Very pale color and not a strong nose at all. The juniper berries had been left in the must for the entire fermentation so I would have expected more of their presence. Its there but you have to hunt for it a bit.
Taste is also surprisingly subtle. The Granny Smith apples make their presence known and the lemon peel adds a bright note. There is some juniper berry but again, not much. The juniper makes itself known more through an astringency in the mouthfeel.
We dunked some apple juice we had sitting around into a glass and it did bring out more apple character and the sweetness rounded it out.
Verdict: It can sit and think beautiful thoughts in the closet for another few months. Then we’ll decide if it needs to be back sweetened, probably with apple juice concentrate.
Our planned brew day will feature the following in one gallon batches: – Spiced hibiscus mead – Hibiscus mead – Cherry cider – British apple cider – British apple cider with crab apple juice
First, the recipes because I’m not an asshole who needs to assault you with navel gazing stories of my childhood before getting to the only bit you care about.
I’m omitting any directions on yeast, nutrition, or other details of the brewing process as I just wanted to focus on the details of these recipes. Go visit City Steading if you have questions about the process for brewing mead and cider. They gave us the know-how and confidence to start our brewing hobby. Their YouTube channel is well produced and well worth the time to watch.
Spiced Hibiscus Mead: 1 gallon water (1 quart to hibiscus tea, 3 quarts to fermenter) 2.5 pounds honey 1.5 ounces hibiscus flowers 3 cloves 1” knob of ginger 3 allspice berries 1 star anise
Crush the spices and ginger in a mortar and pestle until its a well combined paste. Stuff this into a small cloth teabag. Add along with hibiscus flowers to 1 quart of water. Cover. Bring to boil, boil with much vigor for about 8 minutes. Remove from heat and let steep for 1 hour.
Then finish an ordinary average brew day.
To make an unspiced hibiscus, do the same but omit the spices
Cherry Cider: 2 quarts black cherry juice 2 quarts store apple juice
Mix and ferment
Bittersweet Cider with Crab Apple Juice 1 quart delgo crab apple juice 1 container British bittersweet cider concentrate 3 quarts water
Mix and ferment. We’re also making a version without the crab apple juice.
Now, a discussion on resources for cider making.
When we started making cider in November of 2020, it became rapidly obvious to us that our choices were very limited in terms of what we could find at the grocery store for the base ingredients. Cider apples are not straightforward to find, even in an apple growing region such as Washington state. And even if you find the apples, you have to process them into juice.
Our initial search lead us to Cider Auction which is a way of getting cider apples direct from a localish grower. Unfortunately most of the varieties are only available in 48 gallon drums but they do have a few smaller bottle which they thoughtfully provided for home brewers. Due to the high cost of the just shy of 1 pint bottles, these are clearly meant to provide a spike of acidity rather than form the base of your cider.
Farmer Paul is very friendly and I strongly encourage you to check them out and support them. Apples are a seasonal product, especially for heirloom varieties so they may or may not be available.
The juice ships frozen and we immediately put it in the freezer and was covered with tater tots, vegan fish fillets, boxes of popsicles, and sadly forgotten… until today. Today we try the Delgo crab apple juice. We also have 3 pints of Wickerson crab apple juice left in the freezer which we’ll try soon.
Now, the concentrate.
So far I have only been able to find one source of cider apple concentrate available in the US. That is through morebeer.com in the form of a concentrated shelf-stable paste. While this may seem questionable, the results were very pleasing.
Store bought apple juice in the US is cheap, good quality, but limited to sweet flavors. This is fine if you’re planning a cider that is spiced or features other strongly flavored fruit additions. Its a nice backbone but lacking in the character you might know from tasting European and some better US cider brands (Rev Nat’s is our favorite cider, Independence is our go to for perry).
Using the bittersweet concentrate makes for a cider that can stand alone with no other additions. After two months of aging this produces a very pleasing home cider.
Finally, fresh apples.
A number of months back, we purchased a masticating juicer. This was around $120 and promised better extraction than other types of juicers in its price range. It does work very well for what it does but there are a number of considerations.
1) It takes a large amount of fruit
It takes around 15 pounds of apples or pears to make one gallon of juice with our process. Depending on where you purchase your fruit, this can either be a $15 gallon of juice, or a $50 one. Availability of cheap (and local) apples can be seasonal as well.
I don’t know if processing the apples through a mill first will improve the yield as I just chop them up with a knife.
2) It requires prep work
The intake chute for the juicer is small so you will need to wash and chop your apples. I don’t bother to core them, in they go with the stems and seeds. I suppose an apple mill would make quicker work of that but we live in an 800 square foot apartment and lack access to storage space.
3) There’s a lot of pulp
Masticating juicers do leave a lot of fiber in the juice. If you’re drinking juice this is a good thing as you can never get enough fiber in your diet. For brewing, you’ll want to remove as much of the fiber to avoid insane amounts of lees.
What I do is juice the apples 12-48 hour before brew time. I pour the juice into large pitchers and put it in the fridge. The fiber will separate out of the juice and you can use a siphon to pull out the glorious center portion of fresh juice. Its an extra step but requires very little work, just a bit of planning (and plenty of large jars).
On the plus side, the juice tastes fantastic. You can mix apple/pear varieties to your heart’s content. If you have access to a farmer’s market you can pick up a variety of apples or pears towards the fall. Our juicer has been idle all spring and into the summer but its worth it when you can get a 20# box of apples at the farmer’s market.
Hopefully this will help another hapless cider enthusiast just starting out on their yeasty voyage of discovery. I’m not even a full calendar year into the hobby but that has been plenty of time to explore and learn.
One of the eternal delights of being a “full stack” developer is that you get swapped between the data, front end, and back end teams with the vigor of a pair of squirrels playing badminton under the steady eyes of a horned owl who has promised mercy for the victor.
I’ve been reassigned. The past year and a half was spent leveraging an Angular based Single Page Application into an aging .NET Web Forms and MVC application. This is very much like trying to get a pair of Bluetooth headphones to connect to a 1904 Victrola. Now I am to address the deficiencies of the .NET application in all of its mutant glory.
The nice thing about .NET is that adults are in charge. Updates happen in a progressive fashion. You can ignore the first three years of .NET CORE and a few hours with a tutorial can bring you up to speed. Older features, even really awful ones, are generally supported… but any references to them are exiled into the howling wastes of the microsoft documentation archives.
The problem is shifting back.
Javascript based platforms are run by toddlers who have been given access to Monster energy drinks. If you spend more than a week away from things, its Planet of the Apes time when you return from orbit. Spend another week away and you’ll be sharing puzzled glances with Dr. Zira when a three foot chinchilla welcomes you to Margaritaville. Do you have a reservation?
I expect the next year to look like this.
Month 3: We’re no longer using smegCannon for loading dependencies, the community has moved onto BitNostril. Anyone who hasn’t even bothered to jettison last year’s KnockerLocker is beneath our collective contempt and will not be provided with migration scripts. Please try to keep up.
Month 6: We realize that we’ve put out two new full versions of Angular in the past year but Bobby had an epiphany. Or a brain aneurysm, we’re waiting on the MRI results to figure out which. We need to release a new version which completely and abruptly changes how we handle routing.
Backwards compatible? Bitch, please. Just because you invested 3500 developer hours building an application on the previous system is no excuse to not to refactor. Talk to your project manager.
Month 9: A Cartesian monk who had blinded themselves in a religious frenzy showed up at our conference in SF and convinced us that the outcome of their intense meditations in the chill darkness of the Yahoo server room is just the thing we need. Typescript is now base 13. You’ll have to get a new keyboard to handle the extra characters.
Month 12: DUDES! Bobby (who as it turned out had an aneurysm after all) just spent the last three weeks in the hospital being treated for complications from scurvy after consuming nothing but bulletproof coffee and oat cakes for the past year and had a lot of time to think. Javascript is for losers. Typescript is for losers too. Have you ever heard of Fortran?
Attempting to find both energy and focus in this time of plague has been difficult. Time has been granted to us in abundance, but not the serenity to take advantage of that time.
Even as one who was able to keep their job and perform it with little interruption I’ve found it difficult to fight off a feeling of malaise. Its difficult to commit to a course of action, be it the making of dinner, the enjoyment of a novel, the editing of a photograph, or the writing of a short essay. Sadly, the eating of snacks has proven to be entirely too easy a pastime to commit to.
Typical advise for the creatively blocked is to do something else. Attempting to brute force yourself through only leads to a deeply bruised ego and shocking high tabs at your local dive bar. Travel is a frequent suggestion. Go somewhere new. Even if it doesn’t break your creative block at least you go out into the world. And maybe it will work.
Seed head of a grass.
In the time of plague what do you do? Shelter in place order remain and in many locations have been reimposed as an upswing in Covid cases continues in various spots around the globe. Travel is not on the agenda
I was reminded of a project from a number of years ago. One Block Radius. It was a psychogeographic project conducted by Glowlab in NYC. It was an in-depth exploration of a single block in Manhattan. Every business, resident, piece of trash, new addition of graffiti was meticulously cataloged. It provided a snapshot in time for a block in the Bowery that was about to undergo radical transformation.
Rather than expand outwards, the project gave itself strict borders and spiraled inwards, documenting a single place at a point in time.
Since the middle of March my world has undergone a similar, non-consentual compression.
Clover
For the past two years my photography has focused on flowers as it was a subject that I could work with at my leisure. My work has admittedly been heavily influenced by Robert Mapplethorpe’s own floral portfolio. I do have the advantage of working in digital which allows me to use techniques such as focus stacking to do far closer explorations of a flower’s structure.
My neighborhood is a mixture of apartments and single family homes which results in a variety of gardening environments. The backdrop of apartment building landscaping which favors the absolute minimum in maintenance costs typically features shrubs but does have the enjoyment of self-seeded plants. Foxgloves, daffodils, lavender, and bluebells find their place.
Then there are the unwelcome flora. Clover, dandelion, grasses, thistle. Then at the end of the season, there are the seed heads left when the petals fall away.
Ubiquitous, easy to find, free for the taking, and in many cases available year round.
Now I just need to scrounge up some focus and motivation.
After months of forced isolation and over a month of a close examination of police brutality and the reality of being Black in America, its time to celebrate the birth of the nation.
With varying levels of enthusiasm.
Coming to grips with your feelings about Independence Day is your own burden. If nothing else, you got the day off from work so you might as well stuff your face in a slightly elevated level of style.
Be sure to light the barbecue early while using those copies of Sunset and Martha Stewart Living magazines that have been staring at you from the coffee table for the past four months as kindling so that the coals have time to settle down a bit. Or you know, preheat the oven because you live in an apartment where the fire escape is right over the dumpster of the Pho joint and its illegal to have a grill on a balcony.
You know what, just go ahead and chunk the entire collection of lifestyle magazines in the dumpster. Set it on fire. You don’t need that cultural fascism through matching tableware in your life. Those assholes have assistants and photoshop. You have high blood pressure. Fuck them and the horse they rode on. They probably do have a horse. Fuck them double.
Sarah Eisenlohr
It doesn’t hurt to toss the salad now. Toss it right in the garbage because even the Sierra club wouldn’t blame you for not opening that three week expired bag of mixed greens in order to feed it into the compost bin.
If you’re a Pinterest kind of person, you can rip the chalkboard you used for trying to keep track of the housework but haven’t updated in nine months off the wall and write out the menu.
Appetizers: The inch of a half of Cheezits remaining in the box. Those little French pickles right out of the jar. That can of sardines in mustard that you bought two years ago when you were shopping while smashed. Any cheese product that’s still edible and more importantly, wasn’t eaten by someone at 3:00 in the morning while unable to sleep due to generalized feelings of dread.
To drink, there’s an assortment of domestic beer. Or foreign beer. Or wine in a can. Or those weird seltzer things that are the new wine spritzer with a measurable ABV.
Be sure to keep away from the hard stuff early on. You want to keep the floodgates of emotion tightly closed while you gaze longingly at the pleasant summer weather through the window wondering how many idiots are outside having a grand old time at a cookout not realizing they’re going to collide with a reality where an overworked nurse is ramming a breathing tube down their throat in about 17 days.
Served in the kitchen because fuck you, I’m not carrying it to the living room.
Main Course: Braised pork loin with warm potato salad. More beer.
Sounds fancy? Not even.
I’m not even going to wait for the toaster oven to preheat, I’m just going to pour a bottle of barbecue sauce over the dead pig, cover it with foil and slam it into the little oven. The potato salad is warm not because its trending on instagram right now, its because I decided to make it like 25 minutes ago and 20 of those were spent boiling the potatoes. I’m not waiting for them to cool off.
Spend the time waiting for the dead animal to finish reaching a temperature that won’t kill your ass by flicking through Netflix in an attempt to avoid conversation with the people you’ve been locked inside with for way too long. Has emotion bled out of them as well? Should you try to express your love for that special person in your life by letting them know they might be wearing the same coffee stained pajamas for three days but you still want to bang? Or would that be really awkward and better left after everyone’s had a few more drinks.
You’ve already binged everything you can possibly stand? Maybe if you pound the rest of that IPA and follow it with an airline bottle of Glenlivet you‘ll specifically murder the brain cells responsible for season 2 of Bake Off. At least that’s the theory. Bottoms up everyone!
When the alarm goes off and the thermometer tells you that you’re not going to be an unfortunate statistic, its time to think about presentation. Mostly, I think its for wankers. Who the hell has the time or energy to plate something when you and everyone you know has been refreshing COVID charts showing the new cases by day and wondering how long until the death rate shows a similar upswing for the past several weeks?
Put stuff on a plate. There. Done. Steak knives? Do we have steak knives? Is that a thing people have? Maybe we were vegetarians for too long.
Dessert: Um… more beer. And liquor.
Months of prioritizing groceries to bare essentials in order to minimize the number of trips into the Outside World has not left room for sweets. There’s a forgotten half pint of Hagen Das in the freezer but its part of the potato product glacier formation and no one is feeling that desperate. Yet.
And Now Fireworks:
Save a glass of sherry and a handful of salted nuts to take outside to gaze upon the illegal fireworks being set off by errant youth in the neighborhood. Are these nuts? Are they wasabi peas? Cat food? After breaking open the sugar encrusted bottle of apricot schnapps at the back of the liquor cabinet you can’t tell anymore.
Gaze upwards at the moments of visual and acoustic violence spreading overhead and take a moment to meditate upon the American Empire. More specifically its relationship to the Roman Empire. And that fact that the Roman Empire fell. And that none of those assholes left a how-to guide for surviving the collapse.
I’ve honestly lost track of how long the shelter in place order for the state of Washington has been in place. The concept of being able to venture freely outside without concern of contracting a vile disease has been distant and nebulous for some time.
The is a certain emotion between agoraphobia and wild yearning that I grapple with as I sit on an ottoman and stare out the window. I’m a reverse voyeur. There are all the pleasures of the late Seattle springtime as its bends into summer. Just on the other side of the glass. The other side where people don’t wear masks and breathe out the possibility of the plague with every tidal breath.
I felt this keenly during the recent standoff between the Black Lives Matter protestors and the Seattle Police Department outside the Eastern Precinct. The local blog, capitolhillseattle.com, has been covering the standoff as it has progressed so there is no need to give a blow-by-blow account of that time.
The precinct isn’t very far from my apartment. It sits on the corner of Pine and 12th. Pine is familiar enough to me that I have every change in elevation along its length mapped out from past bicycle commutes. Crawling up Pine from downtown is painful. I couldn’t give you the exact grade of the hill as beyond a certain point all numbers blur into one figure, bullshit.
The hill is bullshit. Its bullshit degrees steep, there are a bullshit number of potholes along it length.
The corner of Pine and 11th where the barricades were set up holds a special place in the muscle memory of my calves. At Broadway you’re treated to a short respite from the climb, a gentle downhill which ends sharply as the block between 11th and 12th shoots up in front of you.
It was that incline that hosted the week long standoff between BLM protestors and the Seattle PD. The line of cops in riot gear were stationed just above 11th. They had the high ground on the protestors as they crowded the metal fence that marked the No Man’s Land.
We live close enough to that location that the crackle of flash bangs rebounded off the building next door. The police megaphone was a distorted snarl just far enough away to twist into incoherence. We knew the instant that things had degenerated in the standoff.
Then there were the marches that wound past our corner. Some you could hear from the drums as they approached, others from the chants. I sat in the window and watched a white SUV slowly drifting down the street amidst the marchers. A man stood on the roof of the SUV, directing the march through a megaphone.
And I stayed home, watching it through the various video streams covering the event from above and ground level.
Subconsciously we consider events we watch on the TV or laptop to be distant. Untouchable. Elsewhere. The people fleeing when jets of pepper spray followed by clouds of tear gas aren’t people you’ve stood behind in line at the nearest coffee shop on a low, slow, hungover Sunday morning.
Except the flashes of light of from the gernades are echoed milliseconds later. Its not somewhere else. These aren’t other people. They’re fighting over a hill I had stared up at enough times over the handlebars of my bicycle.
Even now that the police have withdrawn from the precinct and we’ve watched the rise of the Capitol Hill [Autonomous Zone|Occupied Protest] from our apartment, I haven’t showed up in person. A familiar space has been transformed and I can only see it through aggregated feeds on a Twitch.tv stream.
One thing I didn’t expect to discover during the plague was how it transformed all but the most immediate and necessary points on my personal geography into foreign lands. I could see, I could hear, I could read about, but I couldn’t experience directly. Through fear or caution these formerly accessible places have faded into otherness.
Its carved out from both time and the contours of the universe. Its a small spherical volume that erected at any point in time and any point in space. The coordinates can change according to whim and chance or spiral around a specific location and time of day carved out by habit and force of will.
In times past you could venture into the world and mark it out with a package of cigarettes on a rented table. You paid rent in the form of coffee or cake or a glass of wine. Then you smoked. You smoked to demarcate the boundaries of the ritual space. It was summoned from a cloud of ash and the geometrically increasing probability of a foul death. You smoked to push other minds away and their nasty, uncouth bodies. You smoked and drank coffee and tried to forget about your own body.
Today the cigarettes are forbidden and more of an invitation than a ward against strangers.
Still, we go out and try to find that space. In the world. Outside the place where we have a lock and a key and more control. Going out into the world and finding that place where only our own gravity exerts its pull is a challenge but one we imagine to be pleasant.
Artist’s rendering by Nicolle Fuller/National Science Foundation
For women its far more difficult. Despite every sign and signifier, despite every unsubtle demand for others to fuck off and die, others persist in violating the boundaries. I am not a woman so I can only believe what they say. Many say this and they say it often so I have no reason to doubt.
In the time of plague we are not given the option of going out into the world. The feeling of your own gravity is punctured by a microscopic entity that claws into the center of your body. I cannot find the space away from others as they exhale a probability of infection. Clouds of swirling risk. Even walking feels like moving through these unseen miasmas. Its no place to find refuge.
I’ve spent half of my adult life living alone. Its more difficult to find the space when you have possession of a key and a door and a certain square footage all to yourself. Perhaps that why we go out among others to find our own gravity. It requires an awareness of the presence of others to find your own space. You cannot define boundaries in a void. The walls and door defined the edges of the void. There was no place to be found within it. No other minds. No other gravity to exert your will against
We still need to find that space. Alone or overwhelmed by our equally entrapped family. That small sphere where you can only feel your own gravity. Find an hour where time is yours. Eat pickled herring on garlic toast. Feign demonic possession. Take a bath and glue the door shut. Do what you need to do.
I’m sitting here with my glass of tea, engaged in a battle of will with the cat. The 11 pound ball of fur, fangs, and indifferent needs for attention pushes against my sphere. Even the pale yellow eyes of the cat provides enough of an other presence to make the boundaries of my space clear.
Meat processing plants across the country are shutting down as employees fall victim to the plague or stop showing up due to fear of catching the plague. The close working conditions and general lack of concern shown by the owners towards the health and well being of their employees make it hardly surprising this has occurred. That a single workplace was responsible for over half of a state’s COVID infections does not bode well for the continued operations of other meat processing plants.
The scale of meat processing as an industry is horrifying when one looks into the numbers. The South Dakota plan was responsible for between 4 and 5 percent of the nation’s pork supply. Seeing that the per capital consumption of pork in the US was 51.2 pounds in 2019 makes the plant responsible for around 683 million pounds. As the factory turns out 130 million servings of pork per week (6.7 billion per year) that number seems reasonable. At an average of 285 pounds per pig, that means 2.4 million pigs per year meet their fate in South Dakota.
Pork, the wheel of destiny: Joseph Pennell 1917
With the plant shutting for an unknown period of time, this means there’s a backup of about 46,000 pigs per week due to a single plant shutting down. Other meat processing plants are facing similar outbreaks and must shut down. With limited capability to store carcasses in a frozen state this means the farmers are faced with animals they cannot move off their farms. Animals will be in transit and will be stranded. The smooth chain which lead from birth to death to a plastic wrapped portion is broken. Nothing in the current system allows for any disruption in the food supply chain. A massive cull seems to be impending.
The scale of death will go beyond even the largest of modern religious animal sacrifices. The Gadhimai festival is performed to gain favor from a goddess and the carcasses are then sold and used. It is also only held every five years. Nothing will be offered from this killing.
Tens of thousands of animals killed every week. The bodies left for the crows or burned. The scale of animal sacrifice will be enough to rip open a rift in the ether. A new god will ooze out of the slit. Panting and tearing at its birth cowl in the middle of a field of dead pigs. Pigs slaughtered not for the table but because the gears of modern agriculture cannot stop spinning. It will be an offering to the complete unraveling of our own cleverness when a single thread is pulled away.
