Heavy Horses

Mid-1990's NOS Raichle Eiger Boots, baby hand for scale.

I skipped out on doing a happy weekend post last week. Life, it seems, had other plans for me that involved driving through a snow storm to go to a Raptor center full of misfit owls.  I'll say this, if you are ever up close to an owl you'll notice that they give off a strong vibration. Not spooky. Just intense. If you get bored look up all the mythological shit mapped on owls by the ancient cultures of the world. It seems that they all agree: Owls are heavy, man.

Anyhow, 20 years ago I was big into hiking and backpacking. In 1995 my friend Darren and I somehow managed to make 17 backpacking trips. That year I did 340+/- miles of switchbacks and ridges wearing a $35 pair of Chinese Wolverine work boots I bought at a Walmart in Carson City, NV two Summers before.

This is of note for several reasons:

1) These days doing some sort of sport or activity is really just an excuse to buy a bunch of expensive gear that you probably won't use because the point of the activity is really to obsessively pund on and accumulate gear, not to do the thing that the gear is designed to do.

In 1995 I made $2,300 under the poverty line (I'm not just flexing poverty nuts here, the poverty line will figure into the story in a bit). When you make $12,700 a year you can't afford nice gear. In fact you can't afford any gear that isn't a hand-me-down, from Walmart or bought at an Army/Navy. More to the point, the very fact that I went hiking so much was exactly because it was free and I only needed a $35 pair of work boots, a $15 surplus rucksack and a $3 Nalgene bottle full of tap water to do it.

2) After putting so many miles on a pair of broken down shitkickers I had come to the conclusion that I could really use a nice pair of boots that wouldn't soak up water like a ShamWOW! or allow a mesquite thorn I stepped on to stick into my foot.

Cue my tax refund for 1995. I'm not sure if this is true anymore but back in the mid 90's if you made under the poverty line the IRS would give you back enough tax money to push you above the poverty line. At the time I wasn't thinking that it was some sort of scam was meant to cook the income stats, I was just pumped to get enough money to buy THE NICEST pair of boots I could lay my hands on.

Enter my first pair of Raichle Eigers.

Darren and I drove his blue metal flake '73 Camaro with a tunnel ram to the new REI 20 minutes down the 55 freeway to secure said pair of boots on a Thursday afternoon when we were both off work. I was an idiot. A cartoon hayseed bumbling around a pristine footwear dept. that smelled like the lobby of an Ace hotel in a filthy pair of 501's stained with sweat, dust and sagebrush. I ogled high dollar boots from Italy, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. I had a party boner for a pair of Zamberlans but, like all the other Euro boots, save one, my flat, wide Hobbit feet would not fit inside them without footbound pain or enough room for my feet to rattle around like a pinball. Not good.

My frustrated but diligent Al Bundy finally suggested trying a pair of Swiss Raichles that were the boots that REI rented out to weekend warriors dabbling in dirt and blisters. They were heavy leather throwbacks to the era of exploration. No Gore-tex, no lightweight synthetics or molded footbeds. The sales guy relayed to me in a harsh whisper that they were the boots worn by the Swiss army mountain warfare battalions and that they were about to be discontinued so he would take $40 off the $265 price tag.

Put this story on pause for a minute. In 1996 $265.00 was just 10 bucks short of my monthly rent. Not my share of the rent. The whole fucking apartment. Imagine spending your monthly total rent on a pair of boots. Heavy man. Like an owl playing a xylophone made from dragon bones.

OK. Obviously, between the $40 discount and the story about them being issued by the Swiss Army, I bought the boots.

In the coming months learned to I love and hate them in equal measure. They were heavy. This is not hyperbole. I doubt that most people own a pair of shoes that weighs more than 3lbs for both shoes, combined. These motherfuckers were 4lbs. 7 oz. PER BOOT.

Also, being made from heavy duty full grain leather, they were a stiff and inflexible blister factory. I wore them everyday, all day out of necessity. Every evening I unlaced them and shucked my swollen, beat up feet from their hard, black shells. It was 5 months until they became comfortably formed to my feet or, more likely, my feet had formed to them.

I have a friend named Aaron. He taught me how to cut beef a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away and he had a story he loved to tell with great relish from a time when he was working the floor at a particularly rough and tumble slaughterhouse staffed by ex-cons. One day he was skinning a huge steer with a particularly grizzly old con when he accidentally slashed his partner's hand to the bone with his skinning knife. The gentleman looked at his hand, looked at Aaron and then, while stanching the bleeding with his mouth, said "Shiit Aaron! Looks like you and me are married now!"

That's how I felt after 5 months of blisters and bloody socks with my pair of big black anachronistic boots. We were married. I wore them most days for 5 years until the soles worn through and I was forced to send them off to get resoled. 3 months later they returned from Seattle with a new set of Vibram soles, cleaned and waxed, looking nearly brand new. In 2003 I moved to New York City and they became my default Winter boots. Through the snow, ice and salt of 12 Winters I abused them, took them for granted. The leather was scuffed and stained with white rings of sno-melt. The soles had worn nearly smooth and cracked. I hadn't seen or noticed them and they had suffered. When I sat down to clean and wax them a month before I moved to Vermont I was ashamed.

 A New Hope

You never know what something means until it's too late, it seems. After having my boots as a constant companion for 20 years I was coming to terms with the fact that they were not going to make it another 20. After cycling through anger, denial, etc. I decided to throw myself onto the mercy of the universe and set up an eBay alert for Raichle 11.5 boots and see what happened. What happened for two months was nothing. But one morning I awoke to see that not only had someone listed a pair of Raichle's in my size but even the same obscure model, of which there was almost no information on the internet. $130 flew from my paypal account and for a week I waited like a child for a box to plonk down on my front step.

When the day finally came I took the box and hid it in the closet. For days I could not bring myself to open it so contorted were my emotions with worry and disbelief. Obviously something would be wrong with them. They wouldn't fit. The leather would be dried out and crispy like an old saddle. On and on the spirals of neurosis went. When we're young we don't know what thing mean but we also don't worry them to death either. So it goes.

I cracked the box on a Saturday afternoon.

The boots were perfect. Someone had obviously worn them to the store, once, and promptly stuck them in the back of the closet never to be seen again. The only things missing were the wads of paper stuffed in the toes. I slid my feet in and carefully laced them up. The smooth white leather lining caressed my feet. Magic and bliss. Until I started walking around in them.

Holy SHIT those motherfuckers were stiff as a wedding night prick! The love/hate relationship had been made anew.

I'm now 3 months into breaking my new Eigers in. I wear them dutifully everyday, all day and I have the bruises, blisters and weird calluses to prove it. In the beginning I was afraid that maybe, because I'm now an old man, my feet wouldn't endure months of aching feet. Perhaps I had just gone irretrievably soft. Then there was my daily climb up the hill from town to my house now made 4x harder by the small boat anchors tied to my feet.

Maybe I would just die of a heart attack, thinking to myself "Is this how it ends?" as I sank dizzily to my knees, head thrumming with proud moments and regrets as everything faded to grey.

Well, good news all the way around!

One, I have not died and I am now, in point of fact, in much better shape because of those heavy bastards than I was even 5 or 6 years ago, well before I officially become a sooty old geezer. And two, while the boots aren't exactly like wearing bedroom slippers, they are almost comfortable and 2 full months ahead of schedule. Just in time for Spring here in Vermont and the miles of hiking trails just a few minutes from my front door. Oh, and those old boots? Well, as it turns out, I have found a shop that is willing to resole/restitch them, replace the nonexistent leather linings and fix the cracked and stained scree collars. Unfortunately, good work doesn't come cheap but, when I'm more flush with cash this Summer I'll send them away for a few months to be renewed while I get to know these Heavy Horses a little bit better.

For draft horses, everyday is Hump day.

Weekend Cider Update: Mistakes Were Made. Plus Saké!

Here's a one sentence update on my cider making project: It went good, then it went bad.

A few technical items before we get to the fuckery:

1) I added a 1/2 teaspoon of Pectin enzyme that helps make the cider less cloudy to the juice about 1 1/2 weeks in.

As a natural wine nerd I have nothing against cloudy drink but it became pretty apparent that, if left untreated, the final product was going to be downright murky. Not exactly what you want when you're trying to convince people that your weird homemade cider is not a horrible tasting neurotoxin. Plus, pectinase helps free up some extra sugar and thus a bit more alcohol, which is nice.

2) The fermentation took 3 weeks, about 1 week longer than I was planning. This is actually good because a long, cool fermentation produces less headache inducing elements than when it goes warm and fast.

3) The end result was nice. Not super apple-y but clean with a crisp, white wine mineral mouthfeel and finish. In all honesty, surprisingly good! I'm picking up 3 more gallons tomorrow when we head to the store.

What would I change? Well, I'd like to add a pound of sugar per gallon to get a bit more alcohol. the apples up here are well suited to good tasting cider, it turns out, but they don't have much sugar. I'd guess that my first attempt was around 3-4% where most cider is around a beer-like 5-6% and the lack of alcohol makes the mouthfeel slightly off compared to quality commercial dry ciders.

Johnny Appleseed, real estate speculator, gentrified eastern waterways by planting fucking apple trees.

So, what did I fuck up?

In the actual MAKING of the cider, nothing. It couldn't have gone better. I was fully expecting that I was going to end up with murky turd-water or a marginally drinkable cider that had more in common with kombucha than Crispin. Anyway, where I failed was in assuming that champagne style bottles took regular American-sized bottle caps. Spoiler alert: They Do Not. I found this out by tearing the glass lip off the top of my first bottle, completely grenading my heavy duty capper thingie and spraying my kitchen with shattered glass. It was a real donkey fuck and now I have blue painters tape over the top of all my bottles as I wait for my 29mm caps, new capper and 29mm capping bell to arrive. Lesson learned: do not assume anything when it comes to cheese eating Euro equipment. 

Anyhow, my first fermentation project, all technical issues aside, was a success which has won me enough proof-of-concept brownie points to order a big-assed brew bucket in which I plan on making a pilot batch of Nigori Saké with some organic sweet rice from the hippy bulk aisle, some Koji from the internet and the same champagne yeast I used for the cider.

Warning: Sake ahead.

 Don't worry, rice wine is much more complicated than cider making and there will be MANY more entertaining opportunities for me to completely dick it up along the way. Have a great weekend.

Things Worth Living For: Salt-fired German Beer Humpens

Here's a fluffy, Feel-Good, non-confrontational post to lull you into the weekend, it's about mugs.

I honestly can't remember how I ended up buying my first German beer stein. It might have been after going down a deep, dark rabbit hole about traditional European high salt fired ceramics. I do, after all, have a university degree in the ceramic arts. Not the tiddly-winks basket weaving kind of a degree, but rather one that involved, among other things, building kilns from dumpster scraps, welding, formulating experimental purpose specific clay bodies, mold building, slip casting and using the ashes of specific hardwood trees to replicate a 2000 year old Chinese glaze. An engineering/chemistry/materials science/playing-with-fire degree or a sort that I abandoned in the end to make giant color field paintings, but I digress.

Firstly, what makes these mugs interesting, to me anyway, is that the way they are made. They begin as a slug of grey clay that is then swaged into the distinctive sort of bullet shape inside a die with the help of a plunger being pressed in at many thousands of PSI. (Ironically, this is exactly how the copper jackets of rifle and pistol bullets are made so the bullet shape may not be a coincidence.) The newly formed mug body is then trimmed and cleaned up by hand using a metal tool like a lemon zester and a damp natural sponge. On the mug on the right you can actually see the remains of the sponge mark at the bottom in the center, which I find un-endingly charming.

Next they're taken to a room where they sit and dry out for a day or two (this step cannot be rushed and, in fact, should be as slow as possible to prevent the clay from cracking because of the differential between the density of mechanical water in the thicker base versus the thinner lip. If these forces become to extreme you will have a shearing effect that will form a nearly perfect circular stress-riser around the circumference of the mug and the top 3/4s of the mug will just pop off. This is avoided by slowing the drying process with high humidity and giving the clay time to equalize. A process not unlike the salt equilibrium period when you are curing prosciutto, jamon serrano or country hams. Looks like that degree paid off after all...)

After drying to "leather hard" they are taken to an actual human who forms and attaches the handle by hand. And I mean "by hand". See that handle shape? it was formed by squeezing and drawing a piece of clay between the inside of the thumb and the knuckle of the forefinger knuckle area of the palm of some German guy. It's literally the outline of his hand. Once the handle is drawn it is then attached by smooshing the clay of the handle into the clay of the mug. Again, check the top of the mug on the right. You can see the thumb marks! Again, very charming but also very functional as the portion of your hand, when gripping the mug, is exactly the same portion of hand used to form the handle!

Ergonomics, people! These things, despite being fairly heavy and full of a half liter of beer (that's a pint), feel weirdly light in the hand because of this thoughtful and ingenious process.

A vision of the future me

Lastly, the mugs are taken to a series of two kilns. One is the low temperature bisque firing that removes all the mechanical water (as opposed to the water that is bonded, chemically) from the clay, pretty boring, and the second is the high salt firing, where things get exciting.

So once the kiln reaches around Cone 9 (2300' f), the neighborhood where the various minerals in the clay begin to vitrify (or fuse together to form, essentially, artificial stone) there is a massive injection of rock salt mixed with a bit of water through ports in the sides of the kiln. Because of the high temperatures inside the kiln the salt explodes and atomizes, turning into a vapor that coats the mugs. Then something really interesting happens: everywhere the salt vapor touches, the clay becomes molten in a thin layer of the outside. Yeah, like fucking LAVA, molten. The salt acts as a Flux that chemically lowers the melting point of the surface of the clay. This forms the glaze, or glassy surface, of the mug making it suitable to put beer or in my case, herbal tea in. Without the glaze the stoneware would be porous allowing millions of little crevices for bacteria to hang out and be gross in, an undesirable trait in a beer stein.

Well, that's it, your Friday beer themed fluff post has been served. Have a great weekend.

Yes, they come in Liters too.

Aesthetics 1

Choose good things. Do not give your time, money or attention to things that are anti-aesthetic, artificial or anti-human. Let them wither and pass.

And so begins the beginning of my series that will investigate the thinking and works of Bill Mollison, Christopher Alexander, Jane Jacobs, James C. Scott among others and how they can help us see our way to a new appreciation and wonder of the world we live in: Where it's been and where it can go. I think you'll like it.  

Cavender's

I've done a lot of things in my life but driving across the country in a Uhaul with my best friend who was about to have a baby and was moving to the literal other side of the country is one that I will not soon forget.

We ate Hot Fish and Meat-and-Threes in Nashville. Pulled Pork pizza in Memphis. Nu-Mex combo plates in Albuquerque. And nearly threw up after plowing a buffet in Reno.

We stayed at KOA campgrounds, converted witchy-poo hippy barns filled with crickets, Rock and Roll motels and even a hotel-casino inside a military base that was (and still is) the worlds largest munitions dump.

But amid all those stranger things, the thing that sticks out the most to me is the three days we spent with Lon's relations in rural Oklahoma where we rode around in trucks, baled hay and almost died trying to fix an anhydrous ammonia tank that was hooked up to a giant tractor.

Then there were the steaks.

A brief aside here.

I have always thought of steak rub as bullshit. My way of thinking is/was "If it needs steak rub, it is shitty beef!" and I, generally, stand by it. If a steak is of good quality you only need Kosher salt and freshly cracked pepper to make it taste good. Simple.

Where the line gets blurry however, is Cavender's ALL Purpose Greek Seasoning which Lon's great uncle (?) introduced me to during the first night we visited. Rather than, like most rubs, make your steak, chicken or pork chop taste vaguely of chemical residue, Cavender's just makes evrything you put it on taste really good in a way that you cannot put your finger on, even if you know intimately what you are looking for.  My wife has even used it to make quickie trash salad dressing and it was Delicious.

I think what makes it so good, so inscrutable, is that it is completely balanced unlike most rubs and seasonings on the market these days that aim to bomb your palate with one dominant flavor like black pepper, garlic, lemon pepper or bacon. Cavender's is more like just enough garlic, oregano, thyme, pepper, rosemary and onion powder to make what you're eating like itself, only much better. I think here of Cavender's being like a really nice blouse and a hint of Carmody's Smokey Eye vs. getting a Miley Cyrus skank makeover, if that makes sense. Other seasonings are skank makeovers that remove the natural good flavor of the meat and replace it with something terrible and alien.

Yes. That is Snow.

Anyway, I thought of it because I am planning on seasoning up some local pork chops with it and grilling them this evening.

Oy Vey! The Lion of Zion Beef Patty Mina, Mon.

I have repeat offended on these.

I like fusion. Not like DHS Fusion centers or the kind of Fusion you get from overpriced, vaguely racist, New American cuisine type scam restaurants that were all the rage when I moved to NYC a decade and a half ago. No, I mean the kind of stuff that you find anywhere that multiple newly transplanted ethnic groups find themselves sharing the same area. Indian Chinese is a favorite fusion of mine. You can find Indian Chinese food anywhere in the world where there are both Indians and Chinese people and, from the 8 or 9 places I've eaten at over the years, it is exquisitely strange and delicious.

A more mixed bag is the whole oeuvre of Asian-Hot Dog-Taco-Kim Chi type stuff that you'll find in all the hipster cities. Sometimes it works well as exemplified by the East Side Kings food carts in the back yards of Austin's East Side bars. Sometimes it's just a cluster fuck of flavors being mindlessly devoured by idiots, as exemplified by the whole Asia Dog thing in Brooklyn from 7-8 years ago. So it goes.

Anyway, I had been revisiting the 1992 classic The New York Cookbook while I was also infatuated with the Zahav "Israeli" cookbook. The result was a Beef Patty Mina.

A beef patty, if you aren't familiar, is a Jamaican street food that is one part English hand pie and one part Indian samosa, sort of. Basically, you get a filling of curry and Scotch Bonnet flavored beef filling inside a yellow pocket of savory pie crust. And they're weirdly addictive. And kind of gross.

Satmars near my old loft on Flushing ave. VERY good Babkas are one block back, on the left

A Mina is a meat and veggie pie filling inside a crust made from soggy stale Matzo crackers that is layered inside a pie tin or cast iron skillet, egg washed and baked. Yep, Jewish trash food. The problem is that I liked the idea of the Mina but, frankly, hated the bland spicing of the Mina filling in the Zahav recipe. Why would you put cinnamon in a fucking ground beef filling? Right. Also, I wasn't about to make beef patty pastry dough for multiple reasons that involve laziness and my Godzilla toddler. The clear solution was to marry the Beef Patty filling with the Mina crust and call it good. This is how fusion should work, btw.

Yes, Mina is a TRASH FOOD.

 Quite proud of my elegant solution to my twin cravings, I set about making the filling. My recipe seemed odd, but legit since it came from the above mentioned NY Cookbook and from a Jamaican "Jerk King" guy. It involved beef, lots of onions, habanero chiles, curry powder and... bread crumbs. I knew the bread crumbs were wrong. Wrong texture. Very un-beef patty like, at least NY beef patties, yet I made it anyway.

One the other end I was also soaking Matzoh to line my greased cast iron pan where I promptly entered FAIL mode once again by using multiple layers of Matzoh to make the crust instead of one. The result of both fails was a dinner that was "fine." By that I mean, it was edible and even kind of good but not at all what I was shooting for in my mind. But, hey, my loss is your gain as below I give you the corrected "with all my powers" Beef Patty Mina recipe for your perusal and contemplation.

Ingredients

Beef Patty Filling

1 lb ground beef on the leaner side
1 onion, finely minced
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 tablespoons AP flour
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tablespoon mild curry powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 cup beef broth
1 tablespoon scotch bonnet hot sauce or to taste

Mina Crust

1 package Matzoh crackers
1 egg, whisked with 1 tablespoon cold water

Begin

Heat up a large skillet on high heat and add the oil. Once the oil is hot but not smoking, add the beef. Chop up with your grandma spoon and cook until it's brown then add onion and cook 3-4 minutes until soft and a little brown. Add the garlic and cook 1 minute. Add all spices/salt and cook 1-2 minutes then add the flour and reduce heat to medium and cook for 1-2 minutes until it starts to stick then SLOWLY stir in the beef stock until a very thick gravy consistancy is reached. Add hot sauce and mix. Turn off heat and let sit for 30-40 minutes.

Meanwhile, preheat oven to 425'. Grease up your cast iron (12" or so) with butter and dip 4-5 matzoh crackers in water and let them sit for 3-4 minutes until soft. Cover the bottom and sides with ONE layer of cracker. Yes, they will break. Do your best to use larger pieces but make sure, no matter what, to cover the whole interior of the cast iron with crackers then add the filling and top with one layer of crackers and then brush with the egg wash. Toss in the oven and cook until the top is golden and glossy. Remove from the oven and let it rest for 5 minutes then CAREFULLY flip the Mina onto a plate like a Spanish Tortilla. Serve!!!

Addendums

You can add a 1/2 cup of leftover KFC mashed potatoes to the beef patty filling to get a slightly more Shepard's Pie type thing going on.

Also, you can add a knob of ginger, minced up, with the onions at the beginning to make it more zesty.

To get FUSION on FUSION you can add a layer of mozzarella on the top of the filling of the Mina before adding the top layer of Matzoh to yield a NYC pizza slice place classic cheesy beef patty. Gross.

P.P.S.

No, I am not sure whether I am using all of the internet meme images that appear in my blog posts Ironically, post-Ironically or if I actually think they're funny on their face. These are strange and confusing times we live in.

Low Infrastructure Cider Making, Courtesy, Thrift and the Andy Warhol Death Cult

In two weeks this could be 4 x 750ml bottles of elegant cider?

So an old friend of mine turned me onto a beer brewing blog called One Pot Brewing. As the name might suggest the whole reason for being of this blog is to test out the theory of minimalist brewing.

This is significant because one of the things that has always kept me from home brewing is the fact that it classically requires A Lot of gear. Wort chillers, miles of copper piping, a number of huge pots, high BTU propane turkey burners, expensive glass carboys, airlocks and on and on and on.

My issue with all this gear was threefold: 1) It is expensive. 2) It takes up a lot of space with junk that rarely gets used even if you're WAY into beer brewing (I mean how many 5 gallon batches of beer can you possibly drink without getting a fatty liver?) and 3) What if I got all that fucking gear and then decided that I didn't enjoy brewing enough to keep doing it?

As a jack-of-all hobbies with a wife that has seen me deep dive into many nerdy interests only to abandon said interests a month or two later, never to return to them again. Now, as a Dad of a mega-toddler and husband to a woman who is understanding to a point, I just can't bring myself to spend coin, junk up the house, make a giant mess and burn a lot of time on my new hobbies. To upset my domestic tranquility for the sake of my wee tinker drives is not a good idea if I want to continue to nerd out without significant oversight, if you catch my meaning.

Anyway, I was intrigued with the guy's minimal equipment approach to brewing. However the prerequisite of gear was still a bit too intense as I have other things I am more interested in pursuing to use up the amount of marital capital required.

However, the One Pot guy also had a very minimal hard cider recipe that required very little gear, allowing me to dabble without having to explain multiple giant boxes from Amazon on the doorstep. Basically: pour store bought cider in a fermentation bucket, pitch champagne yeast, stir, ferment, siphon off clear cider into bottles and cap the bottles. Easy!

Again, I have some other projects going that are already edging towards the redline of acceptable tinkering so I decided to remove the fermentation bucket from my cider production as it eliminated a sizable box squatting by the mailbox that needed to be explained.

The set up

My thinking here was that, once upon a time, when I was deeply bitten by the distilling bug (and something I fully intend to return to this Fall when the apples start to come in) I was gifted a couple cases of cider that had started to spontaneously ferment in the jugs.

An important aside here is that fermenting liquids produce a fair amount of CO2 gas as the yeast coverts sugars into alcohol. This CO2 needs to be vented in such a way that it can get out but undesirable microbes, that could make the fermentation go funky, cannot get in.

My solution was to poke a slit in the tops of the cider jugs with a very thin, sharp knife. The idea was that the back pressure of the CO2 would keep out the things I'd like to keep out while allowing the CO2 to leak out without the jug tops blowing off, covering my kitchen with stinky, half-fermented, cider. My gamble worked marvelously. Nothing blew up. The cider fermented completely without turning to vinegar and the resulting distilled applejack was delicious and VERY strong. Proof of concept: achieved.

So yesterday we made our weekly trek to the grocery store and I picked up a gallon of locally pressed cider. I already had an airlock from my previous failed Kimchee project and a packet of champagne yeast that I had kicking around. The set up, in my mind, was to drill and undersized hole in the cap of the jug of cider through which I would pour the yeast using a small funnel and then stick the airlock stem in the hole which would stretch around the stem, keeping the whole thing air tight and thus safe from contamination.

I let the airlock soak in a very mild bleach solution to sanitize it. As it soaked I sanitized the drill bit in the same solution and then proceeded to drill the hole, jam yeast in there and then capped the whole thing off with the airlock.

This was last night.

As of this morning the cider is lightly bubbling up, a good sign, and I can see a light layer of dead yeast collecting at the bottom of the jug indicating that everything is going to plan. Whether or not this will work, from the point of view of an uncontaminated, clean fermentation, remains to be seen but I am hopeful.

In the end, the stakes are pretty low:

Worst case scenario is that I will end up with a gallon of raw cider vinegar (which I have already made on a smaller scale with an old partial jug of cider that had been forgotten in the fridge) which we can use to pickle vegetables from the garden this Summer. The $6.00 investment in a gallon of local cider that we can get $35.00 worth of vinegar out of is still a win. The domestic bliss bonus points will not be as numerous but, seriously, it was six bucks.

Best case scenario is that I will get a nice, clear hard cider that I can rack into empty sparkling wine bottles with a few sugar cubes and cap to achieve a natural sparkling cider which my wife is already looking forward to sharing with house guests on our deck. Time will tell. Check back in a few days for an update.

Addendum

I'd like to say a little about the notion of maintaining domestic tranquility cited above. By this I don't mean to reinforce the sort of 1950's Leave it to Beaver passive aggressive, "honey-do list" kind of martial Battle of the Sexes horseshit. What I'm saying is Don't Be A Dick. This is something that most people try to do everyday when interacting with others as a part of evolutionary behaviors. By this I mean that most self-aware, non-idiots in the world try not only to not irritate others with self centered behavior, not only this but they actually attempt to go out of their way to be kind to others as much as they can. Common courtesy, I believe they used to call it. Why? Because people with manners will be saved from being eaten by a saber toothed tiger, while dicks will not not be because everyone finds them irritating and selfish. If you plan on being a rude prick you should be well prepared. This may explain why Silicon Valley Tech Bros and Wall Street types are becoming luxury versions of doomsday preppers.

The people that we live with deserve better than the strangers we encounter on our daily rounds. A deeper common courtesy, tailored to their particular likes and dislikes. In this realm, things like not talking endlessly about work, making a mess in the kitchen, then not cleaning it up or, in my case, not spending a bunch of money junking up the house with a ton of stupid shit that rarely, if ever, gets used.

1999 me really, really loved this movie.

Thrift, Limitations and the Warhol Death Cult of Consumer Equality. 

Embedded in this courtesy is also Thrift, which I mentioned in an earlier post. A lot of people tend to buy things they don't need, as a matter of course, to fill the emotional holes in their lives or to get a brief "thrill" that breaks up the hours and gives them something to look forward to. This is completely understandable. This has been our training. Marketers and advertisers have paid billions upon billions of dollars to condition us to do this. Rather than prattle on with some sort of warmed over Fight Club rant about consumerism I'd like to offer up a different take.

 Limitations, rather than being a hindrance to human creativity, are the fount from which it comes. Said a differently "necessity is the mother of invention." While you can't get much done without some truly basic shit, you can do a lot without buying ALL the shit. Limitations are the midwife of the above cider recipe.

If I told you to go out and buy the same $200's worth of shit that most people tell you to get, would my words be worth reading? Probably not. I would just be another, nearly identical, turd floating in the soup terrine of the internet. Diversity, sweet diversity, is the product of unique circumstances. Circumstances are inherently limitations, all. This is science. Common sense. The way of all things.

Mediocrity is good. Mediocrity works.

Andy Warhol, if you read him, was a fan of sameness. Non-diversity. Everyone should be like everyone else. Everyone should be famous for 15 minutes and everyone should like everybody. 

These are the platitudes of impossible progressive fascism. We will never be same. We will never be equal. We will all be the products of our limitations, environment and circumstances.

You and I are made of our limitations. Sometimes we wish that we were, for instance, taller, richer, thinner, talented at the things we like to do but suck at, etc. You see what I'm saying here. But we aren't. We are who we are, for better or worse and we deal with it.

Part of the reason I am making cider is because really good cider is cheap in Vermont. I eat a lot more cheese than I did a year ago for the same reason. I will grow certain vegetable varietals this Summer because the Summer is shorter here than California or Morocco. On it goes. Are these reasons/circumstances good or bad? Neither. They're different and difference is what makes the world a beautiful, complex place worth living in. Without difference you're just another dumb asshole buying a Coke.

Andy Warhol, apologist philosopher of the Corporate Age.

 The consumerist nihilism of people like Warhol is, quite literally, the belief system of a death cult. A banal corporate mall of sameness and "equality". I don't want a Coke. I don't want to be equal. I want to be who I am and who I will become living inside my limitations.

Cider Update 02/21

Well,  I may be eating my eating (or drinking?) my words. While my cider has been bubbling away I did a little research and it seems that most people who make hard cider from store bought cider jugs add a half-cup of strong tea to their cider to give it body and structure. This, I obviously did not do.

However, I have a few things going for me:

 1) The One Pot Brewing guy did not do this and he used frigging apple juice, not raw sweet cider, and things seemed to turn out well using Champagne yeast, which I used as well.

2) This being Vermont, most apples grown here are of the MacIntosh types, which are a sort of Grandmotherly, tart all-purpose apple much more in keeping with cider making than the Golden Delicious type found in typical grocery store ciders.

3) I can add Hibiscus tea to the cider during bottling to both give it a groovy pink color and tannins just like black tea but with the added benefit of also giving tartness and what I am hoping is a very complimentary flavor. I'll taste it in a week or so and decide. Besides, I need the time to empty some champagne bottles of their vinous content so I have something to bottle them into.

In Europe, Bums Drink Cider. Really.

 All of the above said, I think that once I have ironed out my recipe I will be getting a 5 gallon glass demijohn. Why?

Well, reason one is that I have had to be watchful of my cider as the expanding cider has snuck up into the bubbler a few times because there is not enough of a gap betwixt it and the fermenting cider.

Reason two is that I will want to do 5 gallon batches for the sake of not dicking around and wasting time piddling with a bunch of tiny batches. After all the point of this is to have a neat hobby that both scratches my Wee Tinker itch and provides me and mine a steady flow of inexpensive, quality drink. Again, the math roughly goes like this: $6 a gallon divided by the 4 x 750ml bottle yield is $1.50 a bottle. Even with the cost of caps ($6 for 144) and Capper ($9) that is still $5.25 a bottle but once the first batch is done that cost will again go to $1.50 per 750ml or cheaper, as Dutton's (a roadside plant and produce stand outside of town) sells gallons for $5 each.

The third reason is that I spotted a nice glass demijohn for very cheap at a local junk shop.

Stay tuned.