A Fistful of Flowers

For someone as passionate about fermentation as I am, it’s surprising that I never made any alcohol until recently. The reason was largely that I figured I’d never be able to replicate anything close to the wines I like, and even if I did the quantity would be too small to warrant the effort. But there’s more to drink than wine, and four years in the new garden is producing a lot more fruit than it used to. And since lactic and acetic acid fermentations (including with koji) are pretty second nature to me, I wanted to try something new.

Last year, I began earnestly macerating fruit and herbs (separately or in select combinations) in grain alcohol. Tender green herbs only needed a few days to extract their flavor (after which it can get swampy), while denser things like foraged black walnuts and rose hips took longer. Most fruit, including rhubarb, was pretty great after a couple of weeks. (I would dilute the booze 50/50 with water to taste, since 90 percent alcohol is vile and burns horribly). Once these various decoctions were all ready, I strained them and began blending, diluting, and occasionally sweetening the mixtures until I was happy. I ended up with four different vermouths, each with distinct characteristics, and have been using them since either straight over ice or more frequently in cocktails or spritzers.

This endeavor pleased me, though the relatively high alcohol (even after dilution they all ended up around 20 percent) made me crave something more quenching. And my fermentation fetish really demanded to make the alcohol, not just soaking things in store-bought booze. So this year I’ve been fermenting a variety of meads, kombucha-type things (though there’s no tea involved), and sodas (where I pour the still fermenting liquid into swing-top bottles so it carbonates).

The first ones I made involved spring flavors; I was in Vermont and the spruce tips were perfect so I picked a big bowl full and then put them in a jar with water and maple syrup for a few days until it started to get fizzy. Spruce tips—along with pine tips, elderberry flowers, and pretty much all unsprayed fruit, whether wild or domestic—are covered in wild yeast so you don’t need to buy any brewer’s or champagne yeast to get fermentation going. The wild varieties will take a few days to get going, though, so be patient. I also filled a jar with a mixture of herbs: anise hyssop, a couple kinds of mint, ground ivy, dandelion, and more spruce, and I made one final jar with flowers: lilac, crabapple, and beach rose (rosa rugosa).

The last one I sweetened with raw local honey instead of maple, thinking it would match better with the flowers. (Raw honey is also an excellent source for yeast.) Because I love spruce vinegar, I added a big blob of mother to the spruce jar and let it sit open for a few days before straining it into another jar and putting it with the rest of my vinegars to do its thing for between six and twelve months. I set the other two up in half-gallon jars fitted with airlock tops and let them go until the bubbling subsided (airlocks provide a handy method for assessing the vigor of your fermentation, since you can see the bubbles escaping) at which point I racked them all into swing-top bottles so they’d end up fizzy. I left them on the counter to keep the fermentation going, then moved them into the fridge to slow it way down and prevent the bottles from (possibly) exploding from the pressure.

As I drank my way through these and a few others, to maintain carbonation I would sometimes pour off the remainder of one to top up another so that there wasn’t too much air space in the bottle. As a result, I ended up with a sort of solera situation, where one bottle had the spruce-herb mixture plus the flower blend plus a 100 percent rose batch I made because they were blooming so prolifically and they small and taste so damn good. This complex combination really worked, and serves as a good example of the many rewards that await keen and dedicated experimentation.

I’ve never been one for replicability in food and drink; the whole point of each meal or bottle of wine is that it represents a particular place at a particular time. So as far as recipes go, try a few versions based on what you grow, forage, or buy from a farmer and see what happens. If you have a sugar source, a yeast source, clean water and jars, and delicious plant parts, it’s likely to end up tasting pretty good. If you don’t love it, just leave it in a jar with some cheesecloth tied over the opening for a few months and it’ll make a grand vinegar. (This holds true for kombucha as well, and any other similarly fermented liquid). So there’s no downside.

The most recent finished drink I made was a red currant mead. Unlike their black cousins, red currants are a little insipid; they have great acidity and a nice bright berry flavor, but no middle palate. To remedy this deficiency, in addition to the fruit and the honey water I also added a tea I made from yarrow, mugwort, and foraged sassafras twigs and stalks. There might have also been a little mint, thyme, and bee balm in there as well. I figured that the drink would benefit from the added bitterness, tannins, and herbal complexity, and it did. This is one to work on in the coming years for sure.

A couple of days ago I juiced a big bowl of black currants and they’re starting to ferment into another mead. Because they have a unique and feral complexity, I didn’t add anything else to that jar. I’m going to steep the must left from juicing them in grain alcohol to make more crème de cassis, since last year’s batch is running out. To close, here’s a shot of the red currant mead (which carbonated really nicely) mixed with a little of that cassis to make an all-currant, all homegrown kir royale.

If you have any specific questions about any part of this, please let me know in the comments. I realize that I covered a lot of ground here. A good reference book for making your own unorthodox fermented beverages is Pascal Baudar’s The Wildcrafting Brewer.

Cheers!