IT SEEMED TO me I had three choices.
One. Give up. I could manage pretty much without everything else but not without my barley. So I should just call it quits.
Two. Lie. Who needs to know? I could go on making beer using malt I’d bought, and no one would be any the wiser. When I got down to writing about it, I’d make sure to toss in the odd line about “rippling waves of ripening barley,” their “heads bent as if in supplication to Gambrinus, the legendary patron saint of beer” and lots of other good atmospheric stuff. That would cover it. I mean, it’s all about expectations, and as long as I satisfied people’s expectations, everything would be fine. Except that liars always seem to get caught — look at that whiz kid at the New Yorker or the guy who made up a story about that Apple factory in China for National Public Radio. I might be safe for a few months, maybe even a year, but somehow, some way, the truth would come out. Maybe one of the farm members would rat me out as part of one of the complex vendettas that occasionally seep into the place. Or an envious clerk at the home brew supply place would expose me.
However it happened, I’d have to issue a groveling apology. I could see it — the snapping cameras, Catharine standing off to one side, accompanied perhaps by some blond children, if we could rent them, smiling bravely and watching while I debased myself, tearfully citing the “hurt I caused my family . . . and beer writers everywhere” and then announcing I was “embarking on a journey of personal healing.” True, I could probably recoup something afterward by writing a self-justifying memoir, but frankly? More trouble than it was worth.
There was a third option. I could try to find someone near our farm who had barley and would let me harvest some of it. Two row if I could get it, but any kind of barley if it came to that. The pioneers hadn’t been picky, and I shouldn’t be either. It wouldn’t be mine, but it would be local, dammit. And when you thought about it, I’d still have done everything myself: planted barley, cultivated it and then harvested it — just not the same barley. It was worth a shot.
I WAS THINKING these thoughts lying, once again, flat on my back on my office floor. Back at the farm on the weekend, after I had seen that my crop was a failure, I had basically sunk to my knees in the parched field and brandished a fist at the heavens.
Then I’d started pulling purple loosestrife out from around the pond. Sort of agrarian grief therapy, I guess. Loosestrife is a highly invasive nonnative plant that sends out a tough net of roots, and it is hell to dig up — you need to pry up the whole mat of roots. I’d been working with a fork on a particularly large and particularly resistant clump and was pulling on the stalks when I felt a constriction in the small of my back. I stopped pulling, but my back felt tight and stayed that way for the rest of the week. Then on Thursday morning, while I was getting ready to use a car jack to pop the lock on Catharine’s bicycle (a useful trick when the key snaps off in the lock), a bolt of lightning shot up my back just as I was leaning forward. By that afternoon, I could barely walk. We had planned a special trip to a great beer supply place in Brampton to pick up supplies for my next brew. I was a sight, navigating the store aisles bent ninety degrees at the waist and trying to ask the clerk questions by twisting my head to one side and then cocking it upward to meet his eye, just like Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. By Friday morning, I could make it maybe ten feet before I had to sit down. Just as well I didn’t have any barley, because I sure wouldn’t have been able to harvest it.
But how would I find barley? I wasn’t quite sure, but the first person I could think to ask was Peter Johnson, my agriculture ministry expert. Peter had no idea. He didn’t know eastern Ontario. Instead he put me in touch with Scott Banks, the guy who covered our part of the province. Not for the first time did I appreciate that the telephone was a farmer’s most useful tool.
Scott gave me the names of a couple of seed suppliers and the number for a grain elevator in my area. There was a chance, just a chance, that these people might know a farmer out there who had the barley I needed. The people at the elevator thought there was a local farmer who might still have two row in his fields. He didn’t. But when we talked on the phone, he agreed to sell me eighty pounds of two row for a princely ten bucks. He was located a haul from the farm, two hours at least, but if I couldn’t come up with anything else, his barley would save me. Then I called a seed company farther up the valley. I got a name: Mike Wilson. He farmed over on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, not far from us. At least in distance.
DOBERMAN OR MASTIFF? Or maybe a mixture of both? I couldn’t really say. But it was dark and big and the cinder block connected to the long chain clipped onto its collar suggested that this was a dog that meant business. Ditto the two slightly smaller dogs behind it. I took them to be its — her — pups. Millie barked, emboldened perhaps by the fact that we were safely inside Mike Wilson’s Ford F-150. He had taken me to see his barley in a field near his house, then decided he wanted to talk to the tenant he had living in the farmhouse there. While they chatted in the driveway, Millie and I sat in the truck. I, at least, was careful not to make eye contact with what seemed like three canine refugees from a particularly nasty German folktale.
“Does she breed dogs?” I asked Mike as we headed back to his house.
“Not intentionally,” he said.
When I’d called Mike the previous Friday and explained myself, he had told me that he was close to cutting his barley, but he promised that if I couldn’t get there before then, he would leave me some to do myself. Between my sciatica and the fact that the morning I had originally planned to drive to western Quebec, I had awoken to find the street in Toronto dug up and our car completely boxed in by emergency vehicles (an ancient brick-lined sewer had collapsed), it had taken me a week to finally meet up with him.
It’s odd. I’ve been going to the Ottawa Valley for thirty-two years, and Catharine’s been going for even longer, but in all that time, we had never crossed the Ottawa River to the Quebec side. And the bridge was maybe a half-hour drive from our farm. It just never entered into our minds. Heading for Mike’s, I learned that we weren’t alone in this attitude. Taking the road north from Renfrew, I missed my turn. I’d assumed there would be a sign saying how far to Shawville, the biggest town on the Quebec side, or even announcing something simple like “Bridge” or “Quebec.” No. Apparently the Ontario government doesn’t regard the existence of another large province nearby as worthy of comment.
I’d have been willing to chalk it up to Canada’s two solitudes, except as I discovered when I came off the bridge into Quebec, actually a two-lane road running along the curving top of a hydro dam that straddled the Ottawa River, I didn’t seem to have left Ontario. Say “rural Quebec” and what I think of are gray stone houses and towns dominated by hulking églises, each featuring a steeple coated with that matte aluminum paint that seems to be the exclusive property of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Quebec. Instead, what I saw were red brick farmhouses and small Protestant churches. Valley culture, I realized, didn’t respect the provincial boundary and, up here it seemed, had developed independently of it. With one major difference, though: the shabby town I was passing through and the potholed road I was driving on to reach Mike Wilson’s house in Starks Corners reminded me of the Ontario side thirty years ago. Sometimes when Catharine is trying to explain the valley’s relative isolation and ruggedness to people who have never been there, she will use a helpful phrase she picked up from an economist who studied the area: “The east is the north of the south.” Northern Ontario, which makes up 90 percent of the province’s land mass, is a vast, thinly inhabited expanse of rocks, lakes and muskeg. The south, with the exception of eastern Ontario, is nicely rolling hills, prosperous farming towns and big cities. Folks from the south may not know eastern Ontario, but they do (or think they do, thanks to the obligatory Group of Seven painting of a bent tree that’s reproduced in every Ontario school) know the north, and that gives them something they can understand.
Well, by that measure, western Quebec is like the north of the east. When I pulled into Mike’s steep, sloping driveway, he was underneath his daughter’s Impala changing the oil. He’d been expecting me. Mike was in his fifties, a ruddy-faced man with a couple of days’ growth of beard. I noticed that he was smoking Putter’s, the knock-off version of Player’s ostensibly sold only on First Nations reserves. His house was a gray brick product of the seventies, across the road from a very old United Church. Next door was an old one-room schoolhouse. The Roman blinds in the school’s windows made me wonder if gentrification might finally be reaching western Quebec.
To survive as a farmer anywhere in this part of the valley, actually anywhere in the valley, come to that, you need to be flexible and diversified. Mike had sheep. He had draft horses and competed in plowing matches. He owned two separate farms, the one where he lived and the one farther down the road leading to Ontario where he had taken me to see the barley. He used to work in the bush in the winter. He worked as the mechanic at a nearby organic farm.
And now he was branching out into running his own microbrewery. His goal was similar to mine, if even more ambitious: create a beer that was entirely — water, grain and hops — local. And to that end, he had several dozen acres of two-row barley under cultivation. Another nearby farmer, Tim Wickens, could provide the hops.
The provincial government was only too happy to help him. Known as the Pontiac, this part of Quebec had lost its lumber mill and its mine in recent years. The biggest surviving local employer was the organic farm that Mike worked for, which employed around twenty people, ten locals and the rest migrant workers from Mexico and Jamaica.
Mike hoped to set up his brewery in a disused clapboard cheese factory that stood not far from his house. “Providing I cross all my t’s and dot all my i’s,” he told me, “the government will pay up to 60 percent of my costs.” First, he’d like to wangle a heritage grant. He told me he had pushed the building around a bit with a grader to straighten it up, but to my eyes it still seemed to list a trifle.
Mike drove us back to his place, and then Millie and I got into our Honda Fit and headed back to the barley patch. We had us some harvesting to do. I took my blue tarpaulin out of the back of the Fit and draped it over the single strand of barbed wire topping the page wire fence surrounding Mike’s barley field. Then I dropped Millie over. I tossed my tarpaulin over, grabbed my sickle from the car, slipped it through the page wire, and then clambered over, taking care to keep that lone rusty strand of barbed wire well away from my more tender bits. I thought of Mike’s line when we’d come by earlier: “I’ll bet you don’t climb too many fences in Toronto.”
Looking around, I saw what I should have seen at our farm: golden barley, about eighteen inches high, the heads drooping and the seed kernels large. Just the way everyone described it.
Millie parked herself in the weeds. I spread out the tarpaulin on a bare patch of ground. I’d found my late father-in-law’s sickle when we were cleaning out the basement of our house getting ready to sell. It was an exquisitely rusty tool, except for the glint of the curved edge that I had sharpened using a grinding wheel. Because it was so sharp, I had to be careful with it, and so it was the last thing I had packed in the car late the night before. Still doubled over with sciatica, with a discernible limp, I had shuffled across our dark urban street with it dangling loosely in one hand, its clean edge glinting in the streetlight’s glow. Someone walking up the street caught sight of me, did a double take and then turned on his heel quickly.
My back was still bothering me, but sickling or scything, or whatever it was, turned out to be one hell of a lot easier than I had expected. Sickles have been around a very long time, and over the millennia, they have evolved to be really ergonomically comfortable. Once I was bent over and cutting, it was easy going. I’d grab a big handful of barley, fairly far down the stems, squeeze them together tight, and then slash with the sickle, always making sure that I slashed away from my leg. It wouldn’t have taken my foot off or anything, but I had no desire to drive to the nearest emergency room (about twenty kilometers distant over a bad road by my estimation) with blood filling my running shoe.
I cut then tossed each handful of barley onto my tarpaulin. It was filling quite quickly, but the bulk wasn’t what I would term the business part of the barley — the seed kernels or barleycorn that I hoped to turn into malt. It was mostly just stems, leaves and assorted chaff — as I thought that word to myself, I realized that this was the first time in my life I had ever used it to refer to what it actually meant. Given how much extraneous trash seemed to be filling my tarpaulin, maybe, I thought, it would be best if I just snapped the ears off the barley. Not so much harvesting it, really, as picking it, like grapes. Putting aside my sickle, I started grabbing the barley heads and snapping them off. It was cleaner, yes, but also much, much slower. I’d need the better part of a week to harvest enough barley for a barrel of beer.
I slashed away for the better part of an hour and a half. Cars rolled by a few feet away, and near four o’clock, the school bus pulled up and a couple of kids got out. In the end, I had cleared a twenty-by-thirty-foot patch. I wouldn’t really know how much usable grain I had until I threshed it or winnowed it — or whatever the hell I was supposed to do with it. With my harvest wrapped in the blue tarpaulin in the back of the car, we headed back to Ontario.
I FIGURED WHEN I decided to try brewing beer from scratch that I’d face plenty of challenges. Farming challenges. Brewing challenges. Drinking challenges. I never expected ethical challenges. What to do when my barley crop failed had been one. Now I faced another.
Everything I had read about barley had been false. No problem with weeds; just stick it in the ground and it comes on up. Oh, and it doesn’t need to be watered. Lies, lies, lies. Happily, though, most of what I read about hops was also a lie. Notably, don’t expect much from your hop plants the first year, I’d read — after I’d got embroiled in making beer.
But the hops had done fine. My kick-ass Nugget, the one that came up first and fastest, had a ton of cones drooping on it. The others had come through, too, but the Nugget alone looked to have given me enough for a few brews. I inspected the yield more closely when I got back from Quebec. The cones were turning a little brown along the edges. It might have been nice to get them a few days earlier, but it wasn’t the end of the world. I filled several ziplock sandwich bags with them and took them with me when we headed back to Kingston.
Once you pick hops, you need to dry them fairly quickly; otherwise, the oils that give them their oomph start to break down. You have to rig a system so that the air can circulate around them freely and they’re out of direct light. I had some nylon screen, but I really needed a frame for it. Okay, I’m aware at this point that what I am going to say sounds like self-justification, but bear with me. I didn’t have the right wood around the house, and I couldn’t spare the time to go to a lumberyard in Kingston the next morning before heading back to Toronto. Fortunately, it was Monday night, garbage night. I went out hunting. You never know what people are going to toss out.
Just up the street, in front of a semidetached cream-colored brick house, I found just the thing. A three-by-three-foot frame made of two-by-fours with a piece of plywood the same size screwed to it. I flipped it over. Tack some screen to the two-by-fours on this side, and it would make a great rack for drying hops.
As anyone who has ever sifted through their neighbor’s garbage knows, there are established rules of thumb about taking objects from in front of people’s houses. If someone has put, say, a piece of furniture right down by the street, you can have it. This is particularly true on garbage day. But it has to be right down on the street. If you take a deck chair off someone’s porch, that’s stealing. My newly discovered hop-drying rack — so perfect for my pressing need — was near the street, but leaning against the metal railing of the front steps. A gray area.
Worse, I knew this house — the owners were a young doctor and her chef husband. In fact, I’d met them at a Christmas party given by their next-door neighbor. Nice people. He was a vibrant man, possessor of a grand smile and an enormous gnarled ginger beard. Lanky and chestnut-haired, she reminded me of my own daughter.
It was late evening now. Too late to ask them if it was all right to take it — all the lights were off. And I had to get going in the morning.
Take it! said the evil little Ian the brewer on my left shoulder. They want you to take it. No, no, said the angelic Ian the brewer on the opposite shoulder. It’s not at the curb.
I paced up and down. I looked around. Quickly, I hefted the stand up and started walking fast toward our house.
SOMETIMES, BREWING IS not pretty. Particularly when it requires period clothing.
“Will you want a tie?” The head of the wardrobe department at Black Creek Pioneer Village and I were putting together my costume for my first day of work.
I’d made this trek to the outer edge of Toronto because I wanted to gain some insight into historical brewing methods. I wasn’t necessarily setting out to brew historic beer, but what I was doing did have a lot in common with brewing 150 years ago — around the time the first settlers took possession of the land on which the farm now stood. So it seemed like a good idea to understand how beer was made back in day, so to speak, using fairly simple ingredients and rudimentary equipment. I’d read as many old brewing tracts as I could get my hands on. (This included one volume so old that the s’s all looked like f’s. The constant references to “yeaft” — or “yeft,” as that word hadn’t yet gained its “a” — took a while to get used to.)
Then I learned about the Black Creek Brewery. Aha! A way to do more than just read about old brewing methods. The local conservation authority runs a historic theme park named Black Creek Pioneer Village in Toronto’s northwest suburbs. I think it’s one of those places that are essentially based on colonial Williamsburg, and we’ve all been to them. There’s a collection of period buildings, often rescued from urban inundation, or even literal flooding, all given over to various period endeavors: blacksmithing, tin stamping and rock candy manufacturing, carried out by people in period dress. A couple of years earlier, Black Creek had opened a pioneer brewery, said to be the only one of its kind operating in North America.
I’d approached Black Creek months ago about working in the brewery. But my desire to learn about nineteenth-century brewing had been delayed for a thoroughly twenty-first-century reason — the question of legal liability in case I inadvertently tumbled into a brewing kettle or was crushed by a hogshead of ale. I can only imagine the historic villages in the future that will portray twenty-first-century life: kids will don helmets to watch people dressed in authentic costumes stitch warning labels onto beach towels. And, of course, the highlight of the trip will be a visit to the litigator.
The legalities finally ironed out, the head of wardrobe and I were in a large room filled with period dresses, coats, top hats and bonnets in the basement of the modern visitors’ center. I’d already picked out a pair of brown homespun trousers with suspenders, a waistcoat and a blue-and-brown check shirt. I would have preferred an apron or a leather jerkin, but they weren’t on offer. So a scarf tied insouciantly around my neck seemed like a good detail. I wanted to fit in. On Catharine’s insistence, I had not trimmed my beard or hair for several weeks. This, she assured me, would make me look more authentic; I told myself it made me look like the Unabomber. But that was too flattering. When I checked my outfit in the mirror, I had that same sheepish, self-conscious expression you see on a dog’s face when you dress it up in a shirt and tie. I was the human version of a William Wegman photo.
Black Creek’s brewery is located in the basement of an old inn called the Half Way House that had once stood on Kingston Road in Toronto’s east end. Housing the brewery in the former tavern, now relocated to the other side of the city, was an authentic touch. In the earlier parts of the nineteenth century, in rural areas particularly, a tavern or inn would have made its own beer — such brewers as there were, in our sense of the word, wouldn’t have shipped their product much more than a few miles beyond the towns where they were located. Historically, however, a tavern’s brewing operation wouldn’t have been in a cellar. They might have stored beer there but not brewed it — the more likely spot would have been in a room just behind the bar. In this case, space constraints had trumped authenticity.
I’d enjoyed my time at Lake of Bays, though its relevance to my brewing endeavors seemed a bit tenuous. The scale and degree of technical sophistication were a long way from anything I could replicate. I felt that the three days I planned to spend at Black Creek would be considerably more useful. Whatever tips on the ingredients and techniques of 150 years ago I could take away with me by working with Black Creek’s brewmaster, Ed Koren, would be helpful when it came to brewing my perfect keg.
For home brewers, Ed’s job is a dream come true. A prizewinning amateur beer maker and a butcher by training, Ed had been a manager in the meat department at a Sam’s Club when he was suddenly laid off in 2008. He’d been out of work all of a week when he received a chance e-mail from a friend telling him about Black Creek’s new brewery. He applied and was originally taken on to do just one day a week. In 2009, he became the full-time brewmaster. Ed told me that years ago, when he was stationed with the Canadian army in Germany, he had loved dropping in on little inns that brewed their own beer, never imagining that one day he would be doing the same thing.
Tall, goateed and balding — and a damned sight more convincing in his nineteenth-century clothes than I could ever hope to be — Ed was already heating the water for mashing in on the low brick stove when I pulled open the door to the brick-walled brewery room. Ed works his way through a number of historic beer styles each week, and this first morning, he told me, we were going to be brewing brown ale. I mentally scanned the list that Ian Bowering had given me. Brown ale hadn’t appeared, but I would later learn from Ed that brown ale and dark ale had been one and the same in the nineteenth century, and were sometimes referred to simply as ale. In the mid-nineteenth century, especially in rural areas, malting would have been done over direct heat, and as a result, the barley would have been baked quite brown. In fact, one of the varieties of malt Ed used is roasted a rich brown over a hardwood fire, and I could smell smokiness in it. (It is a bit of a departure from historical authenticity, but Ed uses commercially produced modern malt and hops in his brewing.) Call it brown, call it dark, call it plain old ale, the resulting beer was a very dark brown. Compared with pale ales, it was only lightly hopped and hence nowhere near as bitter.
I worked with Ed for three days, brewing pale ale the next day and stout on a Sunday, but as had been the case at Lake of Bays, the routine didn’t differ from beer to beer.
How damned simple it was. The rig Ed used was based on period photographs and descriptions of nineteenth-century breweries, and it used just two vessels: a mash tun and a kettle. These cost $14,000 to custom-make today and were arc-welded, not a technique the pioneers would have gone in for.
First, we’d dump a pile of milled grain into the mash tun, which resembled an enormous wooden washtub with a tap stuck in the bottom. Next to go in was the hot water. To heat it, Ed used a kettle, an equally enormous copper pot with a conical lid that sat atop a low brick oven. Historically, this would have been heated by wood; Ed’s stove uses gas. We poured buckets of the hot water over the grain and then I got to mash it in, using a large wooden paddle to turn and turn the grain so that it got uniformly wet. Brewers were using thermometers by the mid-nineteenth century, but Ed knows the process so well that during the three days I was with him, I don’t think I ever saw him pick one up.
When we’d finished mashing in, we drained the tun and poured the wort back into the now empty kettle. Interestingly, Ed didn’t sparge — that is, strain water through the used grains to eke out a little more sugar. That’s quite authentic. Old-time brewers didn’t sparge either — as a result, the first pour-through was only about 75 percent effective — but reused their mash to make what was called “small” or “table” beer. These were low-alcohol brews that everyone, including children, drank rather than take their chances with bad water.
After the wort had boiled for a good hour, we poured it through cheesecloth into a cooling vessel — really just a large flat tray. The one at Black Creek had copper pipes running through it that carried cold water and chilled the beer more quickly. I was surprised by this, but Ed told me later these cooling coils were used in the olden days, in those cases where the brewer had access to a source of cool running water nearby, say a stream or brook. The whole setup was gravity fed — from the cooling vessel, the beer ran down a skinny rack located over a spigot turned upward so that the beer poured right into a wooden barrel. When it finished fermenting, Ed would turn the spigot in this first barrel and the beer would dribble into a second one sitting directly under it. I wanted to use a real wooden barrel for my beer, so I was intrigued to see Ed’s. I learned from him, though, that they weren’t authentic — they were actually whiskey barrels. Barrel, shmarrel, I thought, aren’t they all the same? No, I learned — these barrels hold liquid all right, but the carbon dioxide produced by fermentation seeps out between the seams. Black Creek has not been able to find actual beer barrels, which are much thicker walled and, I would imagine, even more tightly seamed. Finishing up, Ed put a piece of cheesecloth over the open bung in the top of the first barrel, which we would peel back to toss in the yeast.
As Ed explained it, the function of the brewery is primarily to provide an educational experience and only secondarily to make beer. Black Creek runs brewery tours that start off exploring an old mill where the grain for brewing would traditionally have been ground and end up watching Ed at work. Or, for these three days, Ed and his slightly addlebrained helper. The whole time I was there, people were constantly coming into the brewery and asking him questions. People even asked me questions. Mostly about things I didn’t know. I answered them anyway.
The highlight of the tour is a sample of whatever Ed is brewing, which I imagine is what draws a lot of people in the first place. Ed, or one of the tour guides, proposes a toast to the Queen (who, back then, would have been Victoria), and then it’s bottoms up. It was interesting to note the number of people who really didn’t like what they were offered — the appeal of flattish, warmish, brownish beer is lost on many who’ve cut their beer-drinking teeth on ice-cold Coors and Labatt Blue. Not everyone, mind you, but many. Although as Ed pointed out, the Victorians weren’t as spoiled — they couldn’t be, when the alternative was water that could make you sick.
I left Black Creek with a growler of old-fashioned beer, a shopping bag full of hops I picked in their garden (their gardener had planted them without telling anyone what variety they were and then quit) and a deep admiration for Ed. His ability to brew using primitive equipment was impressive. Yes, fancy equipment is nice, but care and knowledge will take you a long way. If he could make good beer using two pots and a few barrels, I could do the same. Earlier, I had thought I would do a mild ale for my perfect brew. But now, after working with Ed, I had the beer I thought I should be making: brown ale. I wasn’t sure whether our pioneers, people working land like mine, had drunk mild. It was a good bet, though, that they had drunk brown. If politics is the art of the possible, sometimes historic brewing is the art of the probable.