Book Review: Wild Fermentation

I found Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz, written in 2003, at my local library. Katz is an AIDS survivor, claiming that the natural bacteria of the foods has helped his immune system. He has some valid points: our diet as humans used to consist of a lot of fermented foods before the industrial revolution and discovery of pasteurization. Fermentation was how foods got preserved.

The beginning of the book is Katz talking. Some of it is very interesting, and some of it is Katz on a soap box, though usually not for very long. The chapters are as follows:

1. Cultural Rehabilitation: The Health Benefits of Fermented Foods
2. Cultural Theory: Human Beings and the Phenomenon of Fermentation
3. Cultural Homogenization: Standardization, Uniformity, and Mass Production
4. Cultural Manipulation: A Do-It-Yourself Guide

From there, Katz goes into recipes, starting with vegetable ferments such as sauerkraut, bean ferments, dairy ferments and their vegan alternatives, breads, fermented-grain porridges and beverages, wines including mead, cider, and ginger beer, beers, and vinegars. Recipes include several kinds of kimchi, sour pickles, miso, tempeh, yogurt, kefir, cheese, sourdough bread, amazaké (a sweet rice drink that, with additional fermentation, becomes sake), hooch as inmates make it, chicha, and even soda pop. Each section has a little bit of him talking about how he found the recipe, experiences making it, or some other antidote in conjunction with several recipes in that topic. He even seeks the unite the world by using fermentation recipes, such as finding Afghani Bread after the United States attacked the country.

What really caught my attention was this passage from the wine section:

When I first tried fermenting wine and beer, I learned from books. But I found the complex methods most of the books detailed discouraging. I especially dislike the emphasis on chemical sterilization, and the predominate practice of killing the wild yeast present on the skins of fruit to assure the success of a particular proven commercial strain of yeast. This practice offends my wild fermentation sensibilities.

I knew that simple, quick, and delicious alcohol ferments were possible, having sampled many different indigenous local brews when I traveled Africa (long before my interest in fermentation developed). Almost every rural village we passed though had some ferment to share, among them palm wines and cassava and millet beers. These local ferments were never poured from bottles or stored for long. They were drunk young (not aged) and generally served from gourds or other large fermenting vessels.

Why was there such a chasm between these low-tech indigenous fermentation traditions I had sampled, and all of the information I could find about making beer and wine at home? The European traditions of beer and wine evolved into traditions of refinement, emphasizing pure strains of yeast, uncontaminated by wild organisms, highly clarified products free of cloudy yeast residue, and bottling for long-term aging. I do not dispute that these practices can yield sublime and wonderful products. But I knew from my African travels that far more accessible methods existed.

He has a very valid point. And after watching enough travel shows and even Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Brewing do chicha on Brew Masters, it added extra influence and pressure to make the pulque recipe I had found.

I should add that there are two cider recipes, with the second one being written and submitted by his editor, Ben Watson, who has written a very good book on cidermaking.  I should also note that there is a strong movement in the craft cider making world to use wild yeast.

I like the variety and ease of the recipes, and I’m intrigued by the different fermenting styles. I like this book, though I will probably lament that I can never completely ease up using European practices when making wine as Katz suggests, but I’ll give some alternative methods a try.

Event Review: 17th Annual Spring Beer and Wine Fest

Last weekend, my husband and some friends of ours all went to the 17^th Annual Spring Beer and Wine Fest held at the Oregon Convention Center.

This event is organized differently than most beer or wine festivals we go to. Most of them have a standard starter entry fee, which includes entry, a glass, and some tasting tokens.  This one offered free admission to the first 1,000 people each day (down from the first two hours last year). Then, you decide what kind of glass you want to purchase. There were three options: a beer glass, traditional plastic festival tasting mug, or stemless wine glass. Thing is, last year there was a problem in that either you had to buy two separate glasses for drinking beer or wine in, but this year they said that anything could be served in the beer glass or the plastic mug, but just wine in the stemless wine glass. Another thing: I got to looking at the cheaper plastic mug from last year and decided to bring it with me this time. I figured there was no year on it, so even if the ink was changed, most vendors wouldn’t even notice (there are a lot of festivals that change the ink, logo, or both to force you into buying a new plastic mug each year). When we got there, we realized it was the same exact mug as last year. $5 saved. After you buy the mug, you buy tokens for $1 each, which is pretty standard.

I always say there is a little bit of something for everyone at this festival: beer, wine, cider, hard alcohol, cheese, chocolate, olive oil, food, and even some jewelry. Here is a little bit of what I had:

• I started off with Wandering Aengus Ciders, opting to have their Hopped Anthem Cider (technically called a graf), which I had never had before. I’ve been a little nervous about it since I’m not a hop fan, but this was subtly done as to not lose the cider flavor, and I really liked it.
• The only other ciders represented was Crispin Cider /Foxbarrel Cider and Woodchuck Cider. I’ve had them before and I’m underwhelmed, so the only cider I had was a blackberry pear cider from Foxbarrel, partly because I needed to use up tokens at the end of the day.
• My husband got a coconut brown ale from Kona Brewing Company that he felt had too much coconut, so I ended up finishing it. I did taste other beers of his, but I didn’t keep track of what they were.
• The only beer I used a token on was for Gilgamesh Mamba. This beer is made with black tea, tangerines, and no hops, so there is zero IBU.  I sort of had mixed feelings about this beer, as black tea contains tannins, so it had an interesting mouth feel that I was never completely sure about.
• I discovered a new winery that makes fruit wines named HV Cellars. I had their pomegranate wine, which wasn’t bad.
• Nehalem Bay Winery was back, and I had their blackberry wine. I found it to be sweet, which was kind of disappointing. A good dry blackberry wine can be a lot like a red wine.
• Noble Estate Vineyard and Winery had a mucat, pinot gris, and pinot noir blend they called “passion.”  I commented that it was a nice semi-sweet wine, and that I like muscat. The server (maybe the owner) told me about all the awards the muscat and Riesling wines got at that event, and then proceeded to pour me the muscat for free! It was good, but sweet, so I would recommend the passion wine first.
• I had a raspberry flavored sprakling wine from Spangler Vineyards that I wasn’t too keen on (granted, I’m not a huge raspberry fan).
• I was kind of excited to see Saké One there. The saké maker was pouring, so I mentioned I liked their flavored sakés, and he suggested I have their premixed sakitini. It was cranberry, mint, and lemonade, and it was medium dry, so it was really quite refreshing yet not tart. I snagged the recipe.
• From the free hard alcohols to try, I had a pepper infused vodka from Bend Distillery that was okay, seeing as how I’m just okay with vodka, and everybody had a vodka there, including a mint infused vodka called Lavishmint from Liquid Vodka.
• Duker’s Dill Hot Pickles was a hit among our group, though we did wonder if any of us would really enjoy eating a whole pickle. Like, the sample was tasty, but would a whole pickle be too much and become too hot?
• There were several booths for olives and olive oil, including the Olive Branch.
• Flavored pretzels from Vibrant Flavors.
• Some wonderful flavored soft caramels from Indulge. I really liked the curry coconut caramel, though the ginger caramel was nice and subtle.
• I got some little Brazilian cheese breed balls from BraziBites. They were okay, and we suspect they are only really good when warm. I should add that part of the reason I tried them was that it was made from a gluten free mix.
• It was no surprise that I got some garlic cheddar cheese curds from Rogue Creamery.

Overall, I was pretty happy with the event, though it did seem a little bit more “expensive” than last year, as I passed on some cheeses, chocolates, or hard alcohol tastings because I felt that what they were giving for $1 was not worth it. However, some of the wineries kind of made up for it, as their normal tastings would have been 50 cents, so they were double pouring. I had a pretty good day.

Last year’s reviews:

• Overall
• Cider
• Wine and Distilled Spirits
• Tour de Cheese

Pulque

For Christmas, I got my husband a subscription to Brew Your Own Magazine. When the Jan/Feb 2011 issue came out, it had an article titled, “Pulque: A Mexican Indigenous Brew” (print only). Reading it over, pulque (pronounced POOL-kay) is a quickly fermented agave plant beverage made in Mexico. Reading this article, I decided I had to give it a try before Cinco de Mayo.

First off, we had to get our hands on some agave syrup, which we found in the health food section or next to the honey in our grocery store. It has a very similar taste as honey, though it is a little bit thinner and easier to pour. The recipe called for eight pounds of agave syrup to make five gallons (25.6 oz/gallon), but since the bottles are sold in 11.75 oz, we decided to buy five bottles and make two gallons (about 29 oz/gallon).

We used this agave.

We heated about a gallon and a half of water to around 150⁰ F and added the agave. We then poured the solution into two separate gallon jugs and added some more filtered water to top off.

Normally, in Mexico, they use bacteria instead of yeast to ferment, but being where we are, we wouldn’t have access to those same bacteria, which are also usually guarded by the pulque makers. For my jug, we added some Safale US-05 yeast per the suggestion of the article. My husband, for his gallon, opened up a bottle of sour beer and added a little bit of it to his gallon in hopes that the sour beer bacteria would start the fermentation and be closer to the real thing. In Mexico, fermentation would take days, but because we had to make substitutions, we allowed for four weeks, fermenting near 68⁰ F. The article said it was, “Best if served shortly after fermenting.”

People have tried bottling pulque for export, but for some reason, pulque changes a great deal under these conditions.

So how did my pulque turn out? I’ll have to get back to you on that. Admittedly, following somebody else’s recipe, we didn’t take a hydrometer reading like we should have. Mistake. After a month, I got my one gallon out to bottle and realized the SG was at 1.050, which is where the recipe said it should have started. Either our little couple of ounces extra agave syrup really bumped up the SG, the original recipe was incorrect, or the agave syrup I used was concentrated more. I’m a little bummed, because I was hoping to have this ready by Cinco de Mayo next week, but that won’t happen. The other interesting thing is that my batch is still very much a rich brown syrup color and has not turned white like the article said pulque is.

Further Reading:

• Del Maguey: What is Pulque?
• Pulque –  The story behind the drink
• WiseGeek: What is Pulque?

Winery Review: Tualatin Estate Vineyards

Last weekend, we headed out to see some cider colleagues and their young cider farm, Bull Run Cider. When we got out there, we realized that we were really close to Tualatin Estate Vineyards, so afterwards we took a little detour.

The tasting room is situated on top of the hill and has lots of windows facing the vineyard. The façade inside is all wood, but it had a nice simple modern country feel. It was not pretentious like some tasting rooms can get.

Now Tualatin Estate Vineyards is somehow partnered up with Willamette Valley Vineyards, as the reason we were interested in visiting Tualatin Estate Vineyards stems from having a semi-sparkling muscat of theirs at a tasting we did at Willamette Valley Vineyards. Out tasting at Tualatin Estate Vineyards was probably made up of 60% Willamette Valley Vineyards wines.

They offered us two tastings, one which was free and one which costs $10 because it had more expensive wines. We decided to split both, and both tastings actually ended up being poured side by side. Interestingly, we were poured to chardonnays at the same time, with one being more acidic and having more bite than the other. We were also served two pinot noirs at the same time, but one cost $25 a bottle, and the other cost $45 a bottle because there was a limited supply. On my initial tasting, I could not tell the difference, but when I tasted the more expensive wine first and the other one second, I could then detect some difference. This is one of those cases where $45 is overpriced, because if I can’t tell the difference, I’m not going to buy it.

The other interesting wine tasting experience was that Willamette Valley Vineyards produced a 2010 whole cluster pinot noir. According to their sales fact sheet, whole grape clusters were put into a tank to ferment without being destemmed or crushed. Fermenting began, and the fruit was then pressed lightly so that the tannin from the stems did not overwhelm the wine too much. The most interesting thing was that this red wine was put back into stainless steel and never saw the inside of an oak barrel. So if you ever wanted to know what kind of flavors oak imparts on wine, this is the wine to taste. However, being a 2010, it had a lot of bite because it was young. I think this wine, because it did not go on oak like most white wines are not, was released early like a white wine. I would be curious to see how this wine tastes in a year.

Pips

Last fall, when I was pressing apples, I had pomace waste, which is the apple bits that have been crushed and all the juice was pressed out, leaving just the solid apple fiber. I ended up putting the pomace in some raised beds and throwing a little bit of wood chips on it to keep the vinegar smell from disturbing the neighbors. My goal was to compost it.

The weatherman was telling me this week that this has been one of the coldest springs on record. Yesterday, we had a bit of nice weather, so I was out working in the yard a bit. Surprise, surprise: I got pips where I had been putting the apple pomace. The seeds from the apples are sprouting.

Backing up just a moment, it takes two different kinds of apple trees to pollinate a flower to cause it to fruit. This means that each seed contains a little bit of DNA from the parent fruiting tree and the pollinating tree, and no two seeds are exactly alike. So if a Golden Delicious was pollinated by a Jonathan and then the seed from the apple planted, it would not be a Jonagold, but a whole different variety of tree. Think about with animals how there is a sire and a dam. They can have one offspring, breed again, and the second offspring is not a copy of the first one, but has similar DNA. If it helps, think about a litter of puppies or kittens to understand.

I have been told that about one seed in 300 actually grows up to bear decently edible apples, and the trees are usually 40 feet tall. To get around both of these problems, apple trees are usually developed at universities, and rootstock and grafting techniques are employed to ensure identical genetic varieties. Therefore, all Gravenstein apple trees were a cutting from another Gravenstein apple tree, and so on until you go back to the original “pip” or tree that sprouted from a seed.

Well, considering where these pips are, how long it would be until they bear apples, how tall they would get, and the odds of them producing decent fruit, it doesn’t make any sense for me to keep them, so they will get weeded out in the next couple of days.

First Bottling of 2010 Cider

Last fall, I pressed about 50 gallons worth of apple juice and started about 43 gallons of it fermenting as cider. I had 10 gallons worth “drop clear,” meaning you could see though it and it is no longer opaque. Any wine (except red wine) that has dropped clear is considered more stable for bottling, as it kind of removes possible nutrients for unwanted bacterial growth. Anyway, I bottled those first 10 gallons.

But what did I do with the other 8 gallons of juice I didn’t start fermenting? I put it in the freezer. It was my intent to back sweeten with it. That is to say, add a little bit of juice back to the cider to make it a tad bit sweet and apple-ly (remember, wine doesn’t taste like grapes, so cider doesn’t taste like apples). However, what I froze was unfiltered juice, so to add it to cider that has dropped clear will only cause it to cloud back up again. I guess I didn’t think that out enough. So basically, I had to scrap that idea and go to my local grocery store and buy some filtered apple juice. Meanwhile, I now have 10 gallons of bottled cider, and 8 gallons of juice that I might as well ferment!

Drink Review: Basque and Asturias Sidra

On April 7, Bushwhacker Cider Bar had a Spanish “sidra” tasting, focusing on four ciders from the Basque and Asturias regions in the north.

First off, remember that I had already tasted a Basque sidra,  which tend to have a bit of funk to them due to the acetic acid used, and are usually produced as still ciders. The first sidra we had for this tasting was Sarasola Sagardoa was no different. This sidra had a slight funk to it like Basque sidras do, and it ended up being the only bottle we bought for the night. This is partly because we had already bought and drunk a bottle of the second Basque sidra offered, iSastegi Sagardo Naturala. iSastegi is definitely a funkier sidra with more bite to it, meaning the Sarasola is a milder sidra. Incidentally, Sarasola is supposedly translates as “apple wine house.”

Another way the Spanish pour sidra

Moving on to the Asturias region, we first tried a sidra called Trabanco.  This was a sweeter yet bland sidra after tasting the iSastegi. The second sidra from Asturias was Poma Aurea, which was a sweet sparkling sidra done up using methode champanois, which we still found to be bland. I am not completely sure on this, but I am suspicious that the two sidras are actually made by the same company.

My party questioned the tasting order of the night. I understand the order in which we tasted went in the traditional dry to sweet tasting, but the iSastegi just had too much bite that it left the Asturias sidras bland in comparison. iSastegi also left a smell in our glass, so we kept smelling it on the Asturias sidras and kept expecting that taste. This did not help with the blandness perception.

Keeping with the Basque tasting, there were walnuts and a sheeps’ milk cheese that was quite possibly a Basque style idiazabal cheese. The cheese was excellent! We were told that the Basques usually eat the cheese and walnuts at the end of their sidra drinking in the sagardotegi (Basque cider house). While it may not have exactly been traditional, we could have had the sweeter Asturias sidras first, had some cheese and walnuts to cleanse our palates, and then continued to the funkier Basque sidras.  I think the tasting would have gone better that way.

Did I mention I loved the cheese?

A Collection of Cider Blogs

Every once in a while, I talk about the Cider Workshop. It is a network of cider makers who use email after signing up on Google Groups to discuss cider and cidermaking. They have helped me out quite a bit.

Within the last month or so, the Blog portion of the website was updated (I did not offer mine up because I tend to wander on blog topics and don’t always stick to cider). If you want to read more blogs about cider and cidermaking, check out these writers.

Volunteering at a Small Winery Part II

I spent another day out doing some work for Olequa Cellars last Friday. This time, my husband came with me, and we opened 12 cases of wine and poured them back into the carboy. Turns out the wine wasn’t quite done fermenting, which was creating CO2 and causing the corks to start failing (better than the bottle failing). Thing is, it took us 3 hours for the two of us to do that, whereas last time I was there, it took five of us two hours to bottle 50 cases.

Lesson learned: be absolutely positive the wine is done fermenting before bottling.

Book Review: The Backyard Berry Book

The Backyard Berry Book: A hands-on guide to growing berries, brambles, and vine fruit in the home garden was written by Stella Otto in 1995. This is a very detailed book outlining growing berries.

Section I is titled “Getting to the Roots – Fundamentals of Small Fruit Growing.” This includes chapters on selecting the right site, plant selection and propagation, berry botany, soil nutrition and pH, pest control strategies, insect: friend or foe, disease identification, and wild pests such as birds. Section II is the beginning to gets into the actual plant species, such as strawberries and rhubarb. Section III is brambles, with a chapter covering raspberries and cousins thimbleberries and wineberries, and second chapter on blackberries. Section IV is bush fruit, including chapters on blueberries, lingonberries, and currants and gooseberries. Section V, is on vine fruit, covering the general characteristics and culture of grapes, bunch grapes, muscadine grapes, and kiwifruit. The last section is devoted to resources, such as troubleshooting, a seasonal activity calendar, nurseries, associations, publications, further reading, glossary, and index.

The first thing I noticed when I picked up this book and thumbed though it is how there were only drawings, not pictures. The book has a total of 262 pages not including the appendix like sections, yet the book has a listing of 92 drawings. This means that every 2-3 pages, there will be a drawing.

I think it is a very informative book, however. It has wonderful graphs telling you went to do certain things for certain plants, talks about different varieties of a berry based on use, disease, and comments, and walks you through pests, soil, and pruning. Admittedly, the drawings are a bit of a turn off, but I think this is a pretty good book devoted to just berry fruit.