questions from the crowd, who were keen to make their own mead, authentic and drinkable. While I’m only a winemaker trying to understand all kind of fermentation, I hope my message that mead–heck, any fermented beverage, for that matter–doesn’t exist in a vacuum on it’s own, but needs to be seen as part of the family of fermented drinks that we can all share, whether it’s dandelion wine, Russian Imperial Stout, or Cabernet Sauvignon. Tradition is great, because it teaches us where we come from and how we got to where we are, but it’s innovation and sharing ideas that will take us where we’re going next.
After the lecture was done, it was time for club night. If you’ve never been to a brewing conference club night, you’re really missing out. If you’ve been to the one at BrewCon (I was there the last time it was in San Diego) it’s a glorious riot of beer craziness. PNWHC club night is smaller, but they go all-out crazy with beautifully decorated booth, some of which are more like small brewpubs than little club gatherings.
Tim, Alvaro and Nathaniel, representing Vanbrewers and the Tri-Cities brewing clubs. Seems legit.
Our own booth was a bit more modest, as it was me straddling the fence for the Tri-Cities Brewing Club and for Vanbrewers, along with Alvaro and Nathaniel. We’d like to make a big show of it, but with the US exchange rate and transportation costs all of us were combining it with business trips or vacation time. We were up 50% in attendance year-over-year, a trend we hope will continue.
We were pouring Nathaniel’s Vickie’s Smoked Porter, a really solid porter made with Miss Vickie’s smoked potato chips, Alvaro’s Pisco Sour (I think it was a Saison base, but boy howdy was it delicious) as well as his new world Pilsner with modern German hop varieties, as well as my Barkshack Ginger mead.
My own prediction was that while the blockbuster Imperials and Double IPA’s were going to be early favorites with the crowd, the mead, balanced to off-dry, fruity and refreshing, would get more popular as the night progressed.
In the spirit of the thing! Glad you enjoyed it, Wendy!
Turns out I was right. By the end of the evening most of my keg was gone, with the folks enjoying it coming back for fourths and fifths (not to worry: everything took place in the hotel and nobody was driving anywhere, and there wasn’t anyone overserved–lots of little samples instead).
Straight-up legends, Mike ‘Tasty’ McDole and Denny Conn
Two very welcome visitors were Denny Conn and Mike McDole, who both tried the Barkshack and appeared to enjoy it. Denny’s comment was that it was the first mead he’d tasted in years, and that he didn’t mind it was the highest praise I could have asked for.
Obligatory fanboy picture
After that it was all over but for the packing and tidying and tripping back up to Canada. I’d like to think I learned something on my mead journey, both from making it, teaching people about the history of fermented honey, and the fallout from a tiny minority of mead makers who really took offense at me approaching ‘their’ beverage with humor and cynicism.
People love what they love. And we beer geeks, wine dorks and mead maniacs love what we do so passionately that we’re willing to share both our brews and our knowledge with others, so they can catch the bug and make it a part of their lives–or at least so they can understand something we consider amazing and wonderful.
That’s a thing worth investing your time, your passion and your self-identity into. And I’ll drink to that.
