Beet Wine - now with video

I spent Monday afternoon making beet wine. It was a long time in the offing, but surprisingly easy when I actually started doing it. I boiled about 3 pounds of beets, removed the beets from the water, added sugar, honey, and orange juice concentrate.

 Boiled that mix, cooled, added a yeast-orange juice starter mix, and voila. Beet wine, in a brilliant purple-red color. Won't be ready for at least six months, so temper your expectations, please!

Here's the video of the must bubbling away in the fermenter:



Waiting for this to finish fermenting and aging is not going to be easy. I want to drink the whole thing right now! Definitely encouraging to try something that seemed so complex and find it a fairly simple proposition. I will not hold back from attempting outlandish wines or other fermentation projects in the future. As the truism goes: you can't succeed until you try. Or something like that....

Fermenting for Life

Fermentation is the gift that keeps on giving. This sounds fatuous, but I promise you it's not. Making fermented food is about creating the conditions for new life to exist. It's about nurturing microbes. You make friends with the microbes, and they provide you with food and drink that is teeming with life and delicious to boot. It's a symbiotic relationship. The microbes also live in your intestines and protect you from harmful bacteria. You scratch their back, they scratch yours.

Making fermented foods is so cheap it's almost free! There are limited startup costs for equipment, which you can scale according to how fancy you want to get. There's no reason you can't start making sauerkraut right now with a head of cabbage, salt, and a jar. No need to get any more sophisticated than that. It's very forgiving of beginners and perfect for those who like to experiment.

Why aren't you doing it already?!

Progress Reports:

-Wild Yeast All-Maple Mead (went in on 6/16) is still bubbling up nicely. It has been tasted several times by Matt and I, with impressions all favorable so far. The fermentation is probably less vigorous than it would have been with refined yeast, but there is undeniably something going on in there. Also forming is a big clump of dead yeast on the bottom, which is why the meadmaker is advised to rack the mead to a new container (to get the mead off the spent yeast, which may be imparting yeasty flavors). I'm thinking about leaving it for a while. The big problem is going to be keeping myself from drinking the whole thing before it's ready. Age can only improve the product.

-Fresh batch of kraut is in the jar right now, with radishes, beets, red and white cabbage, and a moderate quantity of garlic. It smells great after 5 days, and may be ready for tasting soon. I favor frequent tasting, especially in the early stages when the flavor is still relatively mild. You get a sense of the evolution over time. This one is being kept in the basement because the air conditioning is off upstairs and the basement is the only consistently cool place in the house.

Some background

Here's my philosophy: you should try anything. Why not? Why shouldn't I throw some vegetables in a jar and let them sit out under brine for a few weeks, just to see what happens? Why shouldn't I be responsible for making my own food, rather than spending dollars to support a corporate food industry that is by all accounts unconcerned with the health of its customers? Why shouldn't I experiment?

If you make your own, in many ways you can taste the effort and the hand craft that went into it. You can go further towards being self-sufficient and running your own home economy. You can create flavors and smells which have never existed before in the world and are delicious to boot. You can keep traditional methods of food preparation alive for generations to come. You can do it all! Go forth and ferment.

All credit for any success I have in these endeavors goes to my parents for raising me the right way and teaching me to ask questions and be mindful of what I eat and where it comes from, to my brother the farmer for being ahead of the curve on everything sustainability-related and for inviting me to dinners at the Hive, and to Sandor Katz, whose recipe I used for my first batch of sauerkraut.