By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

Sure, I’ll make some wine … Yikes! Words are easy; crushing and fermenting and racking are … somebody else’s job—but a pretty darn-near irresistible challenge. What does a wine editor do when she’s asked to put her money where her mouth is, so to speak? Find a book on home winemaking (words again, but they are the stock in trade around here).

The first one I hit on I highly recommend already: The Way to Make Wine: How to Craft Superb Table Wines at Home, by Sheridan Warrick (published by the UC Press just last year). Chapters 1 and 2 alone, full of specific detail on the equipment and kind of space you need, have practically launched this project. And as luck would have it, Dan Warrick used to be the executive editor of one of our sister magazines, Health (he’s a senior editor at VIA now), and—unbelievable coincidence here—he’s a great friend of my neighbors! A Saturday night dinner around their kitchen table, over a couple of bottles of his wine (good stuff, especially the dry Riesling), clinched his support. We’re going to have Dan on speed dial come late September.

And maybe a few other pros. I haven’t been able to stop myself, telling every winemaker I’ve crossed paths with in the last few weeks that I’m going to try my hand at it this year (calculated humble swagger there, just begging to be crushed). When I described the project to Tony Soter, who founded Etude winery in Carneros (very yummy Pinot Noirs) and has consulted on many, many top Napa Valley wines, the first thing he said was, “I’ll be your consulting winemaker!” Now that would be a coup. Unfortunately for us (fortunately for the wine-drinking world), Tony has moved to Oregon to start another winery, Soter Vineyards. Still, there’s speed dial …

And lots of concrete details to take care of—find some grapes (before they’re ripe!), figure out where to make this stuff (where there’s lots of water available to keep everything clean, says Dan), and beg, borrow, and steal equipment. This isn’t a one-person job—the best Sunset talent has joined Team Wine (Team Chicken, what do you really need to do besides keep the little critters alive?): Erika Ehmsen, copy chief (with impressive winemaking connections; more later); Lauren Swezey, special projects editor in the garden department; Irene Edwards, executive editor; and Sara Jamison, style coordinator (this, above all, is going to be stylish wine).

Left: Little Ruby starts to nod off at the back.
Below: The soothing chest rub.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Last Friday, Sunset brought home a boxful of fluffy, tiny chicks (see Cheep! Date). We set them up in our prop shed, raised and lowered the heat lamp (they need to be kept at 90° for the first week or so), and fussed over water and feed and air flow. (As a reminder, we are not eating these creatures--see Team Chicken's First Few Clucks.) We hovered over our itty bitty brood like a mother, well, you know. Then came the end of the day, and one of us (me) assumed the first weekend chick duty.

You wouldn't think this would be a terrifying prospect, but I have a speckled history when it comes to poultry. Even as a little girl I wanted to raise chicks. We were living in an apartment at the time so it wasn't practical, but so badly did I want them that I'd sometimes sneak storebought eggs into bed and tuck them under the covers next to my pillow when I slept, hoping they'd magically hatch. Later, when I was around 10, I won a couple of day-old chicks at a fair. You can imagine the ecstasy. I brought them home on a balmy spring day, and it seemed natural to take them out for a romp on our dewy green lawn. Fluffy and Butterball caught cold in about two seconds and the next morning I found them spreadeagled under the water dish, lifeless.

So I was a wee bit anxious last Friday. I went in to see our flock maybe, oh, 10 times between 5 p.m. and midnight. Four of the chicks were strapping 9-day-olds and already had feathers sprouting, but the little Rhode Island Reds were only two days old, and one of them had developed a condition we'd been warned about at the feed store: pasty butt. (This was not something our chicken books had prepared us for.) Basically it's a situation best resolved with warm water, cotton balls, and gentle application, and you've got to do it, or your chick's minuscule digestion won't function. I did my best. But little Pasty, whom I quickly came to call Ruby because of her shiny deep-red beak, just didn't seem as active as the others. She'd stand under the heat lamp, legs wide apart, her fuzzy red head slowly tipping forward in a kind of narcoleptic trance. She looked like a tiny drunk at the bar. She'd either be doing that or cheeping frantically, her whole soft underside heaving up and down with the effort.

Late Friday night she cheeped like this for a good 10 minutes straight. What did she want? Was she hungry? Tired? I couldn't stand it any more. I picked her up and did what Robin at Half Moon Bay had showed us, the Soothing Chest Rub. It is really an amazing trick. You do this to a chick (see one of our Buff Orpingtons in photo above) and they just go limp. Sometimes they'll stretch their legs way out like they're sitting in a cabana chair on the beach, they're so relaxed. Anyway, Ruby fell asleep in my hand. Talk about gratifying...The funny thing was that soon as her peeping stopped, all the other chicks lay right down and went to sleep. They seemed so relieved to have a break from the noise.

On Saturday morning, I bolted out of bed at 7 a.m. and ran to the office, a bad chick dream in my head. All six were awake and moving! Praise the heavens. I e-mailed the rest of the team with the good news: The Chicks Are Still Alive.

After putting in some quality chicken-watching, petting, and feeding time that day and the next, I can say that these birds are anything but boring. The Ameraucanas--which look more like game birds than chickens, with dramatic Cleopatra eye markings--like to sleep with their necks entwined, and love to get up on top of things, including the water dispenser. They're growing at a tremendous clip (their tails sprouted since yesterday). The Buffs are fat little honey-colored things and look exactly alike. They're quite docile and when they settle onto their chests for a nap, they look like yellow dandelions. And the Rhode Island Reds, the babies, well, they're practically too cute to be allowed by law.

Other fun habits: they like to stretch now and then, with a wing and a leg extended. (No yawns, though.) When they drink, they look like they're gargling. They seem to think that food in a human hand is better than food from a dish. (Six little beaks pecking feels like gentle rain.) Best of all, they are all getting along and don't seem to have established the dreaded Pecking Order (yes, that's where the term comes from. It's worse among chickens than among humans).

Monday morning arrived and still the chickens lived. Everyone on the team rushed into the shed to say hello to them. Ruby was still dozing off, but had spurts of energy, too, and her feathers had sprouted. She was eating, she was gargling at the water dish. We collectively decided there was hope. Grow, little chicks, grow!

By Lauren Bonar Swezey, Sunset special projects editor

Now that we’ve got our coop built and have six baby chicks in hand, we’re on the hunt for some mature hens that can lay eggs for our one-block diet feast. I’ve been perusing craigslist on a regular basis and have responded to several listings, but by the time I send an email, I get a response that the chickens are gone. One posting said they would only sell male and female sets. Sorry, no roosters for us. Our neighbors wouldn’t be pleased (nor would the City of Menlo Park)!

Now I’m putting out a call to all who visit our blog: If anyone has two productive hens they wish to sell or donate, please email Team Chicken! Just think, their feathery faces might end up on the pages of Sunset!

Ryan at the corn bed.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

I’ve been out of town for a while, and just before I left I walked down our corn plot. The plants reached my knee. Now, two weeks later, they’re eight feet tall! Having never been around corn, this seems to me to be the sort of thing that only happens in fairy tales.

Our corn’s rate of growth isn’t its only amazing aspect, though. It’s the sheer size of it, too, especially when you think of how corn began millennia ago—as a small, lowly grass. It’s we humans and our cultivating and selecting that have turned this innocent plant into a maize monster. (Although, if you’ve read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it’s hard not to see corn cleverly directing its own evolution by being so irresistibly tasty and useful.) But what a beautiful and delicious giant…

I snap back to the present tense when Ryan Casey, Sunset’s test garden coordinator, points to the fountainlike tassels at the top of the stalks and reveals more fascinating stuff about corn. “The pollen comes down from here. If you shake the corn”—he grabs a stalk and jostles it—“you can see the dust.” A soft yellow spray blows sideways from the tassels, settling down onto the silk sprouting from the baby ear of corn below. “It drops onto the silk, and each thread sends a message to a kernel inside to grow. If you have two varieties of corn planted next to each other, you might get two kinds of kernels on one ear. So if you’re growing different types and you don’t want them to cross-pollinate, either plant them 100 feet apart or wait two weeks between plantings, so one is still maturing while the other is dropping pollen.”

On the other side of the size spectrum: Our first potato. Ryan’s hand went down in the Yukon Gold patch like a deep-sea diver and came up with a potato the size of a cherry. I boiled it in a tiny bit of water later and ate it…sweet and tender.

Then on a more somber front, I’m sorry to report that our chickpea experiment (see Struggle of the Sprouts) has failed. Our lone chickpea succumbed at last, probably because we planted late in the season (chickpeas need a cool-weather planting, says Ryan.) Our attempt to grow it in pots met a similar fate. Oh well…we tried. There's comfort in the corn.

Cute, as promised. Click here for an album.

By Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Hang on to your hay bales, everybody: Sunset's got chickens. Chicks. Six of 'em.

This morning, we took Highway 92 over the northern ridge of the Santa Cruz Mountains to Half Moon Bay Feed & Fuel. There, the ever-helpful manager, Robin Camozzi, helped us pick out the World's Cutest Chicks Ever. In the whole world.

Two Rhode Island Reds, two Buff Orpingtons, two Ameraucanas. Four of them are 9 days old, while the little Rhodies were just born on Tuesday. On Monday, they were still in their eggs!

They can't go outside yet (they need to get feathers first) so we've set up a home for them in our prop shed. Li'l chickies are living in a cage among the lawn furniture, backdrops, and closets full of the dishes that you see in our photos. They've got an infrared heat lamp to keep them toasty as they grow, and they've gotten lots of visitors today.

So far, they don't mind being picked up. We're trying to give them lots of gentle human contact so they'll be sweet as they get older. Robin showed us how to lay them on their backs, cradling them in our hands, and stroke their little downy tummies until their legs stretch out and their eyes close and they're lulled to sleep. (Who knew?) She also warned us that chicks are kind of wobbly and dopey, so they may go to sleep in uncomfortable positions that will make us think that they might have expired. (Chick attrition is our greatest fear.)

You'll get pictures as soon as our photographer extraordinaire, Spencer Toy, can process them. Monday, people. You'll have to wait till Monday to see our little fluffballs. But it'll be worth it — promise.

Weird, adorable things about chicks:
1. Their eyelids come up from the bottom (freaky!)
2. Their cheeping is so ridiculously high a human can't even imitate it.
3. Their arrival can cause an entire office of normally reasonable adults to abandon their work (briefly!) to peek in at them.

By Dale Conour, executive editor

Our beer is starting to look and taste like, well, beer.

Just to recap, there are three basic stages in making beer:

1. Combining the ingredients (water, hops, barley, yeast, and in our case, wheat and honey) and getting them fermenting;
2. Moving the fermenting beer into a secondary fermenter (a big glass “carboy”) to remove the growing sediment (called “trub”);
3. Pouring the fermented beer into bottles, capping them off, and letting the beer mature and gain a little more clarity.

Last week, we dealt with step 2, taking the opportunity to taste how our brew was coming along. It still had quite a big of sugar to it and was “flat,” but the distinctive hoppiness of beer came through and the honey and wheat flavor made their presence known.

Our beerless leader, Rick, wants to repeat step 2 again to remove more of the trub, then, within a week or two after that, we’ll be bottling. If we can come up with enough empty bottles to sterilize.

A friend has vowed to increase his beer intake to generate the necessary bottles for us. The guy deserves a medal.

By Rick LaFrentz, Sunset landscape supervisor

As scheduled, the brew crew assembled Wednesday morning in our entertainment kitchen to produce our first of many home brews. Move over, Budweiser.

The beer, chosen by committee last week, was a honey wheat. It arrived yesterday as a kit via an East Bay brewing supply store. The first thing I did upon opening the box was to start the package containing the liquid yeast. This is done by breaking an inner seal of yeast giving it wort to fuel its appetite.

Everything went smoothly. The kitchen has a huge efficient gas burning stove which rewarded us with an aggressive rolling boil.

Our 5 gallons of water was boiling in no time. Next, we added the wheat malt extract (at left). At this point we reduced the boil to prevent the extract for scorching the bottom of the pot. After stirring the extract with a long plastic spoon we resumed the boil. After 5 minutes of boil, of the now wort, we added hop pellets (flavoring), which resembles rabbit food.

As stated in the brewing instructions, we added 2 pounds of honey and the remaining hops (aromatics) in the last 7 minutes of the boil.

After an hour of boiling the wort we placed the brew pot in the sink, placed a wort chiller in the pot and packed the sink with ice (good idea, Stephanie) from the nearby ice machine. In about 35 minutes we had the wort temperature from 200 degrees down to 83, which was low enough to pitch the yeast. With a strainer over the top of the fermenter, we poured the wort. At this point we opened the swollen liquid yeast package, introduced it into the wort and stirred vigorously. A lid was secured to the top of the fermenter and a fermentation lock was pushed into the escape hole in the lid.

We placed the fermenter in the corner of the kitchen, and within 24 hours we had fermentation.

While we wait for our own chickens to populate our new coop and provide fresh eggs for our ultra-local feast, we'd love to post shots of your own great roosters and hens.

Click here to email your photos to our Chicken Team (please include his/her name, variety, and general location). Then watch your chicken become a star in our new photo gallery, "Great Chickens of the West."

By Rick LaFrenz, Sunset landscape supervisor

There’s something exciting about billions of yeast cells converging on a sugary malt solution and transforming it into a substance that has so much personality and history—or is it just me?

Who would have guessed that the mistake of leaving some grains in a vessel of water thousands of years ago would have led to the celebrated drink we know today as beer? (Photo of Egyptian wood model of beer making by E. Michael Smith, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.)

Our One-block Diet's brew crew — Sunset editorial services coordinator Stephanie Dean, executive editor Dale Conour, managing editor Alan Phinney, and yours truly — met last week to decide what kind of beer to make and how to make it. Though Stephanie and I have each made beer, we both did so using a concentrated extract, instead of the traditional method of producing the beer exclusively from grain. Beer purists would argue that there is only one method, and that is from grain.

We decided to make two batches of beer. The first batch will be honey wheat, from an extract. If everything goes to plan, we will brew on Wednesday.

After some research (which may involve a trip to a local brewery to see how the big boys do it), we are going to attempt to make a beer from grains. This process is a bit more involved, time consuming, and requires more equipment. We will need controlled temperatures for the conversions of starches into fermentable sugars.

Stay tuned for some pictures of the brew crew in action. In the words of Homer Simpson, ‘'mmmmm beeeeeeer.’'

By MacKenzie Geidt, Sunset editorial assistant

No chickens yet, but the coop has landed! We’re one step closer to welcoming our first flock to the Sunset homestead.

If I were a chicken, I’d be thrilled to shack up in this cozy coop and I’d find very little to complain about.  Our customized coop hails from the masterful hands of James Stamp, founder of Wine Country Coops in St. Helena, California, which was featured in our July issue.

Our coop is 4- by 6-feet (very nearly the size of my studio apartment in San Francisco), and sports a charming red gabled roof of weatherproof corrugated metal.

Wire mesh flooring lets droppings fall to the ground, keeping the house clean and low-maintenance. (We'll use the droppings in our compost pile.)

We’ll be able to easily collect the eggs every day through a door to the nesting compartment, and a ramp will allow the chickens to scuttle out when they’re let out in the morning to roam. Weather-proof with excellent ventilation, the coop features roosting poles, glass windows to let in natural light, and accommodates hen parties of 12. That’s more than I can brag about in my own apartment, so I hope the future residents appreciate these features when they arrive.

Readers: Do you have chickens? We want to see pictures of your feathered friends!  Show off your prize-winners and email us with pictures. We'll add them to our (forthcoming) Chicken Portrait Gallery. Send pictures (include names!) and your stories to: geidtm@sunset.com