By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

On Friday, we finally tasted the results of a year and a half of beer-making effort.

Yes, it's true: back in the winter of 07-08, we planted our barley, wheat, and hops. In summer, we harvested (more like fought off the squirrels for the last stalks of grain) and embarked on the extremely annoying task of threshing (perhaps because we chose to hand-pick the papery, spiky little bracts off each grain instead of choosing a more brutal approach, like running over bags of grain with a car or maybe whacking a burlap-sackfull the way you would a piñata) to malting, brewing, and bottling.

Now came the moment of truth. Team Beer and other assorted staffers gathered around, and we popped open a few bottles.

Rick, Team Beer's Beerless Leader (looking at the beer): Boy, is that blond. (Sips beer and sort of chews it.) Grainy.

Sara Schneider, wine editor: It comes through. Tastes very wheaty.

Rick: We put 3 ounces of hops in there [typically this size batch has 2 oz.] but it's very balanced.

Stephanie, test kitchen director: Don't you think it's sweet? It's pretty sweet. 

Rick: It has a bitter edge to it, though.

Sara: I think it has a zingy, citrusy edge. And definitely wheaty. I like it.

Margo: Alan, do you like it?

Alan, managing editor (thoughtfully): No. I wish it were sweeter—then I'd like it more. That final flavor, whatever it is—it's kind of like a plastic jug.

Margo: I think it may be the hops.

Rick: This seems lighter than your typical banana-clove wheat beer. That can get so tiring.

Margo: I do get some banana in this, though. Remember when it was fermenting? How it went into a kind of frenzy? It blew the airlock off the carboy.

Rick: That was one strong yeast.

Chris Ryan, executive editor: It reminds me slightly of...of cleanser. But good! (smiling brightly). Lemonesque.

Michael Andrews, VP of finance and business development: (Shrugs.) I wouldn't buy this beer, but I'd probably drink it.

Elaine Johnson, associate food editor: It's refreshing, and I like the hoppiness of it.

---------------

Well, readers, clearly some mixed opinions here, but overall they're pretty positive. We're proud of every hard-won bubble in these bottles, that's for sure.

Plus, this beer will probably taste great with the herb quiche we're making for our upcoming spring feast.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

What we're reading this week:

Edible everywhere: We're glad to see that the Edible Communities magazine family has expanded to California's Central Coast. Edible Santa Barbara's first issue is on newsstands now. Go to ediblesantabarbara.com for more info.

Backyard chickens I: It's new chick time! All over the West, folks are taking the plunge and getting themselves a little brood of chick-lets. Our own contributing home editor, the marvelous Samantha Schoech, who has been talking about getting her own chicks for months, finally took the plunge. I'm loving the chick videos she's posting on her blog, Up Mama's Wall. Hilarious.

A seaworthy distraction: (Speaking of the Edible publications, our mouths are watering over Edible San Franciso's Locavore Cioppino. I can't raise Dungeness crabs or Hog Island oysters in my backyard, but the ocean's pretty close, right? Well, now that I'm thinking of cioppino, I'm reminded of Sunset's quick recipe for cioppino from a couple of years ago. I must be hungry.)

Backyard chickens II: The Associated Press noticed that backyard chickens are catching on. (We could have told you that.) The supreme purveyor of Internetz snark, Gawker.com, noticed the AP story. Thus, Gawker writes about how "we are becoming Cuba." (What?) Anway, the Gawker story has a link to the AP story, which quotes Rob Ludlow of Pleasant Hill, Calif, owner of my all-time favorite chicken reference site, BackyardChickens.com. Worth clicking through, if only to read this: "A confluence of localvore do-gooderism and desperate poverty is transforming America's suburbs into a Third World hellscape, because otherwise-normal people are raising chickens in their backyards." Oh Gawker, will my love for you ever cease?

Buzzy, bees-y: Our own queen bee Margaret Sloan pointed us toward Beekind, a store in Sebastopol specializing in all things bee. Candles, wax, honey, hives, and other gewgaws. Speaking of bee-related shopping, I can't get enough of Chinacherie's Etsy store with her affordable bee-themed jewelry.

Loca-techno-vore: I can't decide whether I'm going to pony up the $2.99 for the Locavore iPhone app (see right). I mean, I love local eating, and I love my iPhone, but do I need the two to connect? Here's what the Locavore app does: tells you what's in season, what will soon be in season, where your local farmer's markets are, and it links you to Wikipedia, so you can get oriented about what exactly the fruits and vegetables it's telling you about are. Do I need that? Not sure. But apparently almost 5,700 people downloaded Locavore in its first month. (Readers: Do you have it? Do you like it? Let me know in comments.)

Backyard chickens III:Tucson's getting a chicken coop tour! May 23. Mark your calendars. Plus, it's sponsored by the Food Conspiracy, which has to be the greatest co-op name of all time.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

We spent a seriously warm Earth Day in the hives. Sheer bliss (if bliss is also sweaty and uncomfortable).

It’s been a while since we fully inspected the two Langstroth hives, and we were dying of curiosity to see how our new queen, Califia, and her bees were doing in the top bar hive

Readers, meet our two new queens:

Califia

And Midge

Califia is the queen in the top bar hive. Top bar hives don’t have foundation or frames; the bees build natural comb that hangs from a simple bar of wood that rests on the top of the hive. A strip of beeswax running down the central length of the bar guides the girls to build straight.

Califia’s bees are smart. And quick too. Scarcely two weeks after we installed them in their new home, they’ve begun building comb—straight, perfect comb—on all the original 8 bars. 

We carefully pulled each bar, and then ... there she was! Califia. And right in front of Team Bee, she stuck her tush in a cell and laid an egg! Of course we cheered wildly. But quietly. They're bees, after all.

Midge (thanks to Jen Barnett for suggesting the name) is a daughter of Betty, the queen who swarmed in March. We weren’t sure we had a new queen, an old queen, or any queen at all, so we were very happy when we opened the hive and found it full of brood and eggs. Midge was clambering around in the bottom box. We know she’s not Betty, because she is more orange, and brighter in color than Betty ever was.

Her hive was so full of honey that we took two frames from the center and gave her two empty ones to fill (hopefully with eggs). This will be our first harvest of the year.

And Veronica in the third hive? She’s having some problems. She’s all honey and no brood, but the queen is still in the hive, desperately looking for empty cells in which to lay eggs. We’re trying to figure out what to do. Readers, any suggestions?

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

It is so hard to get vegetables to ripen on schedule.

Our beets, favas, carrots, and radishes don't care that we've planned a nice little ending for them in mid-May, when they're supposed to all be ready simultaneously for our spring one-block feast. Instead, the favas--a giant ungainly green explosion of stalks—had to be harvested yesterday. The bean pods were practically the size of cucumbers. And the radishes were bulging up out of the ground. When that happens, chances are they'll be stinging hot or fibrous. They almost look like they're begging to be picked, don't they?

 Overgrown radishes.

So, we got up from our desks, went out into the garden, and picked.

That giant clump yielded 25 pounds of favas in about half an hour. Along with the radishes, they gave us this classic spring nibble, which we ate in the afternoon:

"Easter Egg II" radishes with shelled favas, soft butter, and sea salt.

We did what the French do: Spread each radish or bean with just a bit of butter, sprinkle with salt, and eat. A glass of sauvignon blanc, rosé, or pastis tastes wonderful with this. (By the way, the radishes were slightly spicy, but probably because of our recent heat wave--not because of their size. I had a big one last week and it was sweet as could be.)

When favas get large, like ours are, they need to be double-shelled. It's kind of fun.


HOW TO DOUBLE-SHELL A FAVA BEAN

1. Slit the pod, lined inside with a downy white fuzz that cradles each individual bean. Pick out the beans.

2. Plop the beans in well-salted boiling water for exactly two minutes. Drain them and pour them into a bowl of cold water. You'll notice that a leathery skin has begun to separate from the inner bean.

3. When the beans are cool enough to handle, slit the skins with your fingernail or a paring knife and pop the inner beans out. What you see in the photo above are the naked beans. Fresh, green, and delicious.


WHEN YOU WANT A REALLY LARGE FAVA BEAN (AND WHEN YOU WANT A SMALL ONE)

For the kind of appetizer we just made, or for salads, monstrous favas are perfect because the beans are nice and fat and a couple make a good mouthful. Peeling tiny beans is maddening and plus it doesn't yield much.

When fava pods are really small--no longer than the length of your little finger--they can be boiled in salted water for a couple of minutes, drained, and cooled. They taste similar to green beans, only richer. Don't try this with bigger pods. You'll be chewing on boiled leather.

A big fava with its beans, and a little pod for eating whole.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

A couple of weeks ago, while up in the gorgeous Okanagan Valley (B.C.), I met a charming beekeeper named Helen Kennedy.

 

I'd gone to her place, Arlo's Honey Farm, to taste her award-winning honey and learn a bit about her beekeeping techniques. Well, as it turned out, Helen has been reading our Bee blog. She knew all about our strange multiple swarmings and our epic, unending battles with mites, which fasten perniciously to the bees' bodies, weakening them. They also kill brood and spread viruses.

Immediately yet gently, she began dispensing bits of advice about both swarming and mite control. We're passing these gifts along today, Earth Day, for the benefit of any beekeepers reading this--and their bees.

Helen's Earth Day Gift No. 1: How to control swarming

Bees will swarm for a number of reasons--most often when the hive has produced a rival queen (or queens), who each fly off with a portion of the bees, or when the hive is too crowded. Your chances of averting a swarm increase if you a) remove the rival queens before they're born and b) give your bees more space.

Which means: destroy the queen cells as soon as they're formed. "Look for a row of cups (i.e. queen cells) along the bottom of the frame and remove those," advises Helen.

But sometimes the queen is weakening, and really does need to be replaced with a strong, healthy new queen. How can you tell whether you're knocking off a crowd of Pied Pipers--or a desirable new leader?

 "If the queen cell is in the middle of the frame, leave it alone. That means the bees know they need another queen." Amazing little creatures, these bees.

The other point about the row-of-cups formation: this is your heads-up that the bees are considering a mass move. It's valuable information, because then you can remove filled frames and replace them with empty ones, giving the bees room to build and grow--and lessening their urge to emigrate.

Helen's Earth Day Gift No. 2: How to fight mites

Use screened bottom boards, with a removable plastic board to catch and count mites. (We do this already, but Helen gave me a board marked into sixths, to make it easier to count a zillion mites; one square's count times six will do the trick.)

Use formic acid pads. We've tried this, with some success. Helen applies hers in fall (after the honey harvest in August and before the frost) and  three times in spring. She likes to apply three times, 5 days apart, "to get it through all the bees and the brood, too."

Put in an "extender patty", a hamburger-like patty made of  Crisco, icing sugar, and essential oil of wintergreen. The bees eat it, crawl over it, and get thoroughly coated in this slick stuff so that the mites have no toehold.  She'll be sending her recipe to us; look for it in a post coming soon.

Plant nasturtiums. She's not completely sure about this, having not yet tried it herself, but she's read about a beekeeper in Germany who noticed that whenever his hives were set near nasturtiums, they were mite-free. Sounds like an idea worth trying!

 

Here's a last Earth Day gift from Helen's own earth—her bees and her 14 acres of peach trees:

Peach and Honey Preserves

In a large saucepan over medium-high heat, boil 1 part peach chunks with a little less than 1 part honey (adjust the amount depending on the sweetness of your fruit). Boil until the syrup starts to thicken. (Test by dropping some syrup on a plate and popping it in the freezer until it's just cool; if it's as thick as you like, stop; if not thick enough, keep simmering and testing.) Pour into jars and process the way you would any other preserve.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator   

The spring garden is filling in nicely (for the most part).

I thinned the dill (back right) after I took this picture, but I was loving the way it looked as a soft mass.

There are tarragon sprouts in the back left corner, though you can't see them in this picture. One problem - they don't taste like tarragon. Has anyone planted tarragon from seed? Does it take a while for the plants to start tasting like they should? They totally look like tarragon. I'm going to be really embarrassed if I'm nurturing a weed.

What we're reading this week:

Growing your own: If you're planning to plant a veggie garden this year, you've probably faced the eternal home-gardening questions: What's best to grow in the backyard? What's best to buy at the farmers' market? We enjoyed this Ask Metafilter discussion on the topic.

Eating close to home, no matter where home is: Local eating is hot, from Arizona to Alaska. I have to say, I was surprised by both these newspaper articles. from the Arizona Republic and the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Living in the mild climate of the Bay Area has gotten me used to being able to have virtually any kind of fruit or vegetable year-round. But it was inspiring to see how people who live in the Sonoran Desert around Phoenix and in interior Alaska manage to eat with local ingredients.

Forage for your food: We're keeping our eye on foraging. I mean, the local-eating appeal is obvious: Free food that grows naturally in the wild—who can resist? So we devoured this foraging primer on AlterNet.

Meeting your meat: The Atlantic suggests that perhaps your best bet for local meat is lamb.

Coops are catching on! Our affinity for chickens is well documented, but the trend is spreading throughout the West. We enjoyed this urban-chicken story from Salem Monthly, despite the snark: The past year has provided an almost perfect storm to make urban chickens relevant in Salem. Chicken-keeping may have started as an almost twee outgrowth of the locavore movement – where people try to eat more food produced within their immediate surroundings – but interest in it has reached critical mass since the economic downturn.

Twee?! Thanks, guys.

By Kimberley Burch, Sunset imaging specialist and Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Our new bees arrived this week! We asked our fans on Facebook for name suggestions and ...

We’ve named the new queen Califia, after the queen of the mythical Island of California! Thanks to Chryss Yost for her suggestion on our Facebook page.

Califia’s girls are to populate our topbar hive.  We’ve never installed bees before. It was quite an experience.

Kimberley picked up the wooden box of bees (this photo is of the box of bees in her car). She was safe in the car; the screened sides of the box contained the bees. A can filled with sugar syrup hanging down in the center of the box kept the bees fed, and the queen, suspended to the side of the can, kept the bees happy.

And, all suited up, we began the “installation.”

We pulled the can from the box, then took Califia’s little cage from the box. The bees clumped around her and didn’t want to leave her, and we had to gently shake and brush them off.

Then Brianne (who just installed her own bees last weekend) removed the little cork in the queen cage and stuffed in a marshmallow. 

The idea is that the bees will eat through this candy plug in a few days and release her. We hung her little cage inside the hive.

Then we installed the bees. It was really more like dumping them.

Kimberley banged on the side of the box, then shook it over the hive and a ball of bees fell into the bottom of the hive.

They surged like a wave up the sides, and began clumping around the queen.

Not all the bees came out of the box, and there was quite a bit of banging the box on the ground and shaking it to dislodge the remaining bees. In the end we put the box on the top of the hive and told the 50 or so reluctant bees to find their own way out.

Bees were flying everywhere, dazed and confused, but once we put the top bars in place, they began to settle down and come to their entrance holes to fan the pheromones that tell the other bees “this is home.”

After about 2 hours, most of the bees had settled down and were scouting the area. At the end of the day, we could see them (through the observation window!) in a big cluster around the queen.

Now we wait excitedly for our new worker bees to build their natural comb on our top bars!

By Rick LaFrentz, Sunset
 

Late last week, team beer bottled their Belgium Abbey Ale. Since fermentation, almost 6 weeks ago, the beer has been sitting in a 5-gallon glass carboy slowly settling out. We noticed that the beer had a bit of cloudiness and were hoping that extra time in the carboy would, through gravity, clear. Because we malted the grain ourselves there was a chance that we didn’t obtain a complete starch conversion, so in the mashing part of the process the end product could produce a hazy appearance. Wheat grains can produce this exquisite little inconvenience where barley is more forgiving. We found an article on line by John Palmer ‘How to Brew’ which explains most of the brewing process in technical but comprehensive terms. There are so many conversions taking place in the brewing processes that any deviation can alter your beer.

 We racked the beer several times during the 6-week period, meaning that we moved the beer from one 5-gallon container to another in order to remove it off the trub, the nasty residue that settles on the bottom of the fermentation vessel. My understanding is that the longer the beer sits on the trub, the more susceptible the beer is to off flavors.

We ended up with 51-12oz. bottles of beer. Yippee! One of the fun chores, yeah right, was to soak the bottles in a sanitizing solution for a couple of days to help loosen the labels off of the bottles. It’s amazing to see some of the creepy things that float out of the bottles when they’re soaking, right Stephanie?

After the bottles were sanitized we attached a jet bottle washer to the faucet, which sends a pressurized water steam up into the bottle to wash away yeast dregs and any sanitizer residue. Then we placed the sanitized bottles in an inverted draining position on a bottle tree until they were dry.

Now we were ready to bottle. We racked the beer from the glass carboy to a priming tank, which is a plastic container with a valve in the bottom and a small length of tubing used to insert into the bottle for filling. Once the beer is in the priming tank we added 4 oz. of corn sugar and stirred vigorously. This sugar will give food to the residual yeast, which in turn produces CO2 to give the beer carbonation.

Alan was volunteered to fill the bottles and Stephanie did the capping. I did the clean up.

We will wait for 3 weeks to taste the beer. Hopefully in that time the beer will settle some more and produce a nice lively carbonation.

There was some residual beer in the priming tank so we all had a taste to decide what flavors had evolved. We concluded that there was a hop presence but also enough grain flavors to balance the bitterness of the hops. The flavor the hops presented was a fragrant wood-like aroma. The wheat grains were very evident, too. Anxiously waiting.     

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

The swarm we gave Tom Vercoutere is booming. We left it in the xerox box, screen taped over the hole, next to the back fence for him to pick up on the Thursday we captured it. He emailed us a week later:

"Your girls got put in a Nuc box on Friday morning and they had already drawn a 4-inch comb from the lid, just sitting in the box for 15 hours.

So did I get Betty? I checked yesterday and there was already capped brood in the Nuc. She must have started laying the Friday I put her in. If it wasn’t Betty, it sure was a mated queen and not a virgin leaving in an after swarm.

One of my hives has a very spotty brood pattern and a failing queen so I am going to put the swarm bees in that hive after I remove the bad queen."

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

This week we pulled the drone frame from Betty and were astonished to find at least 5 queen cells on the drone comb. You can see one of the queen cells in the left of this photo—it’s the long cell hanging from the comb face. If you look closely, you can see that the cap at the bottom has been chewed through to form a little escape hatch. That queen mostly likely emerged successfully on her own by chewing her way out. In fact, it looked like all the queens from that frame emerged successfully, which no doubt spurred our week of swarms.

We had waited the 28 days Randy Oliver recommends for mite trapping, so that we'd be able to kill the drones before they emerged (and in doing so, kill their varroa mites). It was clearly too long to wait.

The hive was filled with drones. Not drones sleeping soundly in their cells, mind you, but lumbering big-butt drones stomping around the frame like it was some kind of testosterone-infused honey-scented male spa. At the right of the photo above you can see one of the drones muscling his way out of a cell. Brute.

The drone frame was filled with empty used cells, and more drones were emerging as we inspected the comb. We froze those bad boys, along with their mite load. We made a note to pull the drone frame a few days earlier next time. (I know, this seems cruel, but beekeeping is not all sweetness and honey.)

The rest of the frames are full of capped brood, and the bees act like they’re queenright (meaning they have a mated queen): calm and productive. In turning a frame over to look at it, a big chunk of brood fell off the foundation (Brianne, shocked, is holding the chunk). We stuck it back on, but we’re not sure the brood will survive.

At the bottom of the frame, you can see yet another queen cell. We don't think this one currently houses a virgin queen. But if it does, and if the hive already has a mated queen, she’ll likely chew through the side of the cell and kill her virgin competition.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

I am so relieved. So far SIX of the garbanzo beans I sowed in the ground have germinated. That's not a great count considering I probably sowed 50 but I'm still pleased because more might very well be on their way.

Here they are, doused in Sluggo because last night was their very first night without floating row cover, and I was so scared that the slugs would devour them. Sluggo was a quick fix as I ran out the door last night, but there are heaps of less-expensive and less-manufactured solutions.

We were incredibly lucky to be able to harvest all of our winter crops at the same time. It'll be a bit more of a challenge with these crops, but I think we'll be able to pull it off with one major exception - the garbanzo beans. While they need cool soil to germinate, they also need a very long, warm growing season of around 120 days. We'll have to wait for summer to enjoy them.

The fava beans are almost ready (as they were originally planted last fall as cover crop). Some of the radishes are also ready (so speedy!). I can sow another succession of radishes before the weather gets too warm, but we've still got a ways to go on the other crops.

 

In order to eat everything as one big feast, we will likely be having baby beets, carrots, and scallions. But that's ok, we'll just say they're gourmet.