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.
Category: Booze
The winter installment of Fish & Game Quarterly is out, featuring another fine assortment of regional talents stretching out on a number of topics in several media. We’re pretty pleased with it; take a look. Those of you interested in learning more about the inspiration behind my wife’s video could start with Caroline Weber’s excellent Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore To The Revolution. Thanks to all our contributors.
The new issue of Edible Hudson Valley is out, and it includes a piece I wrote and photographed about Coppersea distillery. This one was quite a while in the making; after my first visit, we decided to push the piece because of all the local press that attended their debut. Then, I insisted that we wait longer still so that their new 75-acre farm would be available for gratuitous sunset pictures like the one above. As a result, I ended up stopping by four or five times over the course of two years and developing a pretty good sense of the people and the product line, as well as the ways in which they all have evolved since the business began.
Yesterday was glorious, and I made all sorts of spring cleaning-y progress in the garden, including spreading some leftover compost on a few beds and doing some early planting. This year is a late one—some beds still have frozen soil—but for the most part it’s all workable and good to go. Last year’s parsnips are as sweet as bananas, especially with some of the homemade maple syrup; the last batch went a bit long on the stove and became a surpassingly splendid burnt caramel with many possible applications. I’ll have a post or two elaborating on that combination at some point soon.
I do so love my new camera. And, as if on cue, thanks to the Muslim tyranny of Obamalight Savings Time™, now it’s fully light out at cocktail time! I do hope Rand Paul succeeds in his quest to have all those huge government warehouses full of extra daylight opened up. Just think how much brighter we’ll all be then!
I’ll be on WPKN radio in Bridgeport, Connecticut tomorrow morning at 9:15, talking about regional spirits and drinks for holiday gift-giving and numbing the anguish of spending extended time with family. Down below there’s a list of links to producers I will likely mention.
For the August Chronogram, following on the heels of the beekeeping article, I profiled a new meadery up near Albany. Helderberg Meadworks, a tiny operation, could be the beginning of a renaissance of the ancient craft the way distilling and hard cider have both exploded into major new sectors of the agricultural economy. Those are oak barrel staves that Peter Voelker puts in the fermentation tanks to impart the flavors his Norse ancestors would have…
Just a quick one, because I have a lot to do today. This is a cocktail I invented the other night, and I’m pretty happy with it. Like my cooking, my mixology tends to be improvised and unmeasured. The results are usually quite good, occasionally not so much, and once in a while they’re superb. This one is an excellent aperitif, since it doesn’t have any hard liquor in it; everything is around 18 percent…
I contributed two pieces to this month’s Chronogram: an exploration of local mixology (using just Hudson Valley ingredients) with Paul Maloney of Kingston’s Stockade Tavern, for which I also took the pictures, and a more serious look at how our farmers have coped with recovery from last summer’s flooding, including the major problems with crop insurance and waterway management that have not yet been addressed. Enjoy.
I reread my France posts recently, and it already feels sort of like if it happened to someone else, especially the early ones (since I was so jetlagged). And there are still so many photos and so much information left to process. Since the freshness of the experience fades in inverse proportion to said processing, future posts in the “Things What I Learned In France” department are likely to be less literal and more an organic assimilation of the information I absorbed while there. This post is about an homage to Gascony that popped into my head as I unwrapped the many goodies I had stashed in my luggage, including a sampler of the Chapolards’ charcuterie–saucisson sec, saucisse sèche, and noix de jambon–which Dominique graciously gave me and which somehow ended up swaddled in plastic bags and dirty laundry and buried deep in the recesses of my suitcase for the trip home.
I kid, of course; bringing those things home would have been illegal. Also, there was the Armagnac. And the prunes, and the Tarbais bean and Espelette pepper seeds, and pistachio oil and truffle salt and other items that would be at the top of your must-have list if your plane happened to disappear into the Bermuda Triangle and leave you stranded on some desert island somewhere like in a certain TV show that actually managed to be more annoying than Twin Peaks. I’m all about the pragmatism.