Alaus. alaus duok dieve daugiau...

I owe a few posts on the Supperclub menus, but I need to get home and upload photos and recipes for those...

In the meantime, let's talk beer (alus, in Lithuanian). I recently made my first batch of beer - a red ale from a simple recipe from the brew shop - and it's tasting pretty good! A lighter lager-style beer is currently doing its thing in my chilly basement (Seattle has been very cold for the past few weeks - perfect for lager yeast, which likes cool temperatures for fermentation).

When I cook and bake, I'm not one to get too caught up in the details - I tend to not pre-sift flour, or measure goopy substances like honey or sour cream. I figure it'll work itself out somehow, or I've got enough experience to either fix my sloppiness or live with a failure from time to time and learn something from my mistakes.

When I started baking bread using a natural sourdough starter a few years ago, I found that the attention to detail that professionals put into their baking really pays off - measuring flour by weight instead of volume ensures that your bread is not to dry or to sticky, for example. But mistakes teach you the most about how things are actually working in there; when my original sourdough breads weren't rising properly, some trial-and-error with higher-gluten flours taught me that wild yeast needs a little more help to rise properly.

Making beer seems like a similar enterprise, although the yeasts I'm using are highly specialized creatures that you buy for specific flavor development and brewing characteristics. More experienced brewers warned me that sanitation is the number one issue for home brewers, so I've been scrupulous in that department, and have generally tried to follow the recipes fairly strictly until I'm familiar with the processes. Ruining 5 gallons of beer is a pricey mistake, so I'd rather avoid that if at all possible.

But the urge to experiment and better understand the little organisms that I'm working with is always there for me. Yet homebrewers seem to be a fretful bunch, worried about all the little details (The Art of Homebrewing doesn't dispel this fearfulness, despite its incessant cajoling not to worry and have a homebrew). One person I talked to was almost appalled that I was trying to make lager at home without a dedicated refrigerator; the way I see it, people have been making beer for a long long time in sub-optimal circumstances. Since I'm not doing this professionally, I can afford to mess around a little - no need for strict quality control and repeatable processes (I get enough of that sort of thing at work, thank you very much).

Back in the day (and I'm talking 80+ years ago - because I've been talking to my 94-year-old great-aunt this Christmas season), brewing beer was something you did yourself - along with everything else (growing flax, spinning thread, weaving cloth, making clothes, etc.). My great-aunt and father told me how beer was made in Lithuania "down on the farm." Barley was briefly soaked in warm water, then spread out to start sprouting - this increases the available sugar, as my aunt reminded me. The sprouted grain was then dried thoroughly, then lightly cracked. A barrel with a stopper at the bottom was lined with clean hay (how's that for sanitary?) and then boiling water was added along with grains. Once that cooled down (just like when you make bread), yeast and hops were added and the whole works fermented for a day or two. The barrel was then drained off (the straw worked as a filter to keep the grain in the barrel), and a second (and even a third) batch of beer was made from the same malted barley - decreasing in quality with each batch (my father said they referred to these as the "premium" batch, the "good" batch, and the last which was just "fit for drunks"). The batch of beer was moved to another barrel, aged and rotated in the hayloft (that was my father's job when he was a kid) and tapped for special occasions - like the post-harvest party, when they'd slaughter some sheep, make massive quantities of kugelis (without the modern convenience of the Kugelator), and feed all the people who came to help bring in the rye.

So I guess beer-making is in my blood, at some level - but the genes for sewing clothes were definitely not passed down! I'm going to keep experimenting and see what happens - and keep you posted!