What did the grape say when the elephant stepped on it?

Nothing. It just let out a little wine.

 

He says:

 

I don’t brew beer much anymore. It’s not that I don’t like beer anymore, I still like to drink it, but I’ve found that my attitude has changed about the act of brewing. The process that I was using took about 3 hours of time and then probably another hour of setup at the beginning and cleanup at the end. A 4 hour chunk of time is a big commitment and slowly I found myself just not wanting to make it. Fermentation still hold a special place in my heart, but I moved on to non-beer fermentations recently, such as sauerkraut, kefir, and most recently ginger beer (which isn’t really a beer since there are no grains).

 

One of the main reasons that caused this shift is my perception of fermentation. As I read more and more about different fermentations from different cultures, I found that fermentation is supposed to be easy--so easy that it’s almost an accident to get delicious results. Beer is not like that. With beer, strict sanitation and cleanliness needs to be followed. If you forgot to sanitize one tiny bit of vinyl tubing or a spoon and it touches your beer then there’s a good chance that whole batch is ruined. You can kiss those 4 hours goodbye.

 

Sauerkraut is made by chopping up cabbage and squishing out the water with your hands, then punching it down. Ginger beer is made by making a starter from the ginger root, which comes from the earth. Good luck sanitizing that. All of these fermentations and more involve placing natural ingredients and the right conditions and allowing nature to take over. Modern beer brewing is an exercise in chemical sanitation, while traditional fermentations are an exercise in natural biology. I prefer the later.

 

I recently started two batches of wine. One wine batch is certainly much easier to throw together than beer, I think I took 25 minutes total for the two. Even though my schedule isn’t packed, I can certainly appreciate the time saved.

 

I have never been a big wine drinker, mostly being put off by the pretense that accompanies standard wine culture. I have, however, become very interested in country wines or wines made from fruits. The idea of preserving a crop of fruit by turning it into wine is intriguing. The two trial batches that I just made aren’t going to be award winners, and they will certainly have their flaws. But they will certainly be unique.