some stuff i forgot...

I literally type this post two weekends ago and......never posted it. Please, explain how I survive daily.

ANYWAY I have things to talk about like school and malthouses & brewery tours but if I let this post never see the light of day I don't get to show off my barrel, SO.

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After two straight holiday weeks and two straight 4-day holiday weekends, only having two days off last week was an incredibly cruel jolt back in to the reality of the 5-day work week.  Also for the first time in a while I didn’t have much in the way of actual plans, which meant almost the whole weekend was devoted to working out and brewing beer…….could be worse.

Friday night was the annual Men of Zumba event at CC+ - when I first started really hitting the gym hard about 5 years ago, after I made the switch from my small local gym with not much more than a smattering of cardio machines & a weight room to the grand (and pricey) wonderland of Life Time, it was dance cardio classes that really hooked me.  I still enjoy them (I’ve migrated from straight up ‘zumba’ style classes to more hip hop type classes, which if you would have told me I’d be doing about 10 years ago I would have laughed in your face), even though I’ve mostly moved on, but a lot of my favorite instructors participate in this every year, so it’s fun to support.  Unfortunately the more I get out of the scene, the less familiar I am with the local instructors, and the more time I spent desperately trying to catch on to their routines while only being able to see about 50% of what was going on on the stage…but it was still a good, sweaty time.  Props to CC+ for managing the insane amount of people, too – at one point I turned around and the place was packed to the gills, all the way back on to the carpet behind the dance floor!

I also got a surprise delivery from my friend Kirsten in Minnesota – fresh, pesticide-free black spruce tips to add to my next brew, and (almost even more exciting), some Caribou beans!

Saturday I crawled out of bed, hit a boot camp class at my gym, came home to shower & headed back out almost immediately to White Lotus Yoga Studio for their new location’s grand opening.  I was really hoping to check out an aerial yoga class, but unfortunately they were all full, so I popped in to a vinyasa flow since I was already there, & signed up to do some flying next Sunday.  I’d been to the studio for Friday community classes at the old location, but the new one is soooooooo nice and bright and airy!  Solid job, ladies.

Next up: barrel curing!  Back in November a friend picked up a discarded Journeyman Distillery whiskey barrel for me from his homebrew shop (after doing a little investigating – it used to house Silver Cross whiskey, which sounds delightful).  I’ve been scheming a brew to put in it for quite a while now, and finally settled on an eggnog porter that I’ll be brewing next weekend, but it’s been sitting empty for so long that I wanted to go through the curing/sanitizing process even though it’s only held liquor so far.  Luckily my parents’ house, with its much larger laundry room and unused bathtub, was on the way home.

My darling <3

Curing away in a strange environment...

I can’t believe how much char came out of this thing – or how good EVERYTHING smelled. Damn, son.  A week of curing + some sanitizing and she’ll be ready to go!

Prepping for a new batch meant I also had to move along some of my current fermentation projects, so Sunday was a beer transfer day – I have two batches going right now, a Belgian golden strong that I racked over a slurry of almond extract & brandy-soaked dried fruits (blueberries, apricots & golden raisins) to try and conjure up a stollen bread flavor (fruitcake beer is SO last Christmas!), and a standard American IPA that I wanted to pull off a couple gallons to play with (I ended up adding a juniper berry tea).  Both of them came along nicely throughout primary fermentation – the Belgian has a perfect yeasty golden ale flavor and it hit all my projected numbers almost perfectly.  I was shooting for an 8.4% ABV, nailed my original gravity, and after primary it was sitting around 8.9% - bonus!

Beer ingredients looking pretty vile.

Amidst all the transferring I also took down all my Christmas decorations and got in a little extra fitness aka, “I bet you I can totally squat this tree.” (Spoiler alert: it was actually really light and I was kind of disappointed by how easily the whole thing went down).  Apparently the fitness theme of the day was “cold,” though – I tried to meet some bootcamp friends for a nice hour of hot vinyasa in the morning, but the heat at the gym was busted so it was a little more like slightly chilly vinyasa. Still managed to work up a sweat by the end, but hooooooly wow was it hard to find some zen for those first few minutes.

Disappointingly easy, but don't ask me how the attempts at pistols went.

Luckily I warmed up with some Paleomg spaghetti squash pizza casserole once all was said and done – an extra big batch with heaps of ground beef, spinach and mushrooms.  It might only look pretty when it’s fresh out of the oven, but damn is it good (and thank god for that, because with this big of a batch I’m going to be eating it all week long).

fermentation 101

David Klingenberger getting ready to teach us all how to ferment everything ever.

This post is a week overdue, so excuse my tardiness (as always), but the experience was so cool I can't help but backtrack a little.

David showing off the fermentation room.

A few months ago I discovered this really fantastic local foods vendor at The Eastern Market in Detroit.  Initially I was drawn in because they sold kimchi (which was my obsession at the time - seriously, but have you ever had a burger with peanut butter and kimchi, because if not, get your butt to Green Dot Stables and eat like twelve), but I ended up walking away with a jar of their Sea Stag sauerkraut - sauerkraut made with cabbage, carrots, burdock root & most excitingly, a bunch of sea vegetables (which I love love love).  From that point on every time I went to Eastern Market I'd treat myself to some new sort of fermented yum from The Brinery (and of course some new wonderful flavor of peanut butter from The Granola Tree - excuse me for a moment while I pimp their Almond Joy peanut butter as one of the most fantastic things that's ever been in my mouth - but that's besides the point).

Flash forward to last month when I heard about a workshop the owner of The Brinery was doing on lacto-fermentation - it involved a small "seminar" of sorts about the process of fermenting, a taste-testing of many Brinery products, a tour of their new facility at The Washtenaw County Food Hub (which is also a seriously cool place currently in development to support local farm & food businesses through a myriad of really awesome future plans), a hands-on workshop where you got to make your own sauerkraut, and a lunch prepared with loads of fermented delicacies.  It might not be the same sort of fermentation I'm used to (aka beer), but I couldn't help but want to go.

A little background about The Brinery:  It was founded by David in 2010 basically because the farm he worked at, Tantre Farm, had an excess of cabbage one year, and the fermentation was needed to preserve it.  From there, he developed the business into what it is now - serving tons of local farmers markets, even shipping out of state, and growing into a 10-ish employee operation that just recently moved into a new home at the Food Hub.  The coolest thing about The Brinery to me is their product innovation - recipes are my favorite thing about brewing beer, especially coming up with new and unique spins on old standards.  While you can get regular plain old sauerkraut at The Brinery, you can also get sauerkraut with watermelon radishes, sea vegetables, juniper berries, kimchi with local garlic scapes and ramps, pickled beets and carrots, multiple kinds of kvass, and most recently they've forayed into making their own tempeh (which I promise is incredible) and hot sauces (including a fermented play on sriracha!).

I also appreciate David's philosophy on doing things with "assisted manpower" - for example, they still ferment in relatively small batches in barrels, rather than using giant vats or any sort of automated system - but they have special-made machinery to lift & dump the barrels.  Different canvas, but when we were chopping cabbage and leeks and carrots to make into our own batch of sauerkraut, it felt just like being in my garage mashing peaches and portioning out hops for my next batch of beer.  Pretty cool.  Not to mention David was a remarkably personable & friendly guy - he stopped to chat with everyone in attendance, shared his exuberance for the craft and, when he found out I brew beer, even offered a trade - I left him with a bottle of chocolate porter & a bottle of coffee milk stout in exchange for some really great hot sauce.  Fermentation friends!

The Brinery fermentation calendar - kraut might be a little different than beer, but it was really cool (and maybe useful someday!) to see how a smaller scale business operates, especially with regard to things you aren't normally privileged to see, like scheduling!

Chopping up some cabbage (no worries - there was a mandoline & we didn't have to do it all by hand!), leeks, carrots & garlic for our own special batch of sauerkraut.

One of the other attendees offered to take some shots for me while we were mixing up our future kraut - I guess we both figured my briney hands shouldn't be anywhere near my phone.

The lunch provided at the end of the day was the icing on a really awesome cabbage cake - highlights were the black pepper tempeh salad (I went back for seconds...and thirds...), a bevy of fresh local veggies & cheeses, and of course the mounds of not pictured here sauerkraut & kimchi that littered the table.

I've done a decent amount of making jams & pickling, but this is my first foray into sauerkraut.  My batch from this workshop is still chilling on my countertop getting funky, but if all goes well I'm hoping to make my way into kimchi next!!