Tag Archives: fermentation
High on Cider — An International Tasting
Less popular a fermentable than grain or grape, the apple is a fruit more likely to see the inside a Harry Potter lunchbox than a bottle. There’s not much reason to drink cider in a market dominated by large scale cideries more interested in profit from bland drinks than making a product worthy of the fruit.
But among the hundreds of varieties of apples, some of them can make a spectacular natural beverage that rivals lager for drinkability and carries with it delicious fruit flavor. And these are drinks worth seeking out.
The Gourmet Underground consists of equal opportunity drinkers, so we gathered a group of friends and more than two dozen different ciders from half the places in the world that grow a decent apple — Michigan, New York, New Hampshire, Austria, Spain, France, and England. With so many drinks, it was all but impossible to take tasting notes on each sample, but we’ve got ample thoughts, notes, and photos to share.
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In an effort to lend some structure to our event, we started with North American ciders, pulling corks on ciders from a number of producers, the most notable of which was Farnum Hill of New Hampshire.
Michigan, despite its enormous apple production and save one example, was generally disappointing. Ciders from Sleeping Bear, Motor City, and Uncle John’s were certainly solid drinks, worth consideration, and enjoyable — but for the money and compared to some of their east coast and old world counterparts, they didn’t stack up. They generally seem to be the result of fermented dessert apples (similar to making wine with Concord grapes). One that stood slightly above the others wasn’t actually cider — it was a perry produced by 45 North, which carried some notes of sage in a light, effervescent package. J.K.’s Scrumpy had slightly more depth than most Michigan ciders but suffered in drinkability due to sweetness.
Bellwether of upstate New York was solid, though only the King Baldwin drew any serious praise with a moderately earthy mid-palate and a subtle sweetness to round out the drink. At 6.9%, it’s made from a curious combination of the regional Tomkins King apple and the Baldwin apple from Massachusetts.
Farnum Hill, though, is something special. Every cider was deliciously dry with a bit more body and a longer finish than its other American counterparts. My favorite, their semi-dry, was really very nice — not nearly as dusty as the “Extra Dry” cider but not at all sweet with a bit of earth, mineral, and tart apple chutney. Normally, I drift toward the driest drink in a tasting, but in this case, the semi-dry cider was just so full of life, it was hard to stop myself from re-filling over and over. That said, each of the four from Farnum Hill were impressive, as was the much sweeter but nonetheless interesting, juicy offering from New Hampshire’s Crooked Tree cidery, which garnered a lot of attention from the group.
Ultimately, though, moving across the pond yielded the most oohs and aahs from the crowd.
Sparking the most discussion were two Basque ciders, each funky and sour. One is available in Michigan: Sarasola Sagardoa, which is remarkable for briny and humid orchard characteristics unlike any of the U.S. ciders. The other, Isastegi, was either the favorite or near favorite of several trusted tasters. And for good reason. It almost glows in the glass, and the nose alternates between ripe apple and green apple skin. On the palate, it was absolutely funky and exploded with fresh, natural flavors of fermentation with a long, acidic finish and earthy undertones ripe with near-rotten apples.
My personal favorite, though, was Poma Aurea. Reminiscent of something along the lines of a cava or champagne, it was replete with tiny, prickly bubbles. A bit of research reveals that the region in which it’s made, Asturias, considers cider its traditional drink. That legacy is apparent in the craftsmanship as the aroma is very sharp and yet ripe with apple and there is just an amazing focus to it throughout every sip, somehow simultaneously cider-like and razor sharp with minerals.
Another subtly complex, wildly effervescent sparkler that struck me as being as near perfect as cider can be was the “Apfel Cuvee” from Hans Reisetbauer in Austria and imported by Terry Theise, noted Riesling hound. It absolutely prickled the tongue with flowers, pear, and apple.
Todd commented at one point that this must be the most complete cider tasting ever to take place in Detroit, an historic event. He’s right. The beverages above are just the highlights of a remarkable evening, and to think that 20 food and drink lovers in southeast Michigan could be drinking some of the best cider that the United States, Spain, and Austria have to offer while noshing on Benton’s bacon, braised cabbage, chevre, and pork belly sliders is astonishing.
It’ll be years, if ever, before cider really establishes itself in the way that natural wine and craft beer have cemented themselves within American niche markets. But if last weekend’s tasting showed anything, it’s that apples deserve on the whole a fate greater than the one that awaits the Red Delicious sitting inside that Harry Potter lunchbox.
Brew Your Own
The desire usually starts with some kind of revelation. Mine was in the early ’90s at a tattoo parlor on Spain’s Costa del Sol, where an old, salty machinist with a bottlebrush moustache brought me a glass of roasty Guinness Extra Stout to sip on while I was being inked. He had hoped to make my face pucker with a shock of flavor unlike that of any mass-produced American beer I had been drinking up until then. The opposite happened.
Just like that, a vast world of beer appeared before my eyes — and I spent the next dozen years trying hundreds of diverse brands and styles of beer, everything I could get my hands on, the journey peaking with a half-liter hoist to the oompah band playing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” to an international crowd of thousands partying underneath the grandest beer tent in the world at Bavaria’s Oktoberfest.
The next natural step was to brew my own.
Ever since civilization’s founding members discovered that soggy grain would eventually ferment into an intoxicating gruel, man has been brewing beer at home. For millennia, brewing was mostly a domestic pursuit, first with the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, on to the Greeks and Romans, and eventually into medieval Europe, where alewives served thirsty villagers, and nearly everyone drank beer — because it was safer than water.
Homebrewing in the United States was fairly common in the colonial era until thousands of commercial breweries popped up during the Industrial Revolution. It saw a short gain in popularity again during Prohibition, when breweries were no longer able to sell beer, though some, like Detroit’s own Stroh’s Brewing Company, stayed alive in part by selling cans of hop-infused malt syrup for baking purposes (wink, wink).
In fact, homebrewing was illegal then and stayed illegal until Congress signed a bill in 1978 allowing states to drop restrictions on homebrewing. Today, most states permit households 100 gallons of beer per person for personal consumption, except, of course, Alabama.
About five years later, nuclear engineer Charlie Papazian would pen The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, for years the only mass-market volume to present detailed information on brewing small scale in your home and eventually known to fervent do-it-yourselfers as the “Homebrewing Bible.” Though not without its pages of technical charts and data, Papazian advocated a laid-back approach to brewing and, above all, to “Relax. Don’t worry. Have a homebrew.” These days, there’s no shortage of books on the subject, but you’ll still find fans of Papazian’s tome crafting batches of “Goat Scrotum Ale” from the recipes section.
Through the ’80s and ’90s, tens of thousands of zealous homebrewers discovered that beer didn’t have to be the watery yellow swill the macrobreweries were pushing, and they promptly shouted this declaration to all their friends through a bullhorn. It wasn’t long before the demand for better, more flavorful beer spurred the craft brewing revolution. After all, homebrewers are also great consumers of beer, always looking to taste something new, perhaps with a clever name and a bit of history attached.
This was a time when scores of brewpubs and microbreweries were being started, many by homebrewers. Seriously passionate folks like Larry Bell, who founded Kalamazoo Brewing Company as a homebrewing supply shop in 1983. It’s now known as Bell’s Brewery and you can find a six-pack of Bell’s in just about every beer store in Michigan and gas stations too.
It doesn’t take much to become a homebrewer, other than a nagging desire to craft your own versions of the world’s best beers — and a few pieces of relatively inexpensive equipment. At the most elementary level, it’s possible to brew a batch of beer with only a large stockpot, a can of hopped malt syrup similar to what Stroh’s sold during Prohibition, a small packet of dried ale yeast and a plastic bucket to ferment it all in.
Most who catch the fever will be ever-expanding their equipment. It will start with minor things, like bottle-cappers and immense stir spoons that will have you looking like one of Macbeth’s witches at the cauldron. Six-gallon glass carboys with airlocks will reduce the risk of contamination by outside microfauna. An old cooler can easily be converted into a small “lauter tun” that will allow you to use cracked barley grains instead of malt syrup.
Once you move from malt syrups to an all-grain system of brewing, you can easily make quality, high-octane and tasty brews for a fraction of the cost of commercial beers. A little careful planning and it’s possible to bring costs down to around $2.50 per six-pack. Some brewers will even go as far as creating dispensing systems out of old refrigerators and soda kegs, foregoing the bottling stage altogether. These people always have ample supplies of homebrew and easily make good friends.
Homebrewing isn’t limited to just beer. Michigan grows apples aplenty; during harvest season it’s easy to find mills pressing unpreserved and unpasteurized juice, usually containing enough natural yeast to begin fermenting of its own accord and producing a dry, tasty cider. Fresh grape juice is a little harder to come by in this region, but homebrew supply shops sell a wide variety of concentrates, if making wine is more your speed. And then there is mead, or honeywine, the drink of Greek gods and Anglo-Saxon heroes. Honey is a near perfect vehicle to ferment with all sorts of fruits or spices.
There are so many reasons to brew your own: a deep connection to your ancestors, cost savings, the ability to tweak recipes to your taste or merely getting your friends drunk while bragging about your own skills. Is there a more righteous hobby? The only question is where and when your revelation will appear.
This article first appeared in the Metro Times
The Simple Joy of Fermenting Food at Home
It all started with booze. Picture the Neolithic hunter-gatherer coming home from a couple of weeks in the bush to find the honey he had collected before he left a simmering mess. Ravenous from his adventure, he would take a small taste, realize that this strange, not exactly rotten brew wasn’t going to kill him — and the next thing you know the edges of his world have softened and after seeing God he carves mad poetic figures into the walls of his cave. Thus begins our love affair with fermentation.
The wonders of fermentation are mystical. It’s a complex chemical process that occurs, often of its own accord, with little display over a sometimes lengthy period of time. This can be intimidating for the person interested in fermenting at home but with no experience.
Is it working? What is that white stuff? If I eat this am I going to need a stomach pump?
Relax.
Whether in a cave, tent, cabin, yurt or château in Southern France, humans have been fermenting at home for millennia. And they generally had a lot more to worry about than bad food. There are just a few things that you have to pay close attention to.
Cleanliness: Make sure your fermentation vessel and anything else that might touch your pre-fermented food is clean. It’s that simple. Bad bugs and mold can’t take hold if they’re not there.
Inhibit the growth of mold and undesirable bacteria with natural preservatives: This is mainly done by using salt or acid.
For example, acid is a key mold inhibitor in kombucha. That’s why you always want to keep about 15% of your last batch. The acid in the already fermented kombucha is plenty to save your new batch from getting fuzzy on top. Acid allows grape and apple juice to be naturally fermented into wine and cider through yeasts that reside on the fruit and in the fermentation area.
Vegetable ferments require a certain percentage of salt. I like around 5-6% brine (3/4 cup salt per gallon of water). This is easy when making pickles, but cabbage, or other vegetables that release a lot of water when salted, are a bit more difficult. I usually use a tablespoon of salt for about 3-4 cups of cabbage and then top with the measured brine.
Trust your taste: If it tastes or smells bad, don’t eat or drink it. Kombucha and lactic fermented vegetables may be an acquired taste but you should be able to tell right off whether your ferment is too funky to eat.
This is very basic information provided simply to help reduce any fears that you might have about home fermentation. Though they are all related, every type of food ferment has it own rules. The best thing to do is find a trusted source for recipes and more detailed information. If you’re nervous, start with something simple, like sourdough or yogurt.
First posted at Total Kombucha
Spruce Campbell Ale: A Spruce Beer Recipe & Notes
Spruce Campbell Ale is a unique bottling flavored with spruce tips harvested from our own backyard tree and named after ‘B’ Horror movie icon Bruce Campbell of Evil Dead fame. Tart and refreshing with a touch of malt sweetness, it is reminiscent of a Flanders Red Ale.
Fresh Spruce tips are picked in early May and used right away or frozen until brewing time in late summer. You might imagine a beer brewed with spruce tips would taste like pine resin but in fact the tips add a citrus-like flavor and acidity akin to lemon. The tips also contain tannins which help structure the beer. There are no hops used.
The malt bill is based on a Bell’s Best Brown clone. I don’t recall why I chose this particular malt base but it couldn’t have worked out any better. The resulting balance is rather wine-like which may account for its popularity among people who aren’t serious beer drinkers.
Famous among a half dozen of my close friends, the word about Spruce Campbell’s delicious intensity is spreading like wildfire across internet communities. Actually, only one person asked me for the recipe but I wanted to post the pretty pictures again.
Recipe for six gallons of Spruce Campbell:
5 lbs. pale malt
2 lbs. Maris Otter
1 lb. Victory
1 lb. caramel 60°L
14 oz. special roast
2 oz. chocolate
Single infusion mash. Add 0.75 oz. of spruce tips at 60, 45, 20 and 10 minutes boil for a total of three ounces. (Spruce tips can be adjusted down to as low as 1.5 ounces for a less sour beer)
Best enjoyed during an Evil Dead Trilogy marathon.
A Lambic Polemic: What’s in a Name?
From the blog chatter, press coverage, and store shelves stacked with new product, it would appear that the shroud’s been lifted from mysterious lambic beers. There’s barely a restaurant menu in Schlubsville, Indiana, that doesn’t count “Framboise Lambic” among its beverage choices. Glowing red with a frothy pink head. Packaged handsomely in a 750mL bottle with a deep punt and a foil capsule. Often served in dainty portions with desserts.
Perfect, right?
Not quite.
Endless internet tomes have been dedicated to the subject of “real” lambic, but a quick summary is requisite. Fermented by wild yeasts and bacteria and aged in barrels, the beer acquires a distinctly aggressive and puckering lactic sourness. It’s not generally dessert friendly. It’s not sweet. It’s simultaneously ascorbic and delicate. It will melt your face and then show you the tiniest hint of orange peel and soil in the mid-palate.
Complexity is born of fermentation – from betwixt the loins of little yeasties – and true lambic is fermented by a combination of wild yeasts, so it’s got a lot to offer. Straight lambic as it is made traditionally is aged for three years in barrels and can be bottled with no carbonation at that point. A variety called gueuze sees the three-year blended with younger beer to the brewer’s taste, yielding a more lively, fizzy brew. Fruit lambics are aged with real fruit, the most popular options being kriek (cherry) and framboise (raspberry).
Framboise is thus not a brand but rather a raspberry fruit lambic from a brewer. So when some finely accoutered waiter adjusts his clip-on bow tie and pours you a glass of the now ubiquitous sickly sweet framboise, he’s actually pouring the raspberry “lambic” from a particular place – in this case, Brouwerij Lindemans.
But what’s in a name doesn’t always equal what’s in a bottle.
Sadly, there is no law regulating the control of how much lambic must be in a bottle that reads “lambic” on the label. The agreed-upon standard has been a paltry 10%, which means you could more or less bottle 90% Aunt Jemima diluted with 10% lambic and call it Vermont Maple Lambic. That’s essentially Lindemans’ modus operandi.
Several years ago, I encountered a rep for Merchant du Vin, the Lindemans importer. We were both pouring beers at a public tasting. I was serving De Ranke Kriek, a blisteringly tart cherry beer that the brewers refuse to call lambic, even though they’re legally allowed to do so. It’s not 100% lambic, so they won’t call it lambic. Honest fellows, I’d say.
After the tasting, some of the folks working the room that night shared beers, and upon sampling the Kriek I had in hand, this hapless gent exclaimed, “Wow, that’s really sour,” before admitting he hadn’t a clue that lambic was sour. Later when wondering about De Ranke’s fruit source, he didn’t actually ask about fruit. Instead, he inquired, “So where do these guys get their juice?”
His product, Lindemans, isn’t truly lambic, but he didn’t know it. He, much like the legions of waiters and sommeliers peddling their novelty framboise on Valentine’s Day, figured that lambic was soda-like – manufactured, assembled, and sweet. When I explained that they used actual cherries, he seemed utterly perplexed. No one at Merchant du Vin had bothered to lift the shroud of mystery surrounding lambic for this poor fellow. I was glad to have helped.
I’d heard rumors throughout the years that Lindemans (along with DeTroch, Timmermans, and other sugar pushers) actually blended quite a bit of non-lambic beer, sweeteners ranging from sugar to aspartame, and fruit juices and syrups into small proportions of lambic in order to make their products.
So as I popped the cork on a bottle of traditional lambic at home last night, I thought back on that chance meeting and thought: Can I make that sugary crap at home?
Questing after an answer now, I hauled out a bottle of Cantillon Gueuze (an authentic representation of the style from arguably the best producer of the stuff), a bottle of cherry juice, some Domino sugar, and a bottle of Hoegaarden witbier. Playing the mad scientist, I mixed them together, trying to come up with something that tasted like one of these sweetened concoctions.
Somewhere around equal parts witbier and cherry juice with a half-part lambic and a tablespoon of white sugar, I laughed. Cackled, really. It wasn’t quite as syrupy as Lindemans, and I suspect they use something other than white or rock sugar as a sweetener – that’s a scary thought – but if bottled, my homemade “kriek” easily could have passed for one of Lindemans’ competitors like Giradin’s sweetened kriek or DeTroch’s Chapeau Kriek. Absolutely spot on.
Who knew that behind the shroud of lambic was an Oxo measuring cup and a six-pack of mass-produced wheat beer?
Of course, it’s fair to ask, “So what, dude?” And I’d like to think I have an answer.
In a post-industrial age where people are starting to find the value in shopping at a farmer’s market rather than peeling back the industrial foil from a microwaveable frozen tray, there’s still that shroud of mystery that surrounds so much of our food and drink. What exactly are we putting into our bodies when we drink a beer that’s adulterated with syrups or sweeteners? We should care about that, right?
Then there’s the simple matter of honesty. Packaging, shelf-talkers, special interest manipulation, ad-sponsored review publications, and all the standard plays from the corporate playbook have created an environment where it requires genuine research to figure out what one is eating or drinking. If something says Champagne, it should be from Champagne. If it says organic, it damn well better actually be organic. If the bottle reads “lambic,” shouldn’t it actually be lambic?
Further, our food and drink extensions of what we do with our time here on the pale blue dot. Do we value the hard work put in by traditional brewers and the bacteria and yeast in their employ, or do we value the immediate thrill of a sickly sweet novelty, entertaining our palates for a fleeting moment after dinner? In that respect, are our beers any different than our movies, our asparagus, our literature, our music, our beef filets, or our clothing in that regard?
Truly, I’m a bit sick of reading mass media reviews of Lindemans Framboise, going on as though they’ve just peeled back that shroud and let everyone in on a big secret. The luminescent pseudo-lambic is a revelation when one’s been sucking at the teat of Anheuser-Busch, to be sure, but given the increased attention that we as a country have put on our food, I’d suggest that we all learn something from our history with mass production: Dig a little deeper and understand what you’re drinking. Pull back the real shroud. And while you’re at it, leave the Lindemans on the shelf with the Twinkies and support real lambic brewers like Cantillon and Drie Fonteinen.
Some Tasting Notes:
- Cantillon Gueuze 100% Lambic-Bio (Organic): Pours a vibrant but hazed shade of golden straw with a decent sized white head. Looking beyond some of the expected and aggressive vomit-acid fumes, there’s a strong lemon zest component, some sour green apple, and perhaps because this bottle is a year or two old, some straw and barnyard aromatics. Mixed together, it gives a vague impression of ground mustard seeds. Acidic with some restrained funk on the palate. Some orange peel creeps in under the radar, and there’s an earthier, woodier component than I recall in some other lambics, even gueuzes. Top notch.
- Cantillon Rosé de Gambrinus: A perfect fruit lambic. The loud cork pop releases an intoxicating, invisible cloud of sourness; naturally one expects the dominant aroma to be that typical barnyard funk, Cantillon being the best of the best at capturing that natural, raw sensation. Surprisingly, it’s according-to-Hoyle raspberry that pushes itself to the forefront — fresh raspberries, rotting raspberries, underripe raspberries. Each sniff brings about a variation on the theme. Raspberry sweetness precedes a wicked sourness. Rotten, delightful, ruinous, ascerbic fun wrapped up in a remarkably natural raspberry package.
- Drie Fonteinen Kriek: A blood red color and a blood orange hue around the edges of the glass where the light slips through more easily. Practically no head. Strong cherry nose — leftovers from cherry consumption, notably the stems and pits; truly bile-like in its pungent, ascerbic aroma; and almost dusty like sniffing around through a pile of shredded cardboard. Make no mistake about it, though — tartness dominates the aroma and the taste. I mean, wow…just such a potent, flavorful beer. Acidic marathon, except unlike a marathon, this is fun. Flavors of sour cherries and unripe, tart plum.
Kombucha Refermentation and How to Grow a Kombucha SCOBY from Commercial Brand Kombucha
We like our kombucha best after it’s carbonated by refermentation in the bottle. Total Kombucha makes the case for plastic bottles for homebrewed kombucha.
Total Kombucha also instructs on how to Grow a Kombucha SCOBY from Commercial Brand Kombucha
A Few Tips for Quality Kombucha Tea
I have been making kombucha tea long enough that my mother culture has spawned multiple babies, many of which have gone to friends. I even know of a grandchild. It is one healthy SCOBY, indeed. Initially cultured from a couple bottles of GT’s, I have raised it to the point where each three liter batch I ferment produces a baby at least 10 millimeters thick, if not thicker, and some really tasty kombucha. Here are a few details that I believe have helped me to succeed:
1. Use a fine grade tea: Though I only have anecdotal evidence to support this, using a good, loose-leaf tea has worked amazingly well. Bagged tea always seems to take longer to ferment. Does this mean there are more nutrients in a quality loose-leaf? Perhaps. I like oolong best. The flavor is milder than black tea and it makes for a lighter, better looking product.
2. Be consistent: Though the type of tea might change, I use the same formula for every batch. Each three liter batch will yield…Read the rest of this article at Total Kombucha
