More fermentation

There’s something about early spring weather in south Georgia that makes me want to brew. The afternoons are sunny and pleasant but the nights are cool enough that one can count on a vat of ale maintaining the correct temperature for fermentation. In the past week I made a big batch of mead, which will be combined with our harvest of muscadines from the fall for melomel or pyment. Currently the grapes are in the freezer, repeated freezing and thawing being an acceptable substitute for bare footed peasants in breaking the skins. As I’ve said before Ken Schramm’s method for making fruit meads is wonderful. By making a plain honey/water/yeast mead, letting it ferment to 80% and then adding fruit one can avoid any cooking or sterilization of the fruit, preserving the delicate aromatics and flavors. The alcohol present from the initial fermentation prevents infection and the slowing ferment prevents the scrubbing off of volatiles by CO2. Mead wants a slightly higher ambient fermentation temperature than beer so it’s in a spare room bubbling merrily.

While I went through the fancy beer phase that most home brewers succumb to early on, making raspberry wheats, peach lambics etc. lately I’ve been focussed on traditional British ales. My favorite British beers tend to be country ales from the southwest of England followed closely by London styles like Fuller’s and Young’s. I like a tad more floral hopping than the most traditional British beers but their dry, buttery malt flavor is the grail I seek. This week I made a london ale from Maris Otter Crisp malt and a Wyeast London ale starter, bittered with Northern Brewer hops and finished with Centennial, a new variety for me. I always add lots of honey (more about that later). The ‘07 hop harvest was a near crisis and prices are horrifying, some six times what they were two years ago. Centennial has notes of Cascade and Fuggles and is quite strong with a fine floral aroma for dry hopping.

Adding honey to beer does not do what most people think it does, like sweeten, thicken or darken it. Commercial beers with honey in their names tend to add it after fermentation as a flavoring, taking advantage of the positive connotations people have to seeing the word honey on a label. Dundee’s Honey Brown, made by Genessee is an example of this. Honey by itself has many ways in which it inhibits fermentation, one of which is a paucity of nutrients for yeasts. Barley malt on the other hand is loaded in these nutrients and combining honey with barley makes the honey ferment out quickly and cleanly helping to dry and strengthen the ale, leaving the faintest hint of floral honey flavor. By keeping the honey sugars as 20% or less of the total it doesn’t slow fermentation (a fast steady ferment encouraged by a high pitching rate is a key to good British ale) and tends to a good crisp finish on the palate.

For more about using honey in beer and ale feel free to contact me through the comments. Cheers!

Gratuitous camelias, because I can and for Red Barber’s 100th.

 

Holiday Thanks To Our Customers

We’ve had a busy holiday season what with moving bees around and sending out all the Christmas orders for honey.  Our commercial site, beeherenow.com, has been hearing from our wonderful customers and they’re really nice.  Here’s an example:

” Hi, everyone :-)  I’m ordering some of your wonderful honey for my auntie in PA.  She’ll LOVE it.  Thanks much for your hard work in providing such a precious product :-)”

And another:

“A long-time fan, love-love your products.”

One all-together excellent customer even sent us some of the mead he made from our honey.  How good is that?  Here’s a picture to prove it along with some of today’s camelias.  It’s nice to be able to pick flowers at Christmas time.  We had more much-needed rain last night and it’s a nice soft day in Georgia.

 

Here come the Bees

Here’s a sight to warm a bee man’s heart, a full load of bees safely delivered.  These girls sure were happy to get to Georgia after some chilly Maine December.  They’re all settled out in the woods now and seem glad of it.

 

Cumberland Island Report

In an attempt to shake off the profound sadness resultant from the death of my teacher ( see post below) I’ll describe the beautiful weekend we had on Cumberland. We keep some bees on the Island, in good years making honey for the spectacular Greyfield Inn. This year was no good year, either on the mainland or the barrier islands for honey, blueberries, peaches, corn or most other agricultural enterprises. In the dearth of nectar some or our colonies on Cumberland succumbed, to starvation or varroa mites or hive beetles but I went through the survivors, helped them out as best I could and got them ready for the spring that will soon be upon us.

This is the best of times to be on Cumberland, cool, clear, free of pestiferous insects, generous of sun and balmy airs. We had a fine hike on Friday morning, along a trail new to us, through mature longleaf forest and old live oak. 10 kilometers of beauty full of butterflies, spanish moss and big trees. I did some fishing in the afternoon. The sea was soft and still with fish swirling and jumping and small pods of dolphins feeding back and forth in the river. I caught one speckle trout and one redfish and sent them both back to eat more shrimp and get bigger. The air was so still that one could hear the exhalations of the dolphins in the channel as they hurried back below to hunt.

In the evening we went to Lane’s Landing where there’s a cabin we hope to stay in soon. There we experienced a sunset of transcendent beauty and imagined bringing friends there for another such. From the immense marshes to the west rails and herons squawked and chattered and stately wood storks roosted in the trees. As it got dark we went to Plum Orchard, the restored Carnegie mansion, now a Park Service facility, to use their dock for some early evening fishing. I hooked a pair of beautiful sea trout and sent them back to get bigger.

At sunrise we drove up to Stafford Beach, where we were engaged, six years ago, and had a good beach walk, poking in the spindrift for curiosities. Cuban rum bottles, many florescent light tubes and the remains of a dolphin, clearly butchered for meat. Who eats dolphins? It couldn’t have been killed more than forty miles away and I puzzled over it though Ellen pronounced it ’stinky’ and insisted we move on. I’m not talking about dolphin fish ( dorado, mahi-mahi ), a noble fish for the table, this was a bottle nosed dolphin, like Flipper, a mammal and not generally thought of as food. Perhaps it was by-catch for a commercial shrimper. We watched the shrimpers towing their enormous nets offshore, defined for our eyes by the cloud of birds diving into them, and saw plenty of dolphins inside the trawl.

Grateful to our generous hosts we were back in Fernandina by 4:30. It was as fine a weekend as one could have.

Update:  I really should always ask Stacia first.  All dolphins found dead are necropsied, the skulls saved along with some crucial parts and the remains sent back into the sea.  What I found was a relic of research, not harvesting for meat.  Wrong again.

 

Strange doings in chickenland

I’ve been assembling the honey house and am finally done.  The extractor is up and running and we’ll have honey in the barn by the end of the day.  It will take a while to get it all done but having on site honey extraction is going to make possible better varietals and more exact harvesting.  In the past we’ve used  other facilities, one of them on Cumberland and its been more work than it should be.

Meanwhile back at the chickens, I was gathering eggs yesterday and was greeted by the sight of a 5 foot chicken snake getting its jaws around an egg.  Once I got him to yield up the egg and administered a lesson in not eating eggs I noticed yet another snake ( an oak snake, smaller, similar to the one pictured ) coiled up in the corner of the coop with the characteristic shape of an egg partway down it.  Eek.  The first snake in the coop this year and there are two of them, different species, side by side snacking on eggs. Strange doings indeed.  That rooster should shut up already and do some work.  If he can attack me, and he gave me the spurs just the other day, he ought to see off some puny snakes.

When I first heard of chicken snakes I assumed it was yet another southernism like ‘chicken hawk’ which refers not to a specific species of hawk but to all hawks that might like chickens.  My guide to local herps had no chicken snake.  Then during a trip to the Smithsonian I chanced to find the Okefenokee display and there it was, clearly identified, a chicken snake.  Egg snake would be more accurate because they don’t actually prey on hens but they love to steal eggs.  I don’t blame ‘em our eggs are delicious.

 

Muscadine Melomel

Its time for the muscadine harvest so its also time to talk about mead. Mead is something of which I have too much to say but I’ll try and restrain myself, for now.

Simply, mead is honey wine. Using honey as the source of fermentable sugars is ancient and mead has played interesting roles in history, everything from a secret military weapon ( soldiers that are high fight better ), to an aphrodisiac ( honeymoon ), to a vehicle for herbal remedies ( the root of the word ‘medicine’ ). In modern times commercial beekeeping means that it is no longer an exclusively luxury product and we can use honey in ways that would have seemed profligate in medieval times. And we can add fruits, spices and additives at our fancy to create never before imagined drinks.

Fruit meads, known as melomels, are a wonderful and varied kind of beverage with the flavours of the fruit and honey blending in strange and unpredictable ways. I like using fruits with lots of anthocyanins and tannins to add body and complexity to mead. Think wild Maine blueberries or blackberries, sour cherries, or grapes of many kinds. I’ve used the old overgrown Concords from my farm in Maine and this year for the first time I’ve got a real harvest of muscadines in Georgia.

For the first years we owned our Georgia farm we never picked a grape. They ripen in August and we were always in Maine. The man we bought the place from said the critters got them but our friend Roy says the critters were two legged. The vines had been neglected and it took a couple of years of pruning and irrigation to bring them back but now they look great and the fruit are some tasty. Three years ago I was given 20 kilos of heirloom muscadines by a local beekeeper that came from his families home place and I made two slightly different batches of mead with them as experiments. I think its a great way to use muscadines for wine, balancing out some of their exotic nature and making a drier wine than using the grapes alone. SWMBO

is a mead lover and is urging, even insisting that I get to it and turn these into wine. Pinot Georgio perhaps.

Ken Schramm has written a fine book that I would recommend to anyone who cares to have a go at making mead. His best idea is to make melomels in a whole new way, by making a plain honey mead, fermenting it to 80% and then adding fruit and finishing the ferment. This eliminates the need for sterilizing the fruit by cooking or sulfites and it preserves more of the fresh fruit flavour because it isn’t scrubbed off by the vigorous initial fermentation. Even after aging for a few years the fragrant volatiles are still there.

Another great resource for mead information is the Mead Lover’s Digest. Some really good meadmakers are very generous with their knowledge there and I, for one, am very grateful to Dick Dunn for his years of moderation ( as it were ).

For six gallons of mead I use a gallon of honey in five of water. It takes three or four weeks for the initial ferment to quiet down then I rack to a new container, leaving sediments behind, and add the fruit. For muscadines I like 6 to 8 kilos in a batch. After another month or so of ferment I bottle in champagne bottles with a small amount of honey dissolved in water added to make a little sparkle. Melomels, like all meads, have a very exhilarating effect, like champagne with considerably less aftermath.

 

Comb honey for sale

People have different reactions when I say I’m a commercial beekeeper. Do you get stung? is by far the most common. Less frequently but still often enough people ask if I sell comb honey. Till now the answer has been no. Its labor intensive and difficult and a very small percentage of those who ask are prepared to reach in their pockets and part with the readies. Nonetheless, now I can say yes I do sell comb honey and we’ll see who really wants it.

This spring I spoke to a honey packer that buys a lot of comb honey and we discussed the economics and mechanics of it. So I did a trial run, south Georgia being an excellent place to do it and my woods here blessed with the right combination of flowers. Here’s the result and it came out rather well. The floral sources are holly, gallberry and palmetto in varying ratios, based on timing and location, yielding a range of heartiness ( holly very light, palmetto amber, gallberry in between ) but the flavour is excellent as only honey from the comb can be. If you’re interested get in touch, michael at beeherenow dot com.

 

How are the bees?

Well they’re hot but so is everything. Near 100F again today and not dry either. While we finally got some good monsoon action last week and the water really stimulated plant growth and bloom there really isn’t much for the bees to do but haul water to cool themselves.

There is loblolly bay ( usually called red bay here ) and since we got rain it is blooming beautifully but there’s only so much of it. Likewise for the clethra ( Pepperbush ). That’s not one of my girls there, that’s a big solitary bee. In parts of our woods there are stands of clethra big enough that one smells them as one drives by and one Georgia beekeeper told me that sometimes it blooms enough that you can make splits but I don’t believe him.

The bees are toughing it out, mostly just hanging around the hive trying to maintain temperature control. They do this by taking a drop of water and spreading it with their front legs while fanning their wings to evaporate it. I found more small hive beetles than I would like; they are a much bigger problem here than in a Maine summer. I’ll have to do some trapping. Although the bay and pepperbush aren’t much they are all there will be until maple in January.

 

Creme de miel

In Spain or Mexico its flan. In France its creme caramel. Here we do it our way, cane sugar phooey. A great way to use all these fresh eggs and honey too.

• 1 cup honey
• 1 1/2 cups cream
• 1 1/2 cups whole milk
• dash of salt
• 4 eggs
• 4 egg yolks
• 1 tsp vanilla

Heat honey in a sauce pan until it foams and browns slightly, about 2 minutes. Pour into a loaf pan and put in the freezer. Heat cream and milk to a simmer and beat eggs together with yolks, salt and vanilla. Whisking constantly drizzle hot cream/milk into eggs. Pour gently into chilled loaf pan, place in a larger pan of boiling water and bake at 350F for 50 minutes. It will be slightly browned but not completely set. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours. To serve, run a knife around the edge of the pan, invert serving plate over the pan then invert pan over the plate, leaving the flan upside down on the plate.

The bowl is from Jody Johnstone’s wonderful anagama kiln.

 

Cue it up

What a fine day down South. Its Her day off and we had an excellent sunrise walk out in the woods, 2.5K through the forest where we keep the bees. The pepperbush ( clethra ) is just starting and there are red bays blooming here and there. Then back to raid the garden. Edamame, sweet red peppers, tomatoes, habaneros and the best watermelon I’ve ever grown. We had messy watermelon snacking on the porch.

To add to the fun its ribs night at the farm and I’m making a cha siu barbecue with a rack of ribs from one of our neighbors’ pigs. Cha siu is the Chinese contribution to the world of barbecue and has been adapted, with local variations, throughout SE Asia. Our version of it is altered, as usual, by the substitution of honey for any other kind of sugar and habanero for any other kind of chili. Here’s how I do it:

Brine or dry salt ribs for two to three days.

Parboil with bay, star anise and lemongrass. 30 to 40 minutes is plenty.

Marinate for some hours with the following:

1/4 cup light soy
1/4 cup whatever cooking wine you have
1/8 cup honey
3/8 cup hoisin
1/8 cup vinegar
8 cloves garlic minced
6 cm ginger or galangal root, minced
2 ripe habaneros, minced ( hey, I know, but that’s how we like it…. newbies have expressed shock and horror, leave it out or try a couple of Thai chilis instead )
1/2 tsp 5 fragrant spice powder
1 stalk lemongrass, chopped
1/2 Vidalia onion, barbecued and chopped

Grill, covered over a slow charcoal fire. As they near completion (20 to 30 minutes ) brush with a glaze of soy, sesame oil and honey in the ration of 1 to 1 to 2, three times, a few minutes apart.
Let sit under a foil tent for ten minutes and serve.

Alternative cooking methods:

South Georgia smoker:
Eliminate the parboil, marinate seasoned ribs overnight, start fire and heat up the smoker, burning off the bark and first smoke. Cook for 2 1/2 hours at about 230F. Glaze as above.

Conventional gas oven, marinate overnight, bake in a slow oven ( 250 - 300F ) for two hours, glazing as above towards the end. Turn off oven let the ribs sit till you’re ready to serve.

Notes on the ingredients.

Its hard to find decent soy sauce in the US. I like the Thai Dragonfly brand ‘Thin Soy Sauce’, try your local Asian market. Pearl River Bridge is a more authentic Chinese taste.

Asian recipes always specify rice wine vinegar. I’ve tried many vinegars and, like the wine, whatever you have, white, cider or wine is fine. Don’t use balsamic.

5 Fragrant Spice powders vary widely. Look for one that smells of anise rather than commercial cinnamon. If you’re as crazy as me you’ll end up mixing your own.

Whenever we barbecue I put on three large yellow onions after I take the meat off the grill. When the meal is over run out and take them off. They will be charred on the outside and soft on the inside and very fragrant. Kept in the fridge they are a fine addition to all kinds of cooking including this.