WHAM! THE DEER’S legs flailed as it rolled up along the hood of the Honda Fit before dropping off into the ditch, where it lay kicking in its apparent death throes.
I felt sick and shaken as we quickly pulled over. I opened the passenger-side door and got out. Catching some movement in the side mirror, I turned and saw the deer bounding off, along the verge and into the woods, seemingly unharmed. Unlike our car, which now had a buckled hood and a shattered left headlight, garnished with a bit of blood and a few delicate pellets of deer shit. We were lucky. Because we’d been coming uphill and rounding a corner, we had dropped our speed. Hitting the animal on a straightaway, going flat out, would have destroyed the car. And maybe us. As it was, the damage to the front of the car complemented the dent in the back of the car. I had backed into a pillar in the underground parking garage at my cousin’s place while staying with her during my time at Black Creek Pioneer Village.
When I had harvested my barley at the farrm in Quebec, I had asked Mike to hold some threshed two row for me when he was done with his own harvest. I had my plastic garbage can full of the stuff I’d cut myself, but I figured I would need a fair amount of additional barley to practice on before I made my ultimate keg. His crop was in now, and we had been heading up to our farm, the first leg on our trip to his place, when we hit the deer.
We reached Mike’s place in Quebec around eleven the next morning, Sunday, after a night at the farm. The enormous dog that Millie and I had been wary of on our last visit was in the yard as we pulled up behind Mike’s truck at his other farm. I was relieved to see that it was still tethered to a cinder block by a long chain, though Mike’s tenant told us that in the night the dog had dragged the block far into a nearby field, apparently in hot pursuit of a wolf.
I felt a little better about my own failures when I learned that Mike’s harvest had been disappointing, too. (Disappointing is a relative term. He had brought in more than ten tons of two row.) Mike dropped an electrical fence and led me toward the barn behind the brick farmhouse. I sidestepped an enormous chewed bone, a human femur by the look of it. Two-row barley was heaped about three feet high inside a stall against one wall. Mike found me a snow shovel, and I started filling the garbage bags I had brought with the pale brown seed. In the end, I had about forty pounds in each. Enough, I reckoned, for eight or ten brews. Plenty enough to compensate for potential mistakes.
It was largely an impulse, but I figured as long as we were in Quebec, we might want to call on Tim Wickens, the hops farmer Mike had told me about on my earlier trip. Tim was waiting for us just outside an old wooden farmhouse a few minutes away on the road to Shawville. Gray-haired and bespectacled, he possessed a fine valley accent, undiminished by more than two decades away in the big city, in his case working for the board of education in Ottawa. He retired a few years ago and then moved back to this farm, which had been in his family for four generations. (And it was considerably older than that: the original farmer had been granted the land for service at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.) Not far from his house stood an old lime kiln and the remains of a mill race. This farm was just one of several in the area that he owned. No one around here, it seemed, worked just one patch of land.
We reached Tim’s hop field via a small corral holding about a dozen sheep, which mobbed Millie. She escaped by wriggling through a five-bar fence. So much for our long-held belief that her ancestry included border collie, which was based entirely on her occasional display of the crazily intense look that breed often favors.
The hops field consisted of several dozen telephone poles, each about twenty feet tall. The poles were bare now, but in the growing season, the hops would climb thick brown cords running to the top of them. At harvest time, Tim just cut these down and pulled the hops off by hand. He grew about a dozen different varieties.
Tim’s field is yet another government-supported attempt at diversifying the local economy, and he is just one of a number of local farmers who are growing hops. (To curry favor with the francophone civil servants sent from Quebec City, Tim said that they made sure to play up their status as oppressed Scots, not haughty English overlords. Relations between this comparatively needy but largely English-speaking district and its faraway French-speaking government seem complex, to put it mildly. That femur I’d seen earlier might well have belonged to some hapless official sent out to guarantee local compliance with the strictures laid down by the Office québécois de la langue française.)
This was Tim’s third year farming hops, and his crop had done well. But what happened next was the problem. Some of his and the other farmers’ hops had been taken by a collège d’enseignement général et professionnel (CEGEP) with a brewing program, but the farmers didn’t really have any other market. I had an idea and as we left I told him I would look into it. In exchange, he promised me hops. The completion of this transaction took on epic proportions but ultimately had a happy ending. I was able to put Tim and his fellow hop growers in touch with Joel Manning of Mill Street Brewery. Mill Street was planning to open an Ottawa brewpub in the coming months and were looking for local suppliers. But the hops I was to get in return proved elusive.
I tried to e-mail Tim, but he had warned me that his dial-up connection was fairly spotty. I began calling instead and leaving messages. Always without an answer. I grew increasingly worried — to the extent that I began scanning local news online for reports of fires or car accidents. Finally, I did something I hadn’t done in years: I sat down, wrote him a letter and thought no more of it. Weeks later, I arrived home one day to find a delivery notice from the post office hung over the doorknob. I couldn’t imagine what it was, but I got on my bike and rode off to my local post office. When the clerk, a stocky young fellow who looked pretty much the way I imagined Gimli’s son would had that redoubtable Tolkien dwarf ever been blessed with issue, reemerged from the back room, he was carrying a box three feet long by one and half feet wide and two feet tall. Hops from Tim Wickens. I rode home, the box teetering on my handlebars and my knees banging the bottom of it as I pedaled. Between Tim’s hops and Mike’s barley, I would be able to create numerous practice brews.
AS WELL AS pounds and pounds of practice barley (which we later transferred from garbage bags to burlap sacks that Catharine sewed by hand while we watched old episodes of Jeeves and Wooster), I also had the barley that I had hand-harvested in Quebec. Barley in burlap sacks can last for years with no ill effects, but my hand-culled crop was stashed in the henhouse at the farm, wrapped in a tarpaulin and stuffed into a large heavy plastic garbage can. The lid was jammed on firmly so that no mice or chipmunks could get in, but it had been sitting for quite a while and I was nervous about it going bad. When it came to creating my perfect keg, I could not use practice barley. I would brew with only what I had harvested with my own hands. Fine and good, but when I created my final brew, I didn’t want to have everyone frenetically doing Saint Vitus’ dance thanks to galloping ergot infestation. It had to be stored properly. Storing it meant, of course, preparing it.
It’s odd how unaware we are of where a lot of our most popular metaphors or similes come from. Think of “three sheets to the wind” or “take the bit between your teeth,” for example. In a world where most of us don’t have much to do with sailing ships or riding horses, the original meanings of these turns of phrase aren’t always clear. So it’s interesting when you encounter a metaphor or a simile in its original context. I soon discovered that working with barley means getting reacquainted with a lot of fairly deeply buried metaphors and similes. You do flail wildly. And you winnow. Just not metaphorically. You really are flailing, and you really are winnowing. So in these cases, I guess you could call them literalphors. And what you are doing isn’t like separating the wheat from the chaff, you are separating grain from the chaff. So that’s not a simile, it’s a same-a-le.
The first step was to separate the barley seed from all the stalks and other crud that I had harvested. From what I could discover in books or online, the best way for the small-scale winnower to do this was to wrap the barley in a tarp and then start whacking. My sources championed a plastic baseball bat as their weapon of choice. I didn’t have one, but a lot of sources also mentioned a broom. That I had. After I’d worked it over with that, the experts said, separating the grain from the chaff would be easy. Of course they did.
Using the front porch as our threshing floor, we carefully folded the barley inside a worn blue tarp we’d found in the henhouse. Then I banged it repeatedly with the flat of a broom. It didn’t do much. I’d hammer and hammer, and then we’d unfold the tarp to find that I had knocked a lot of kernels loose, but many more steadfastly refused to separate from the stalk. We decided it would be easier instead to work through the barley by hand, picking off the heads manually and squeezing the seeds into a pail. We kept at it for three or four hours, grabbing handful after handful of brown straw, snapping the tops off and tossing the rest aside. It’s good work for the middle-aged brain. We needed to finger through handfuls of dry brown barley, find the heads, gather them together, pull them off and cast aside the dross. (At the time I thought that was another literalphor, but it really is a metaphor. The dross is the scum formed by molten metal.) You wouldn’t think that snapping the heads off barley was hard work, but it was surprising how well we slept that night.
Next day, with the stalks disposed of, I had a lot of barley still mixed up with little bits of, oh, what I’ll call “drossettes” — leftover pieces of gunk smaller than standard dross. The time-honored method for separating the barley (or any grain) from this stuff is to grab handfuls and then toss them in the air. The breeze blows the chaff away and the seeds fall back. I had seen women doing this in some Bollywood video one time, but I have to say that I was dubious — I figured it probably “worked” in the same way a lot of time-honored rustic techniques work, like witching for water. I took the tarpaulin, spread it on the lawn and weighed down the corners with pieces of firewood. Then I dragged my pail over. I grabbed a handful of seeds and fluff and tossed it in the air. Lo and behold, the chaff blew away and the seeds hit the tarpaulin. I tried it again. Same thing. And once more. Before long, I had a collection of barley and the chaff had taken care of itself.
But not much barley. It was humbling, really, how little I had. A couple of hours’ work with a sickle got me a garbage can full of barley plants. That and about five additional hours’ work had given me maybe five or six pounds of maltable barley. Enough — just, I feared — for my perfect keg. God, what would it have been like if I really had brought in my own much larger barley crop?
THE THINGS YOU learn when you brew beer. Hops and grain absorb water. When cheesecloth gets hot, it burns. Bacteria don’t taste good.
Over the fall, Farmer Ian had been getting quite the workout. But life hadn’t all been crop failures and hand-harvesting. When I wasn’t cursing the heavens for my fate or coveting my neighbors’ trash, Brewmaster Ian made his presence felt.
My previous homemade brew, a mix of specialty malts and malt extract, had been fine as far as it went. Easy to do, and easy to get right. But today I was going to make my first all-grain brew, a big, important step on my way to making the perfect keg, a chance to put to use what, if anything, I had learned working at Lake of Bays and Black Creek.
I’d had the idea that because all my ingredients would come from the farm, or very near it, I should do my brewing there as well. Alas, circumstances were not, as they say, propitious. It wasn’t just the two plumbers who kept shutting the water on and off all day. Or the electrician and her apprentice punching holes in the kitchen wall beside where I was working. Nor was it the presence of two farm members, one of whom had made a special trip to the farm that day, who were hell-bent on figuring out, once and for all, the source of the sour smell under the kitchen sink. (“You’re smaller, you go in.”) Good work, laudable work, but also work that meant pulling out every last spray bottle of cleaner and box of automatic dishwashing powder and sponge and scouring pad and spreading them across the kitchen floor, a task they carried out in stoic oblivion to my presence in the same room. To this day, I have no idea how or why everyone wound up in the same room at the same time. I just know that at the farm, that’s often how things roll.
Of course, it’s easy to point a finger at others. And there’s a prissy cliché about that: point a finger at someone and there are three pointing right back at you. Too true. If I pointed at the electricians or the plumbers or the farmers and said they were the problem, three fingers, three gnarled fingers with dirty, chipped nails, were aiming right at my chest.
Finger one. Brewing with all grain can be messy — doing a five-gallon, nineteen-liter-ish lot takes about ten pounds of grain. The grain ends up saturated with water, and from my time working with other brewers, I knew you wound up with a mess that resembled nothing so much as demented Weetabix. You can try straining this out with a sieve or a colander once you have finished mashing in, but I thought a much simpler solution would be to load my grain into a cheesecloth bag bound up with string. I’d drop the bag into hot water to start my mashing in and then fish it out at the end.
What I learned was that buying a cheap brewing kettle had been a false economy. When I started mashing in, the (very) full cheesecloth bag rested on the bottom of the pot, which in turn sat on the largest burner on our electric stove. Maybe the same pot on a gas stove would have been all right. With gas I get the feeling that the heat would have played more broadly over the whole bottom of the pot. Conversely, maybe a heavier pot on an electric burner might have been okay. Thicker metal, better dispersed heat. What was not okay was a thin metal pot on an electric burner. When I pulled the bag out, a sizable section of it stayed behind. The charred edges of the hole in the bag told me it had burned onto the bottom of the pot. I poured off the wort into every container I could find and scraped the charred cloth off the bottom of my brew kettle, where it had burned onto the enameled metal in the shape of the rings of the element.
That wasn’t my only mistake. Then came . . .
Finger two. At the end of the boil, when I strained all the saturated hops I’d used out of the brew kettle, a good deal of the wort went with them, leaving me well short of the promised five gallons. At first, I was baffled about where it went. But then I understood. People who follow the instructions — people who read them, actually — know to have a standby pot holding a gallon or more of boiled water to top up their wort.
Finger three. But to be honest, my biggest problem was my decision to brew at the farm rather than at our house in Kingston. My quest for brewing authenticity led me to brew authentically terrible beer.
The day I brewed, I was in an insane hurry. Not just because of the plumbers and electricians but because I had to get going. It was to do with getting the house ready to sell. I could picture all too well Catharine tapping her foot even as she plumped pillows, thinking dark thoughts about her husband mucking about with wort at the far end of the province when there were still endless fluffings on the agenda.
When the brewing was through, I hastily chilled the beer using my cooler, poured it into my large white plastic primary fermenter, slapped the lid on and stuck in the air lock. Then I humped it down to the basement and tucked it in under the cellar stairs, where it sat for the next two weeks. When I transferred it over to the secondary fermenter, it had a faintly banana aroma. And when I bottled it, it didn’t taste all that good — but it never does at that stage.
It was when I opened the first bottle a few weeks later, alas, that the true flavor asserted itself. Think Band-Aid. I guess that’s another simile, though it doesn’t have a “like” in front of it to set it up. But it sure is accurate. The flavor wasn’t overwhelmingly Band-Aid, really, like chewing on a couple of them, but more subtle. Just a hint — a soupçon, in every sip, if you will.
I was proud of the work that had gone into this brew (my first all-grain batch, my first using liquid yeast and the first where I did an iodine test at home), but having to drink our way through this batch was going to be more chore than pleasure — despite the comment of an artist friend of ours who said she thought Band-Aid beer sounded “really postmodern.”
It’s too bad you can only point three fingers back at yourself. Because if I’d had a few more, I could have kept on going.
Finger four. Having schlepped the brew back to Kingston, I bottled it in the bathtub. Normally I like to work on the ceramic floor downstairs. But at the time, this area was full of boxes and the pieces of Catharine’s disassembled loom, detritus from our final chaotic departure from our old house minutes before the listing went live. Bottling in the bathtub did make it nominally easier to clean up, but because I had to lean over the edge of the tub, I couldn’t see clearly how full each bottle was getting. I had a lot of overflow as a result, and this was one of the reasons why I filled fewer bottles than I might have expected: thirty-six rather than forty. But really, how much Band-Aid beer would anyone want?
I WASN’T QUITE sure what had gone wrong with this batch. The most likely explanation? It had sat too long on the yeast. Generally, you leave the beer in the primary fermenter for four or five days, maybe a week, and then transfer it over to a glass carboy. One of the reasons you do this is to get your beer away from the buildup of bacteria and dead yeast that goes with fermentation. With this brew, it was two weeks before I could get back to it and switch it to the secondary fermenter.
So I started working my way through Papazian. You could call Charlie Papazian the king of home brewing. At least in North America. He first published my mainstay, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, back in the early 1980s, and by this point it has gone through four separate editions and countless printings. I would guess it is verging on selling a million copies. Papazian has a favorite catchphrase: “Relax. Don’t worry. Have a home brew.” It’s a phrase that I think helps aspiring home brewers keep things in perspective. Although given my ability to create catastrophes, if I had followed his advice literally, I would have wound up a stumbling, slurring disaster. His little linguistic tic apart, Papazian is probably the best source on how to brew at home — he’s logical and exhaustive. And one of the best things is that he sees brewing as open-ended. You can substitute ingredients, you can screw around, subject to certain constraints — and it’s all okay.
Until this point, what I had been doing had been fairly straightforward, so I had just dipped into him when I needed a specific piece of advice. But after the case of the vanishing wort and the Band-Aid beer, I thought I had better get a bit more systematic. So I sat down and read him from beginning to end.
ACRID BLUE SMOKE filled the kitchen. Coughing and weeping, I fumbled for the silicone oven mitts, while Catharine lifted the pot off the metal plate straddling two stove burners. I grabbed the smoldering plate, and she tore ahead of me down the stairs to open the front door. I had to hurry — the hot plate was beginning to burn my fingers through the mitts. I thundered outside and tossed it into a snowbank in the laneway where I watched it, sizzling and hissing, sink slowly out of sight.
In theory, having Catharine onside as the official perfect keg brewmistress would make my beer quest a lot easier. In fact, she had been helping me all along whenever I needed an extra pair of hands or some advice. That aside, I had to admit to some mixed feelings when in December she offered to help me more directly with my project. Mixed, in the same way Canada’s and Britain’s feelings were when the United States finally entered the Second World War. You kidded yourself that, somehow, ultimately, you could have done it on your own, so how dare they show up? But, in general, you were grateful that their resources and ingenuity were at your disposal. Catharine is a great cook and a trained scientist, so I thought she’d bring a measure of know-how and method to my haphazard brewing.
Well, that was the theory.
We had decided to start making smaller batches. It made sense. We needed to make a lot of batches (and, as always, it must be said, drink them — without endangering our lives or our livers). Standard beer recipes yield five U.S. gallons, about nineteen liters, but we decided to slash this to two gallons, or about eight liters, which in turn worked out to sixteen 500-milliliter bottles. This way, we could do several lots in the next few months.
For our first cobrew, as I thought of it, I had a porter recipe, inspired by Papazian. I say “inspired by” because we didn’t have exactly the right ingredients to follow it. We had some crystal malt but not quite enough; the recipe didn’t call for it, but we had tons of roasted barley. And we didn’t have the exact yeast strain called for, either. However, using a handy-dandy recipe builder that we found on the Brew Your Own website, and then creating a spreadsheet to recalculate amounts, Catharine was able to rejig the recipe for two gallons. So new yeast, new grain, new amount — definitely not the same great recipe.
I wanted to figure out some way of avoiding the problem I had at the farm with the cloth bag burning onto the bottom of the pot. The more we talked about it, the more a large metal plate seemed the way to go. Setting this on the burner, and then putting the pot on top of that, would diffuse the heat. Not only that, a large enough plate could straddle two burners, giving us both greater and more consistent heat.
Finding the plate was easy — when you live four or five scant blocks from a shipyard. Ten minutes rooting in the dumpsters behind the large corrugated metal shed where Metalcraft Marine puts together high-speed fireboats for customers all over the world turned up exactly what we needed: an aluminum plate two feet by about eight inches and probably slightly less than a quarter of an inch thick.
Again, the things you learn from brewing. For example, aluminum smoke is not toxic (at least according to Wikipedia), but it does react chemically with other materials in strange ways. When the smoke had cleared and we had climbed back upstairs to our second-floor kitchen, we saw that the stove’s burners were a strange ash color and the black metal rings that surrounded them were badly pitted. Worst of all, the top of the stove was coated in a sticky brown stain that I was still working on removing with Fantastik a month later.
There was another way to avoid the burning problem. I grabbed a smaller but far heavier shiny steel pot from the drawer under the cook top. I filled this with three-quarters of a gallon of well water before throwing it on the burner. We could mash in using this, and then pour it into the bigger pot for the boil.
When you mash in using an all-grain recipe, you end up with a very thick porridge. But even allowing for that, something seemed wrong with the consistency. I added and added grain, but there was no way the three-quarters of a gallon of water could ever possibly absorb all of it. A quick check of our recipe revealed that we had a pound of crystal malt too much. Catharine had properly calculated the amounts by which to reduce the original recipe, but she had then, for some unknown reason — which might explain why she never actually became a scientist, despite that training — weighed out a different amount, and now we had far too much. A quarter of the recipe too much.
Which actually would have worked with our next mistake. Again, there were some issues with dealing with a shrunken recipe. Here was the challenge: we knew that once we had finished pouring additional hot water over it to sparge the grain, we needed to top up the pot with well water to bring it up to two and a half gallons. Over the course of an hour-long boil, this would gradually be reduced to two gallons. So that we would know the right amount, we used a four-cup measuring cup to measure two and a half gallons of water into my big brewing pot. Then we stuck a piece of adhesive tape on the side of the pot at that level. Eleven centimeters equaled two and a half gallons.
After lunch, we began sparging by pouring the contents of the mash tun into our brew kettle through a colander. Because there wasn’t quite enough room in the colander for all the grain, we had a second sparge going on the floor with a steamer. I’d alternate. I took heated water, poured it into the perforated colander and let that run through into the kettle. Every now and then, I’d take the pot on the floor and pour the wort I’d collected in it into the big pot on the stove. There was a rhythm to it: First one pot. Pour, lift, turn and dump. Then the one on the floor. Pour lift, turn and dump. Busy with the pot on the stove, I turned to find Millie with her snout buried in the strainer full of spent grain. I shooed her away and kept pouring.
We sparged and sparged, but, once again, something was wrong. When we looked at our tape mark, it was obvious that the wort was barely rising. We knew we were going to have to make up the shortfall with well water, but we were barely halfway to two and half gallons. On an impulse, Catharine grabbed the steel ruler and measured the height of the piece of tape I had put on. It showed not eleven centimeters but twenty-one. I’d arbitrarily added ten centimeters to the depth. We had thought we were just starting out; in fact, we were just about finished.
Then began what I thought of as the “But waits.” Catharine thought it would be good to take the original gravity of the wort. This would give us some idea of its ultimate alcohol content and let us monitor its fermentation. But it also required taking the amount of wort we had, estimating its shortfall from the final amount of fluid we would have, and then combining that percentage of water with some wort in a measuring cup, while (“But wait”) allowing for the maple syrup we were going to add. Which in turn (“But wait”) required switching from imperial to metric (converting before — no, oops — after we had added the water). Then (“But wait”) she changed her mind because the only way to do this accurately was to estimate the gravity by volume, not weight. If the final answer had been “a fish” or “Thursday,” it wouldn’t have made any less sense than the number we came up with: 1.033. 1.033 what?
But for all that, the beer tasted great.