By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

Nothing like a predatory bird to liven things up!

Today we spotted a hawk eating a squirrel on the main lawn. Jim was glad it was a squirrel and not a chicken (actually, Jim wanted nothing to do with today's events. He doesn't do so well with blood and guts). I'm all for hawks controlling the squirrel population. They are they only major pest I've had trouble with in the test garden over the last two growing seasons -- they decimated Team Beer's wheat and snatched some of the baby butternut squash from the vine. Bon appétit, hawk!

Here's my pick for a last-minute gift: Novella Carpenter's Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (The Penguin Press, $25.95). Of all the local-eating guides and tales that have been published this year, hers is still my favorite. 

With total honesty, she recounts the story of how she set up an actual subsistence farm in her dodgy Oakland neighborhood, complete with crops growing in the abandoned lot next to her house, a beehive on the deck, and turkeys, ducks, and chickens in the tiny yard—along with rabbits and two voracious pigs. (Because they can't really afford sacks and sacks of pig chow, she and her boyfriend, wearing headlight helmets, dumpster-dive at night to bring them food.) She manages to keep them alive, too, unlike her predecessor-in-prose, Manny Howard, who inadvertently killed off most of his livestock in his Brooklyn backyard a few years ago.

The book is extremely funny and well written, but what I love most about it is its compassion and its fearlessness. Novella lets homeless people harvest from the garden--in fact, it makes her feel good. She butchers ducks and rabbits for dinner (the pigs she sends off to be dispatched, given their sheer strength), and when her turkey Maude somehow flies into the car yard behind the house and into the jaws of two guard dogs, she scales a razor-wire-topped fence to try to rescue her. (Sadly, the turkey doesn't make it, but Novella gets away unharmed.) One night, biking through an especially dicey area where she gathers weeds for her chickens, she runs into a gang of young kids--one of whom points a gun at her--and delivers a "strange oration, which at its heart was motherly." She tells him, "You have to be careful...I care about you. Please be careful or you'll wind up dead." He walks away, and all she can think about is not her own mortality or desire for revenge but the "stupidity and injustice in this world, the cycles of violence that seem they will never end, and my inability to change anything."

Anyone reading this book can see that it's people like Novella Carpenter, courageous and unsentimental and fiercely energetic, who actually do change things.

by Rick LaFrentz    Team Beer.

That is the question that the team contemplated when deciding what style of beer to next create. Our first attempt produced a beer that would be considered a white beer sans the traditional spices of a true white beer beer popular in Belgium.

When we malted the barley and wheat grain from our first shot at brewing we did no roasting to the grain except dry it in an oven at a fairly low temperature. This gave us an extremely light color in our finished beer, and when I say light color, I'm talking about a shade or two lighter then the mass-market beers popular with the American public. This time we decided to create a beer with a dark color and a roasted-toasted flavor.

The higher the temperature you roast grain, the darker the color of the finished product. The color of grain used for brewing is measured with a system developed by J.W. Lovibond in 1883 and is appropriately called the Lovibond Scale. The grain color is measured in degrees lovibond, the lighter color being 2 degrees and the highest and darkest color being 580 degrees, which is popularly called roasted. Coincidently, the higher the Lovibond number the more aggressive the roasted-toasted flavor appears in the finished beer.  

Some examples would be Miller or Pabst produced with extremely low Lovibond degree grain and on the opposite side of the scale would be Guinness with a rating on the highest level.

We wanted to produce a beer that had a pronounced toasted flavor so we set aside a very small portion of our total malted grain to achieve this goal. Team beer had 13.5 pounds of grain, mostly barley, to make this batch and roasted only about 1/2 pound.

One word of caution if you are going to attempt to make a dark, high Lovibond grain, don't roast over a pound of grain, for a 5 gallon batch, because too much may produce a grainy, bitter taste to your finished beer and roast the grain OUTSIDE. This type of roast will create a huge amount of smoke so if you don't mind repainting the interior of your house feel free to do it in your kitchen. The paint store will love you and you will be helping the stressed economy.

The hops that we had been growing for the last two years rewarded us with an incredible bounty so we were excited about adding them to this batch of beer. Because of the variety we had chosen to grow, Nuggets, we knew that genetically the alpha acids, which provide the bitterness to hops, were going to be fairly high so we either had to add a limited amount of hops or we had to create a beer that would be higher in unfermentable sugars. The unfermentable sugars will not ferment into alcohol, so now we can create a beer that will have a fuller body. A fuller body and a higher alpha acid hop combination should reward us with a balanced beer, at least it looks good on paper.

Again, as with our first batch, we were fortunate enough to recruit Chuck Schwalbach, the husband of Diane Schwalbach, one of our co-workers. Chuck, a product design engineer at Apple, has an incredible knowledge of brewing and a vast array of brewing equipment. I think it's a prerequisite that all engineers must procure the latest equipment available to complete a task.

When the team made our first batch of beer last year we crushed our barley-wheat combination about a month prior to making the beer. This time, Chuck suggested that we crush the grain minutes before we start to brew thinking that it would provide a fresher flavor, plus he had the equipment  to make the process flow a lot smoother. Crushing the grain for our first batch was with a hand crank meat grinder which made the job very tedious and the grind inconsistant. The grain mill that Chuck brought utilized a power drill, as the energy source to rotate the grain rollers, which produced a more consistent grind.

The following are the statistics that we came up with in the production of this batch of beer. For some of you this will be interesting, for others, well.

The photo on the left is Chuck and Alan milling the grain

As stated the total weight of the grain used for mashing was 13.5 pounds. Wheat made up 3.9 pounds of the total weight We chose to use a small potion of wheat because it will produce a nice frothy head when pouring and and it adds a different demension to the finished beer.

Of the remaining barley, we set aside 8 ounces to roast over mesquite charcoal on a barbaque. The finished roast could be compared to a pale chocolate malt. The roasted grains were not one uniforn color but a range of various shades.

After the grains were mixed together and milled, Chuck took a temperature reading of the grain, 68.1 degress, so that we could calculate what water temperature,174.5 degrees, we would need to add to our grain to achieve a mashing temperature of 154 degrees. A mashing temperature of 152 degrees would have provided us with more fermentable sugar but we formulated a recipe that would give us a wee bit more body, thus a
higher mashing temperature.

Pictured above is the roasted pale choclate malt.

We mashed the grain for 1 hour and 15 mintes using 1 quart of water for every pound of grain. For the sparge, we used 4.4 gallons of water.The addition of hops was interspersed at various intervals. At the start of the boil we introduced 1 ounce of hops followed by an addition of a 1/2 ounce at mid boil and a final addition of an ounce at 15 minutes before the end of the boil.

When the boil had reached completion, Chuck brought out his heat exchanger, which allows us to chill the boiling wort to yeast pitching temperature  within 5 minutes. We're talking about going form 212 degrees to 75 degrees in a matter of minutes. Amazing! In this case yeast was pitched at 75 degrees.

The faster you can achieve fermentation the faster your sugars are converted into alcohol. Bacteria love the sugars as a food source but once they are converted into alcohol, you deminish the chances for infection. This phase of the brewing process is the most vulnerable to infection.

We used liquid yeast for fermentation. This type of yeast is generally more pure and you have more strains to choose from when developing your beer. In this case it was Northwest Ale, which had a fermentation range of 65 to 75 degrees. This yeast will supply a malty and mildly fruity character with depth and complexity. Our enviorment gave us a constant temperature of 75 degrees to achieve fermentation.

The starting specific gravity was 1048 degrees, so we estimated that our potential alcohol content could be 6 percent . The finished gravity was 1010 degrees, which in reality made our finished alcohol content 5 percent.

Fermentation started in a little over 24 hours after we introduced the yeast. We racked the beer a couple of times to remove it off of the spent trub and bottled the beer 2 1/2 weeks later. Our next task is to open a couple of bottles and make a thorough analysis of our endeavor.. To be continued....

by Rick LaFrentz, Sunset grounds manager

Just as there are Deadheads who follow the Grateful Dead, Parrot Heads who have a fondness for Jimmy Buffet, potheads who—well, if I have to explain...

There are also hop-heads, who have a great affection for hops.

I was amazed to find on the Internet how many home brew clubs throughout the country call themselves the Hop Heads. Interestingly, hop-heads and potheads have something in common. Hops, Humulus lupulus, and hemp, Cannabis sativa, both belong to the plant family Cannabaceae. Small world, isn't it?

Hops add balance and complexities to beer. They contain alpha acids, which add bitterness. Some varieties of hops have low alpha acids and thus add a subtle nuance to beer; those with high alphas have a much more pronounced presence. Beers with an evident malt flavor require a hop with a lower alpha content to let that style show, and your India pale ale styles require a hop with a higher alpha content.

The first recorded reference to hops was by Pliny the Elder, who died in 79 AD, so hops have been around for quite some time. The first documentation of hop cultivation was in 736.

Sunset's own hop-heads—hop harvesters, anyway—Stephanie Dean, Alan Phinney and Margo True gathered to harvest our homegrown 'Nugget' hops. I tagged along for support and to take photographs.

'Nugget' hops are known for their high alpha acid content so they are a good candidate for making a bitter beer or for adding balance to a beer with a lot of body. They are also known for their herbal, somewhat spicy aroma and flavor.

Pictured above is managing editor Alan Phinney gathering hops and doing a balancing act on the upper steps of an 8-foot ladder. Don't let OSHA catch you doing this.

Below are food editor Margo True and Test Kitchen manager Stephanie Dean diligently cutting the 'Nugget' flowers from the vines. When you have to harvest by hand it takes a great deal of concentration and precision.

We applied a couple of methods to test the hops to make sure they were mature enough to harvest. One method is to press and release a hop flower to see if it will spring back after compressing. If it does, it's ready to pick. Another test is to cut a flower in half lengthwise to view the color of the lupilins, the bittering compounds found at the base of each flower bract. If the color is a golden yellow, it's ready. You can also taste the lupilins to see if they have a distinct bitter taste on your tongue. In the case of our 'Nugget' hops, there was a very distinct bitterness so we knew that we were well on our way to harvesting the crop. You also want to pick the hops while they had a green color and not when they were tan or brown.

Because Alan is the tallest of the team, we pinned him to pick the hops on the upper part of the vines, and I might add that he did a meticulous job, considering that he was standing near the top of an 8-foot ladder. Stephanie and Margo, with their feet planted firmly on the ground, harvested the lower growing hops.

Our total bounty was about a pound. When you consider that between 2 to 3 ounces are used per 5-gallons of beer, we have the potential for one hell of a Christmas party.

Here are a portion of the hops that we harvested. Notice that the color is a fresh green. Try to harvest your hops when they are this color.

Next: drying the hops.

We concocted a drying bed, a 2-foot wide by a 4-foot long frame made of 2-by-4s with a fine mesh screen nailed to the bottom. The frame is set on bricks placed in each corner to keep it off the ground and letting air circulate underneath. We put newspapers under the frame to catch debris, then placed the hops on the screen and spread them out in a single layer. After about a week of drying we used a seal-a-meal machine to bag 2-ounce increments. The advantage to this machine is that it draws excess air out of the bags while it seals so you can retain a longer storage time. I personally have placed purchased hops in Ziploc bags and set them in the refrigerator to store, but after time air always finds a way to enter the bags and impede the freshness of the hops.

In a few weeks Team Beer will be making our next batch of beer using our first harvest of 'Nugget' hops!

If you are interested in growing your own hops you'll have to wait until spring when the new hop rhizomes hit your local home brew store. They are also available online at a variety of home brew supply sites. You should research in advance what type of hops you would like to grow. Do your homework as to what hops will grow best for you. Some varieties tend to sell out faster then others; be diligent with your research and timing.

Some advice: You will get very little hop production the first year after you plant your rhizomes. This is what we anticipated and it held true. The first year our 'Nugget' produced virtually no flowers and the hops that did develop were covered in mildew and virtually useless. This year, as I stated, we had a very bountiful harvest. You also need to consider a place where the hops can grow. Hops are a vining plant so be sure to have some form of trellis or pole for them to grow upon.

This is a hop flower that has been cut in half. Notice the golden color of the lupilins, the bittering agents of the hop flower.

Good luck all of you hop-heads out there who are interested in trying your luck at growing your own.

Don't miss: This weekend is the annual Great American Beer Festival in Denver, which has caught on in popularity since its inception in 1982 when there were 22 breweries present. Last year there 432 breweries with a total attendance of 46,000. This is the Holy Grail for hop-heads.

by Rick La Frentz, Sunset beerless leader

While team beer contemplates what style of brew to produce for the next One Block Feast, we are anxiously following the development of our hops that we planted last year. As we expected, the first year we achieved very little hop production but an abundance of plant growth. This year is quite a different story. There are plenty of hop flowers developing on the vines, so many in fact that we may have to get inventive with the left over bounty. We are currently growing 2 varieties of hops, 'Nugget' and 'Centennial'. Both are excellent choices for our climate. 

It was the Romans who first used hops but it was as a food source. Apparently they used the new tender shoots and leaves in salads. On their conquest to the north they introduced hops to England, and in the mid-fourteenth century there was mention of hops being used in beer. Hops were introduced to the United States from England in 1629. Prior to that, in place of hops, beer was made with herbs and spices producing a drink called gruit. If you think some of the beers on the market today are bad, you can imagine what this stuff must have tasted like. Whoever introduced hops to beer for the first time found that there were a preserving quality to the addition. Prior to that the gruit didn't have much of a shelf life and would readily spoil. good example of hops used as a preservative is the India Pale Ale. When the British shipped beer to the colonists in India, they would add extra hops to the casks of beer to preserve the flavor for the long journey. The beer would achieve an extra hop aroma and bitterness but would not spoil, thus the origin of today’s IPAs.

Fibers from the hop vines were used as a flax substitute and also used to make baskets. The young shoots can be eaten as a boiled vegetable. The spent hops used in the brewing process are used as a food source for sheep, and then there is the insomniac's dream: the hop pillow.

Of our two hop plants, the 'Nugget' is performing best. After doing some research on how to manage our plants when the rhizomes started to produce shoots or bines, I decided to remove all but five of the shoots from our 'Centennial' hop plant, of which there were many. Apparently this is supposed to eliminate a lot of unwanted growth and make it easier to harvest our bounty. Also, the source said to remove the bottom leaves off of the stems a couple of feet above the ground to help prevent the spread of disease like downy mildew and insect pests. Well, as the photograph shows, something went terribly wrong because we lost most of the plant to some sort of die back; perhaps verticillium wilt. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. The 'Nugget', which we didn’t tinker with, is thriving beautifully and will be the hop used in our next beer.

When we planted our hop rhizomes there was a wire grid attached to the fence behind our planting area which provided us with a structure for the plants to climb up. On each end of the grid we attached a round wooden pole that extended about 7 feet higher then the fence. We secured several eye screws to the poles at 1-foot intervals and ran wire from one post to the other. This gave us plenty of room for the hops to grow upward. Hop vines climb in a clockwise manner and can grow as high as 40 feet. “Feed me Seymour”.

The vast majority of hops on the market today are grown in the Yakima Valley in Washington State and the production of beer uses 98 percent of the world’s hops. Hops are added to beer to achieve flavor, aroma, to help with the preservation of the beer and to add a balance to the malt flavor. Some of the flavors and aromas that are expressed by hops are flowery, spicy, grapefruit, citrus, pungent and woody. When making our beer we prefer to add whole hops to our boil so that when they move through the wort the bracts that make up the hop flower will pick up proteins that may cloud our final product plus whole hop flowers are easier to remove through filtering.

Hops are measured in bittering units called Alpha Acid. Though all hops have a distinct flavor and aroma they all contain a product called lupulin that basically are very small yellow balls of resin located at the base of hop flower bracts. The alpha acids in the resin contribute to the bitterness of beer. The lupulins vary in color from a pale to a deep yellow. Nuggets tend to have alpha acids in the 10 to 14 % range, which is on the high, bitter end. They will provide a spicy herbal quality to beer.

Lupulins

Hops in wort

As with anything there is a great deal of chemistry involved in the breakdown of hops in the brewing process. Hops create a sedative value, humulone and lupulone (chemicals found in hops) have anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties and help to preserve beer. They are also said to produce a calming effect. Heck, I always thought it was the alcohol.

If you are interested in trying to grow your own hops you can purchase the rhizomes (roots) in the spring. Pay a visit to your local brewing supply store and they can set you up, but you might find more variety shopping online. Perhaps you might know someone who is presently growing hops who would give you a root cutting in the dormant season. Hops rhizomes should be thinned annually to avoid excess plant growth the following year.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Hank Shaw in his garden, in front of a gigantic cardoon.

Handmade boar salami....home-cured olives...wine grown in the back yard....fat, juicy venison sausages.

We ate this—and much, much more—on Saturday at the home of Hank Shaw, a political writer, and his partner, Holly Heyser, a journalism professor at Sacramento State.

Hank was also nominated for the James Beard blog award this year. We shared a table with him and Holly and his mom at the awards ceremony in New York back in May, and really enjoyed their company and like-mindedness. Hank writes fascinating accounts of making food from scratch, which in his case involves hunting and fishing as well as gardening. Holly grew up hunting in Minnesota and has a blog of her own about, as she says, "acquiring food the hard way."

Talk about a gracious guy. Even though he lost to us, he invited us to a cookout at his place on the east side of Sacramento. 

Dinner fell on what turned out to be a fearsomely scorching day in his neighborhood—as in, 108 F°. Nonetheless, a small group of us One-Blockers left our cool coastal habitat behind, lured by his promise of wild game.

A Wild Feast

The minute we walked in the door, Hank had his homemade and very respectable sangiovese ready for pouring, and a glistening array of things to eat:

* Good home-cured olives, which I found impressive since we've tried to make them ourselves, without success (yet!)
* Hank's own pickled beets, carrots, and sunchokes
* Totally delicious shad rillettes—a sort of loose pâté, traditionally made with pork or rabbit but here with  tasty local shad that Hank caught with his dad recently on the American River. I had no idea that shad existed in the West. I thought they were strictly an East Coast species. Now I'm hankering to catch some shad myself. (Their roe are particularly amazing, fyi.)
* Excellent saucisson sec, a dry salami from a wild boar Hank bagged in Monterey County. Secret ingredient: 1974 Heitz Cellars Angelica, made from Mission grapes. This fortified wine was the first wine made in California back in the 1700s.
* Lonzino, air-cured from the loin of above boar—more delicate and thinly sliced, so it looked like rose petals
* Fennel- and ouzo-cured salmon, made with an Alaskan pink salmon caught by one of Hank's friends

Bear in mind, these were just the appetizers. I hadn't seen snacks so hefty since my New Year's in Moscow, when I noshed on an enormous spread of zakuski.

After a fully appreciating all that was on the table, we presented Hank with a couple of just-baked fruit pies, plus gifts from the One-Block Diet: last year's honey from hive Veronica and this spring's honey from Midge, plus a bottle of red-wine vinegar and some fresh eggs from the flock.

Then he took us on a tour of their abode.

The Tour

The first guided look-around of a person's house is always fun, isn't it? It's especially interesting when the place is full of strange and quirky stuff. Hank and Holly live in that kind of house, and seeing how Hank makes his food only increased our pleasure in eating it.

Hank's homemade wine, hanging out with the books.
Each carboy holds one varietal; included here are
Tempranillo, Sangiovese, and deep, dark
Portuguese Touriga.The two tiny carboys in back are
Zinfandel, which Hank made from his own grapes
(the rest used grapes he bought).

The garden, where Hank grows everything from beets
to heat-resistant romaine to salsify. 

It occupies a chunk of their 1/4-acre back yard,
but there's plenty of space to grow more stuff. We
semi-seriously suggested he try growing wheat—
since he actually has the space for it.

A few of Hank's vines (I think these are mainly Zinfandel).
More grapes grow against a far wall.

In the garage, garden zucchini dry on a rack.
Several ripe figs were set out to dry on a work
surface nearby.

And best of all...

The "curing fridge"—a battered but useful appliance
in the garage, equipped with a thermostat control
and a teeny humidifier (at bottom right).

Hank at the grill while we gab under the tree.

Hank slowly and tenderly grilled a slew of those venison sausages until they were shiny, taut, and on the verge of bursting. The rest of us sat around under the big shady tree just beyond and gabbed for a while.

The Dinner

We went indoors—merciful air conditioning!—and feasted on those sausages, stuffed into giant buns with homemade pickles; firm, meaty marinated octopus liberally seasoned with paprika; two pasta salads—one with the couscous-like Sardinian pasta called fregola, studded with bocconcini (tiny fresh mozzarella balls), and the other with barley and sundried tomatoes—and a lovely, simple little beet salad with feta cheese and lovage. So much care and generosity went into this dinner. Hank even made the paprika. As in, he grew the peppers, dried them, and ground them. Having made our own salt, we knew this wasn't as crazy as it sounds. These kinds of things are worth doing, if for no other reason that it makes you really, really appreciate paprika and salt.

Hank served his honey lemon-verbena ice cream, I cut up the pies, and we chewed our last bites in a semi-stupor. Hank brought out some little glasses filled with that precious 1974 Heitz Angelica, which tasted surprisingly similar to Italian nocino, a walnut liqueur. Delicious. 

Then Hank and Holly, pied pipers that they are, ushered us into what they proudly call their Opium Den. It's a library with deep pink walls, a comfy sofa, a fireplace, and a mantle adorned with bare skulls of past game. As we sank into the sofa, Hank plied us with homemade absinthe. Yow. You could practically see the fumes emerging from our lips as we tried it. It only took a couple of sips to finish us off.

We eased into our cars and drove home, sated from head to toe and marveling at all that Hank and Holly do. Before we left, they accepted our invitation to munch freshly baked pizzas from our brand-new wood-fired oven, topped, naturally, with whatever will be ripest and most flavorful in the One-Block garden. Coming soon.

UPDATE: Here's what Hank wrote about the evening (and you can see the food he made, too).

By Elaine Johnson, Sunset associate food editor

Photos by Kimberley Burch, Elaine Johnson, and Margo True

We have a tough job here. Really. Well, maybe not so tough. We just raised our glasses to the spring harvest with a beautiful lunch featuring our own produce, eggs, Chardonnay, beer, and honey. Team Kitchen did the cooking.

Test kitchen coordinator Stephanie Dean and recipe editor Amy Machnak put the finishing touches on the table. In front, you can see Grilled carrots and green onions with fresh thyme.

 

 

We started with Favas and ricotta on homemade wheat crackers and Radishes with fresh butter and sea salt.

Art director Jim McCann and test garden coordinator Johanna Silver try the crackers.

 

That’s me in the middle sampling the Sunset Chardonnay. It’s really mellowed from the crisp green-apple character it was showing last summer. Now it’s a lovely, full aromatic white. (In fact, wine editor Sara Schneider is scheming to slip it into our upcoming Western Wine Awards to see how it fares.) Photo director Yvonne Stender is on the right. She and Johanna (on the left) might be making faces about the beer. Still bad news, like Crayola crayons. Noble effort, though.

 

Managing editor Alan Phinney, associate garden editor Julie Chair (left), and Sara Jamison liked the wine, too.

We sat down to a table of pinks and greens. The Strawberry-honey lemonade (the pink drink in the glasses) was so refreshing. Plus, the color matched Johanna’s garden flowers.

The bulls-eye Chioggia beets looked stunning on the mesclun salad.

 

We also feasted on Spring greens quiche (made this time with spinach, but also delicious with sautéed fava leaves) and Grilled carrots and green onions with fresh thyme.

 

For dessert, another taste of spring: Fromage blanc with strawberries and lemon honey.

It’s incredibly satisfying to eat good food that you’ve raised and cooked yourself.

Here’s the recipe for the lemonade. We’ll try to catch you up on the rest of the recipes in Sunset or in a future blog. Happy spring!

Strawberry lemonade

MAKES About 2 quarts

1 qt. strawberries
¾ cup honey
1 cup fresh lemon juice (from 5 to 6 lemons)
Ice

Whirl strawberries and honey in a blender until puréed. Pour through a fine strainer set over a bowl, rubbing to extract liquid; discard seeds. Stir in lemon juice and 1 qt. water. Pour over glasses filled halfway with ice.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Last Sunday, Erika Ehmsen, Johanna Silver, Amy Machnak, and I sat in a darkened theater at the Millennium Broadway Hotel, nerves tingling. As some of you know, we'd been nominated—along with fellow one-block-diet bloggers Elizabeth Jardina, Rick LaFrentz, and Margaret Sloan—for a James Beard Journalism award.

Since we were sitting at a table near the exit sign, way way at the back, I was sure we wouldn't win. After all, no one would put us here if we were actually meant to get to the stage in any reasonable amount of time. I gently suggested that everyone just relax and enjoy dinner and give up the dream of winning an award.

So we did, and got to know our tablemates—fellow nominee Hank Shaw; his wife, Holly; and his lovely mother--all come from Sacramento. Hank writes a very entertaining, knowledgeable, pull-no-punches blog called Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. Like us, he's trying to show how possible it is for you to make your own food — from scratch. He tends to hunt and forage, we tend to garden and make wine, but the intention is very much the same. We felt glad to be sharing our table with a kindred spirit.

Then Kelly Choi, announcing the winners for the award ahead of ours (for Audio Webcast or Radio Show), accidentally opened the wrong envelope. "Erika Ehmsen, Elizabeth..." Oh, my lord. She'd flubbed, but we knew we'd won. Whoever got the Audio Webcast award, well, sorry, dude, our screaming completely drowned out your moment. Then we ran to the stage. (Ok, Erika walked. She's pregnant and wise.)

Hank Shaw's mother very kindly took this picture of us accepting our award:

 

Left to right: Johanna, me, Amy, and Erika, beside ourselves with joy.

And moments later, in the lobby:

Courtesy Hanna Lee

The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur. Some very fine journalists won awards, including the multiple James-Beard award winner Alan Richman, of GQ magazine, and we cheered them all. For the full list, click here. Erika, bless her, was Tweeting like mad the entire time.

The next night, we put on our fanciest duds and went to the chef awards, at Lincoln Center. What a scene. We were quietly ushered around the red carpet, ah well. Amy's shoes deserved to have a prance before the papparazzi!

Amy's shoes. Actually, she had to mince, not prance.

The awards ceremony, which this year honored Women in Food, lasted three and a half hours, and although many deserving (and terrific) chefs won (including San Francisco's Nate Appleman and Maria Hines of Seattle), we were as famished as wolves by the time it was over. We dashed out and devoured tidbits put out by some of the top female chefs in the country (my favorite: Anita Lo's steak tartare with anchovy broth).

It was Quite a Scene. Besides the best and most celebrated chefs in the country, we spotted Salman Rushdie (we unabashedly had our pictures taken with him, on a camera that, alas, was lost at JFK).

Amy, Johanna, and me in the thick of it.                                   Top Chef Jeff McInnis and Erika.              

We had a very, very good time, piling happily into taxis for an after-party at Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton's tiny, excellent, jewel of a restaurant down in the East Village. (She'd been nominated for Best Chef New York City.) Gabrielle makes the best hamburgers EVER, intensely flavorful and so juicy they squirt.

I remember the clock saying 3:30 when I closed my eyes.

--------

Now, back we are at Sunset with all of us winners together, in front of the crazy-tall hops that we'll be using in an upcoming batch of beer:

Left to right, Sunset's Beard-winning bloggers: Elizabeth Jardina (with Honey), Rick LaFrentz, Amy Machnak, me (with Ophelia), Johanna Silver, Margaret Sloan, and Erika Ehmsen.

and because they were part of it too...the very patient Honey and Ophelia, representing the coop:

:

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

We’re looking over a four-leaf clover that Chicago’s French Pastry School sent to wish us luck at this Sunday’s James Beard Foundation Awards. (Thanks, guys!) Four of us are headed to New York for the ceremony, and we’re excited and nervous—and not just about what to wear!

Our One-Block project is in great company in the Best Food Blog category: Our fellow nominees are Bon Appétit columnist Andrew Knowlton’s The BA Foodist and Sacramento omnivore Hank Shaw’s Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, which takes locavore to a near-complete DIY level. We’re looking forward to swapping stories with Shaw, Knowlton, and all of the other food and wine writers we’ll be meeting this weekend.

Want to hear who we’re talking to and find out if we win? We’ll be posting live updates from the Media Awards ceremony on Sunset’s Twitter page. Sign up to follow us by clicking here—it’s free, easy, fun, and admittedly a bit addictive. Wish us luck, and see you on the Interweb!

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 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.     

Excuse us while we do a little crowing.

We've been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award! Yes, this very blog.

The category is: Blog Focusing on Food, Beverage, Restaurants, or Nutrition. (Yep, that sounds like us.) The winner will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on May 3.

And this is right on the heels of the news that our One-Block Feast story from August '08 was nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals award.

Spring is feeling very springy indeed.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Good news! Our print story last August about our summer one-block feast, We Had a Dream, has been nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) journalism award.

To read our story, click here.

We're thrilled about the nomination, since the IACP has thousands of members—and other nominees include such food-magazine luminaries as Gourmet, Saveur, and Food & Wine. The winners of the awards will be announced at a gala ceremony in Denver on April 4.

We'll let you know how we do!

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

We began with salad, wheatberry ciabatta, and homemade butter.

Our winter feast started with a happy accident.

Back in September, Team Kitchen and Team Garden drew up a list of cool-season crops that would do well in our area, and planned a menu around it. First we'd have a salad of Belgian endive and escarole, with a fresh poached egg on top and croutons from extremely homemade wheat bread (as in, we grew the wheat and ground it).

Well, the endive never sprouted. And we couldn't find escarole seeds. Who knew there'd be a run on escarole seeds?

Moral: Be flexible. Johanna, our test garden coordinator, had also planted some red butterhead lettuce and arugula, so Team Kitchen adapted.

It was easy; the lettuces were beautiful. We hardcooked the egg instead of poaching it, because a liquidy poached yolk, great on crisp endive and escarole, would've turned the tender lettuces into a sticky clump. We added small chunks of sweet, juicy tangerines from our tree, garlic-rubbed croutons, and a vinaigrette made with tangerine juice, our olive oil, and sea salt.

Red butterhead lettuce and arugula salad with tangerines and hard-cooked eggs.

We had plenty of wine to go with the food. The Syrah was in bottle at last and had recovered from its bottle-shock; it was back to its original blackberry suaveness. The Chardonnay still tasted fine—like a crisp green apple.

Sunset Chardonnay and Syrah, left; right, wine editor Sara Schneider sips the white as managing editor Alan Phinney tears off a chunk of ciabatta.

The stunning brassicas from the garden—cauliflower, broccoli romanesco, Savoy cabbage, kale, broccoli rabe, mustard greens—gave us our main courses: a winter vegetable chowder and spicy braised greens with preserved lemon.

Winter vegetable chowder. On top: yellow broccoli rabe flowers and purple rosemary blooms. 

Braised Savoy cabbage, mustard greens, and
Tuscan kale with preserved lemon and chile.

The broccoli romanesco was so beautiful and strange that we used it as decor, too.

SO WHERE ARE THE RECIPES?

They and the story of how we raised the ingredients for this winter menu will be showing up in larger form at some point in the months ahead.

For now, please have some salad. It's hearty enough to eat when it's cold, but bright and lively, too—which suits our California March, the month when winter slides into spring.

Red Butterhead Lettuce and Arugula Salad with Tangerines and Hard-Cooked Eggs

MAKES 6 to 8 servings TIME About 1 hour

We used our own chickens’ eggs, but we let them sit in the fridge for at least a week to let the air pocket inside each shell expand and make the eggs easier to peel.

6 to 8 eggs (not super-fresh)
2 tsp. fresh tangerine juice
1/2 tsp. each finely grated tangerine zest and sea salt
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided
3 to 4 thin slices wheatberry ciabatta or other whole wheat bread,
     cut into 1/2-in. dice (about 1 1/2 cups)
2 cloves garlic, mashed to a paste with 1/4 tsp. sea salt
5 loosely packed cups arugula leaves
6 loosely packed cups red butterhead lettuce leaves
     (about 1/2 small head)
2 large or 4 small tangerines

1. Preheat oven to 400°. Put eggs in a small pot and cover with about 1 in. of water. Bring to a boil; immediately lower heat to a simmer and cook 10 minutes. When eggs are finished, transfer to ice water; let cool 1 minute. Crack eggs all over on counter and return to ice water for 5 minutes. Peel under cold water. Set aside.
2. Meanwhile, whisk tangerine juice, zest, and salt together in a small bowl. Whisk in 1/4 cup olive oil. Set aside.
3. In a heatproof cup, microwave remaining 1/4 cup olive oil with mashed garlic for 10 seconds. Put bread cubes on a baking pan and drizzle with garlic oil, tossing to coat. Spread in a single layer and bake about 15 minutes, or until crisp, stirring once or twice. Set aside.
4. Rinse greens and dry twice in a salad spinner. Peel tangerines and remove thready white pith; then cut fruit crosswise into chunks, removing any seeds.
5. In a large bowl, toss greens gently but thoroughly with only enough dressing to coat. Add tangerines and croutons and toss just to mix. Divide salad among plates. Add a quartered egg to each plate and drizzle eggs with a little more dressing. Or pile it all on a platter if you like, so people can help themselves.

By Rick LaFrentz, Beerless Leader

Here's what went into our beer: Hops (the green flowers in front); yeast (in the vial); and bags of malted (i.e. sprouted) wheat and barley. The dark bag in the center is Irish moss, a seaweed, to help cleanse the brew of cloudy proteins; the white powder in the right foreground is food-grade gypsum, to harden the water.

WILL A YEAR'S WORTH OF EFFORT PAY OFF?

Last weekend, Team Beer (Editorial Services Coordinator Stephanie Dean, Managing Editor Alan Phinney, brewing genius Chuck Schwalbach—husband of our Manufacturing Associate Manager, Diane Schwalbach—and yours truly) finally brewed the beer we have been formulating for the past year for our one-block feasts. Oh, and one innocent bystander, Food Editor Margo True.

From planting wheat, barley, and hops last spring to harvesting the grains, threshing and malting them, and then, several days ago, to boiling them with the hops, we are almost home.

The part of this process that brought the most procrastination was the threshing (loosening the seed from the scaly chaff) and winnowing (removing the seed from the chaff). We actually ended up with only 3 pounds of grain, but any more than that and we would have been on disability with eye strain and hand cramps.

Chuck, unlike the rest of the team, had experience in making beer from grain (rather than from extracts sold as part of a beer-making kit), so he was our savior with his knowledge and all of his equipment (two converted Gatorade coolers, a large stockpot with a spigot, and a chilling unit, purchased from San Francisco BrewCraft and MoreBeer.com.

The total amount of grain we malted: about 9.5 pounds of barley and 6 pounds of wheat. We decided to use Belgium Abbey yeast because it tends to be more tolerant of high alcohol, and not knowing how effective we’d been with the malting process, we wanted to be prepared. (If the grains had fully malted, they'd yield lots of sugars--the food for fermentation.)

Chuck, a mechanical engineer for Apple, brought his laptop and used a program designed for brewing with grain, so everything was down to a science.

Left: Chuck with his gear (one of the stockpots is mine; the rest is his). Right: Chuck's cool calculations.

HOW WE MADE BEER FROM GRAIN

1. Mashing. We heated up a big metal stockpot filled with water (1 quart for each pound of grain) and then poured it into one of Chuck’s converted Gatorade coolers, the one fitted with a mesh bottom to keep the grains from clogging the spigot. Once we got it to the specific temperature needed (172° F), we added our grain and mixed well.

Stirring the grains.

At this point the mash temperature decreased to 152 degrees. This is the ideal temperature for grain to convert its starches to sugar for fermentation. A series of chemical changes take place at this time, and if I could fully understand them, my head would explode.

We held the mash for 90 minutes, which was enough time for the conversion to take place.

2. Sparging. Toward the end of the mashing, Chuck heated up another giant stockpot of water, added some food-grade gypsum (which hardens the water and forces proteins to drop out, so they don’t cloud the beer), and hoisted it up on top of a tall stove so it would be elevated. He attached tubing to its spigot and let the water (also 172° F) flow down into a sparger—a water-dispenser—set over the mash pot. The point of sparging, as this process is called, is to rinse off the residual sugar that adheres to the grain during the mash. We sparged the grain for about 20 minutes.

Left: Hot water flows into the sparger, the space-station lookalike set over the mash pot. Right: The sparger dispenses water through its central tube very evenly and slowly, keeping the water level constant.

At the same time, we attached tubing to the mash pot’s spigot and let the wort—the sweet brown liquid now full of grain extract—flow into the first, now empty stockpot.

Left: Hot water on top, sparger and mash in the middle, and wort below. Above: Fresh wort.

3. Boiling.
The wort now had to boil for 90 minutes. During the boil, we added whole hops at various stages to impart flavor and aroma. (This particular hop is known for its woody fragrance).We used a variety called Fuggle, which we had to buy because our own Nugget hops, being weak as is typical in the first year of growth, got attacked by fungus and bugs.

Fuggle hops boiling with the wort.

4. Chilling and flowing into the primary fermenter.

After the required boiling period, Chuck brought out the Porsche of all cooling devices: a wort plate chiller.

We attached a hose carrying regular tap water to the water inlet side of the chiller and put the outlet hose in the kitchen sink to drain. Then we attached a second hose to the boiling pot to carry the hot wort to the chiller; from the chiller, the cooled wort flowed through a second outlet hose into a 5-gallon plastic pail (the primary fermenter). We put the yeast in when the pail was halfway full.

Left: The boiling pot, elevated so that the wort will flow easily downward into the chiller and then the fermenting vessel at Chuck's feet. Right: the fermenting vessel (3 seconds ago, it filled up with cooled wort from the chiller; Chuck just disconnected the hose).

It absolutely amazed me that the wort went in at boiling temperature and exited at 70 degrees within seconds. This device saves so much time in the cooling process. With an immersion chiller, it takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. With this thing, you can pitch yeast (i.e. add it to the wort) immediately, which helps expedite the fermentation process.

5. The verdict.
With the wort and yeast now in the fermentation vessel, Chuck took out a sample of it and a hydrometer and measured the specific gravity of the mix (its density relative to the density of water; in brewing, it indicates the amount of sugar) to see what kind of potential we had for it to turn into beer. It looked light in color so we wondered about it. Wort made from malt extract (rather than malted grain) is usually darker. “It’s probably about 7%,” said Chuck. Looks like our malting worked!

Chuck measures the wort's specific gravity.

Of course we had to all have a taste (I'm on the left).

The wort had a grainy, sweet flavor, with a little bit of bitterness and some wood on the nose (probably coming from the hops that we used).

Now all we had to do was let the microbes do their work. We put an airlock on the fermentation vessel, covered it with a tablecloth, and put it in a quiet corner.

Fermentation didn't take place right away. But then, last Monday afternoon, the airlock started foaming wildly. Fermentation! It is such a sweet and victorious smell when you stick your nose over the airlock and realize that finally all of your labor has reaped a reward.

This first aggressive fermentation, called the primary, will dissipate within a few days and settle into a slow methodical rhythm. I will rack (move the beer from one container to another) several times before we bottle. The racking helps to clear the beer through gravity and also frees it from all of the trub (sediment that accumulates at the bottom of the fermenter).

We’ll keep you updated.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Four of our chicks at about two weeks old, back in August of 2007.

If you've been enjoying our blog posts about our various one-block feast projects, and don't yet know about our downloadable how-to guides for each, check them out by clicking on the one that interests you.

The Guides:

How to Raise Chickens

How to Make Beer

How to Make Olive Oil

How to Raise Honeybees

How to Make Wine

How to Make Vinegar

How to Make Salt

How to Grow Summer Crops

How We Made Cheese

How to Attract Beneficial Insects (we threw this one in just for fun, and because it's helpful)

Send us your comments, if you like...and stay tuned for the launch of new projects as we head into spring.

By Rick LaFrentz, Beerless leader

The next time you take a sip of beer, ponder the process of the extraordinary journey it takes from seed to suds. The whole process is a series of procedures targeted to one end product, beer. It is indeed a long and tedious process, and Team Beer knows this first hand.

One vital segment in making beer is a stage called malting. This involves converting the grain used for your beer, be it barley or wheat, from a starch storage unit (a seed) to a slightly sweet, crunchy grain that can be further converted, through a series of events, into a fermentable sugary solution called wort (pronounced "wert").

MALTING

To malt the grain, you need to soak the seed in 8-hour intervals until it starts to swell, a sign that it is about to germinate. You cannot soak the seed longer than 8 hours at a time. To do so would deprive it of oxygen and literally drown it. You may have to do the soaking a few times in order to achieve the swelling.

Once the seed starts to swell, place it on a large cookie sheet that has been layered with paper towels. This will help retain moisture that will be instrumental in keeping humidity while the seeds germinate.

Now enclose the cookie sheet in a large, dark garbage bag and tie the end. At room temperature, it will take 4 to 7 days for barley seed to push out a shoot. Wheat seed usually takes about 3 days.

Don’t confuse the root hairs for the shoot. The stem shoot will be quite a bit larger in size. When the shoot becomes ½ to ¾ the length of the seed, it’s time to stop the germination. This process converts the starchy seed to a fully modified barley malt that can be mashed for complete conversion to a fermentable product.

The next step is to take the germinated seed out of the enclosed bag, remove the paper towels, and put the grains, on the cookie sheet, in an oven at a temperature between 100 to 125 degrees. I should mention that the germinated root hairs sometimes grow into the paper towel, so you may have a fun time pulling them free. One of our ovens had a 125-degree temperature from only the pilot light, which was perfect. We kept the grain in the oven for 24 hours.

Try to move the grain around on the cookie sheet every ½ hour for the first 4 to 6 hours to help dry the seed in a uniform manner. After 24 hours, your seed should be dry enough to use for your mash. One way to tell if you were successful is to bite on a piece of grain. If it breaks a tooth, you failed. If it is crunchy and slightly sweet, you’re on your way to making a true home brew.

You should separate the fine dried root material from the grain before you mash to help the clarity of the beer. A lot of this may sound fuzzy, but once you’ve done the process, it will make sense.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

I just copied this encouraging emoticon from a website I can't believe I haven't found before: www.homebrewtalk.com, givers of free advice and dispensers of sudsy enthusiasm for all attempts to make beer at home.

As you may know from a previous Team Beer post, we are soon going to try what we thought few sane home brewers had done before, at least not in the modern era: make beer from whole grains and flowers (wheat, barley, hops). We've been getting slightly anxious about it, but Rick LaFrentz, our Beerless Leader (and Sunset's head gardener), has kept a cool head and a que sera, sera smile as we've moved into what we thought were fairly uncharted waters.

They're not. Here on homebrewtalk.com unfurls a whole forum addressed to makers of AG brews—All-Grain brews. "Attention new all grain brewers!" booms one post, from senior member RichBrewer of Colorado. He's advising us to use plenty of water during mashing and sparging (I love the vaguely troll-like sound of beer terminology), and how to hit the temperature "sweet spot" for mashing. There are even how-to photo guides for new AG'ers, including one called Partial Mash Brewing, courtesy of Deathbrewer, in Oakland. Thanks, dude.

This site covers everything, it seems, that anyone of any skill level would want to know (or teach) about beer, from brewing wild and funky lambics to brew-tracking software. There's even a neat little section on wine, cider, mead, and homemade soda.

Homebrewtalk.com, we're glad we discovered you.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Here's what we're giving for Christmas this year:

Photograph by Spencer Toy

Yes! The fruits of our summer one-block diet.

Happy Holidays, everybody.

By Rick LaFrentz, Beerless leader

About a year ago I received the gift of a page a day calendar called 365 bottles of beer for the year. Everyday it features a different brewery from various countries throughout the world with detailed tasting notes on one of the featured breweries particular beers.
Some days they have an item called a quaff quote or label lore with humorous sayings or pertinent information with respect to beer.
Throughout this year I have collected some ditties that I hope will ferment a profound impact on your vision of brewing or at least put a smile on your face.
Here they are. Enjoy.

In 1862, the U.S. Congress imposed a beer tax as a way of raising money to fight the Confederacy in the Civil War.—Hey, I think we’ve found a way to balance the budget.
                                                                  -------------------------------
In St. Louis, it is illegal to sit on a curb of any street and drink beer from a bucket.
They don’t mess around in St. Louis.
                                                                   -------------------------------
English pubs used to bake a whistle into the rims of their beer mugs as a way for customers to order more beer, hence the phase, “wet your whistle”
I always wondered where that phrase came from.
                                                                 ---------------------------------
Beer was first sold in bottles in 1850 and first sold in cans in 1935.
                                                                 ---------------------------------
A term coined by the Victorians, pub, an abbreviation of “public house” refers to an inn or tavern. They were often designed to replicate the convivial social setting of home. Before painted signs became commonplace, publican’s often posted a distinctive object such as a boot or crown outside their premises.
                                                                 ----------------------------------
The longest bar in the world is said to be 684 feet long and is located at the New Bulldog in Rock Island, Illinois. Belly up to the bar-everyone.
                                                                 ----------------------------------
It is illegal in Texas to take more than three sips of beer at a time while standing.
I’m glad I live in California.
                                                                  ---------------------------------
The four basic ingredients in beer are water, hops malt and yeast. The exact role of yeast was unknown until 1876 when French researcher Louis Pasteur scientifically established its role in the fermentation process.
                                                                  ---------------------------------
“There is more to life than beer alone, but beer makes those other things better.” Author Stephen Morris.
                                                                   ----------------------------------
German monk and brewer Benno Schari is said to have been the first to isolate the lager yeast, a breakthrough he accomplished in the early 19th century. God bless him.

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

“The pub knows a lot, almost as much as the churches” Amen, brother.
                                                                    ----------------------------------
“Beer does not make itself properly by itself. It takes an element of mystery and of things that no one can understand.” This is a quote by my hero, Fritz Maytag.
                                                                     ----------------------------------
Ninkasi, the 3600B.C. Sumerian goddess of beer known as “the lady who fills the mouth” was portrayed as the giver and protector of beer and brewing. Until the Middle Ages, brewing was considered the exclusive domain of women, who were known as “brewsters.” That’s why I love women.
                                                                    ---------------------------------
“It’s a fair wind that blew men to ale”. Washington Irving.
                                                                     ---------------------------------
“If you can boil water, you can brew beer”. This is an old home brewing saying and with God as my witness, it’s true.
                                                                     ---------------------------------
I will leave you with what is considered a timely toast by Lewis Henry.
“Here’s to a long life and a merry one.
  A quick death and an easy one.
  A pretty girl and an honest one.
  A cold beer and another one.”

This is also a great time of year to introduce yourself to the many seasonal beers that are brewed all over the world and the best time of the year to drink them.

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

As Team Beer’s brew guru and Sunset’s head gardener, Rick LaFrentz is a great guy to know—especially at this time of year.

Yesterday afternoon, chatting about a seasonal beer from one of the West’s many “local” breweries (more on this in a minute), he told me about his latest concoction: a Trappist wheat that he’ll use to check off his Christmas list.

“I’ll make sure you get one,” he said as my eyes lit up. Score!

Rick brewed and bottled his homemade gifts a few weeks ago, but if you, ahem, hop on it this weekend, there’s still time for you to squeak one out: an ale takes about five weeks, from kettle to bottle.

Just download (for free!) a PDF of Sunset’s Guide to Making Beer. You'll get Rick's handy checklist of equipment and his recommendation for where to buy reliably tasty kits. No growing or malting required—as Team Beer is learning, this takes approximately forever (malting Sunset’s own barley for a wheat ale is how Rick plans to spend Thanksgiving weekend).

What to make? Rick and I both gravitate toward “winter warmers” when the leaves change—their malty and often spicy goodness is a welcome treat for any beer fan. They're served chilled, of course, but they're still "warming" because of their higher-than-a-lighter-beer alcohol content.

Speaking of warmers, I just got my hands on an Imperial stout called Ten Fidy; that's what’s delighting Rick’s nose in this photo: “I always like to sniff beer,” Rick said when I laughed at his connoisseur approach. “It's got a lot going on.”

This seasonal offering from Oskar Blues (“the little brewery that cans” in Lyons, Colorado) is a delight for dark-beer fiends. Hoppy yet not bitter, this chocolate factory has a decadent Champagne feel that would make those Imperial Russian czars proud. Yum. SoCal readers, you can share in Colorado’s joy: Ten Fidy is now available near you.

If you don’t have time to brew up a winter warmer of your own (really? this Imperial stout kit looks mighty good), you could always pick one up on your way to a holiday open house.

In terms of hostess gifts, I love Team Wine, but defecting to Team Beer clearly would have some benefits (hello, shorter fermentation times!).

Maybe I should apply for dual citizenship.

by Stephanie Dean, Sunset test kitchen coordinator

It’s official. Team Beer has been the most been delinquent of the One-Block teams, but we’re finally beginning to make some progress after some serious procrastination.

In the time since we last posted, we have all done our fair share of (ahem) field research, of course. I conducted mine in Germany over the summer (Dunkelweizen is officially my new favorite type of beer; If you happen to find yourself in Germany anytime soon, memorize this key phrase: Bier bitte, translation: beer please).

You might be asking yourself why we have been so remiss. Well, that’s because we are attempting to do the near-impossible: Make beer out of actual grain instead of pre-malted barley which is what every brewery in the country does. Check out the photo below for a glimpse as to what we had to do to prepare our grain:

We kept trying to brainstorm ways to make the process less tedious, but nothing really seemed to help. Alan came up with a method for threshing the stalks, crushing the remaining grain and spikelets, and then blowing on it to separate grain. My main tactic was deception, which involved introducing barley threshing as a new hip party game and some minor child labor. Rick tried many different methods, including an attempt to float the grain in water to separate the spikelets from the grain. Alan put it best when he said that he now understands why we have industrial farming.

Now that we have our grain, we are going to try malting a small batch of our wheat so that we can figure out the kinks (malting method TBD). Then it is on to the barley. Wish us luck!

At last, after much trial and error, we eat! See how our crops became a summer feast. | Jump to the recipes.

Coming up next: How we're eating from the garden every day.

Veggie-garden primer | Sunset guides to growing edibles

By Stephanie Dean, Sunset Test Kitchen Coordinator

Yes, you actually have to reap what you sow, but why couldn’t the timing be better? Today, in the 90 plus heat, Team Beer harvested our barley.

We had to act now because most of the barley had dried out and was ready to harvest. Also, we were worried that our squirrel neighbor would gobble our barley for dinner. (We’ve been watching our wheat and barley like hawks after we came back to work one Monday to find more than half our wheat had been eaten by our squirrel friend over the weekend.)

Right now, the barley is spread out to dry on a tarp in an unused office. Our next step is figuring out how to the get the barley off the stalks, which will be shortly followed by malting.

In the meantime, we’ll be vigilantly guarding our wheat from the squirrel enemy. GAME ON!

By Rick LaFrentz, Beerless leader

Photos by Kimberley Burch

“John Barleycorn must die.”

These are lyrics from a song I would listen to in my wayward youth. It was about a group of men who set out to disrupt the planting of the evil barley seed.

Barley is such a vital commodity in our everyday life and an absolute necessity in the process of brewing, why would one want to prohibit its planting?

The barley that we planted several months ago for our homemade beer is, at last, setting seed. Break out the cigars.

We chose a fairly new variety of barley called Lacey that has 6 rows of seeds growing on the seed head. Barley either grows in 2 or 6 rows. From my research on the subject, the 2 row seed heads are the most preferred by the brewing industry because they contain less protein, which will cloud the appearance of beer, but Lacey was developed for its plight in the brewing process.

We also had planted white wheat (shown left). I had planted the seeds rather thick not knowing what the germination rate would be and to our delight almost all of the seeds had germinated. We thinned a few rows at a time to avoid over crowding and allow for less competition but to our surprise the rows that had not been thinned actually grew taller and had deeper lush green colored foliage.

It’s an enigma.

This is the time of year when hop rhizomes arrive at your local brewing outlet. Hops are another vital ingredient in the brewing process.

We chose 3 different varieties, out of dozens, that we feel would grow without difficulty in our climate. Cascade, which is a very popular variety with the micro brewing community, gives a citrus-floral character. Another hop we chose is Centennial, which is very similar to cascade, but is more intense and will add bitterness to the beer. The third variety is Nugget, which again will add bitterness, but has an herbal spicy note. (Finding yourself captivated by hops varieties? Wikipedia has a nice roundup.)

During the growing season, hops have a tendency to attract spider mites and mildew so I guess we can count on these exquisite little inconveniences to add complexity to the final product.

Which hops and to what extent they will be used in our brew will be decided by committee.

Our next step in the home brewing process will be to wait until the barley seeds have dried and then try to malt the seeds to produce a product that we will be able to ferment. Wish us luck.

Just to recap, the Brew Crew made beer and it was good. But many enthusiasts could say we "cheated," using extract instead of starting with the hops and grains in their raw state.

Our growing update follows...

By Rick LaFrentz, Sunset head gardener and beerless leader

A couple of days before one of our worst winter storms, I planted the soft white winter wheat seeds. Lord knows I didn’t have to water it in.

The barley is up and growing. Hopefully we can keep the birds from eating the toils of our labor.

Now we sit back and wait for the plants to grow and develop seed heads, or grain.

We need these grains for their sugar, which is necessary for the fermentation process. Most grains are initially vehicles of stored starch, but we want them to move on to the next step in their development, germination, when they convert to a food source, sugar.

While the wheat we’re using does this conversion on its own, we’ll have to go through the malting process with our barley crop. We’ll store the seed heads in constant humidity until the grain thinks it’s time to germinate, to shift from starch to sugar. We’ll arrest the conversion at that point, probably by putting them in an oven. (If we wanted to create a beer with a darker, roasty flavor we’d really heat up the grains.)

For the all amateur grain beer makers there are beer catalogs and brew stores that carry these grains already malted. In fact, I know of only one brewery that malts its own grains and that’s Coors. The rest of the breweries, both large and small, buy their grains already malted.

So obviously we have our work cut out for us.

By Dale Conour, Sunset executive editor

Exciting times on the beer front. We’€™ve combined our ingredients (water, hops,barley, yeast, wheat, and honey) and got them fermenting...

we’ve moved the fermenting beer to a secondary fermenter (a big glass "carboy€") and removed the growing sediment (called "€œtrub"€)...

and this week...we bottled it.

Beerless leader Rick stirred in some "€œpriming"€ sugar to give the remaining yeast something to chew on and produce carbonation, and then we poured it into sterilized bottles, using a manually-operated capper to seal each bottle—41 of them in all.

Now we wait for the carbonation, as well as some maturation and a little more clarity; for beer, this means a couple more weeks—€”unlike guys, who need decades. Or so we're (often) told...

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.

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.’'