A Couple Ways You Can Really Help Out a First-Time Author

By now you've undoubtedly heard that I wrote a book called The Fermented Man: A Year On the Front Lines of a Food Revolution, and are aware that it came out several weeks ago, after a many-year journey through illustrative meta diets, weird French Fries, rotten shark meat, and the publishing industry. By now, you have undoubtedly picked up several dozen copies for all your family and friends, and have hungrily read through your own copy while relaxing on the beach with your citrus-infused IPA of choice. I think the book is a an interesting read whether you're into fermentation already or not, and I hope it reaches the mainstream enough to bring some new people into fermenting. That's the goal, ultimately — to spread fermentation awareness, as well as entertain.

But to achieve that goal, I obviously need to reach many people who have never previously heard of me or my writing. There are, in fact, a few very simple things you yourself can do to help me make this book a success.

First, after you're done reading the book, please consider writing me a review on Amazon. However you feel about the site, it plays a major role in how people shop for books these days, and from what I understand, reviews factor heavily into a book's visibility (due to Algorithm Stuff). The more reviews the book has, the more likely it is that shoppers who are interested in other similar narrative non-fiction food books will happen across it. Doesn't have to be a long review — even just a few sentences. It makes a big difference and I hugely appreciate the feedback regardless! So honestly, that's the big one right now.

Secondly, and more obviously, is just telling everyone you know who might be interested about the book. Word of mouth and social media discussion can go a long way in building momentum in the early stages of an indie book's release.

Finally, if you own a small aircraft, another easy way to get word out about the book is to make one of those word banners that you always see at the beach trailing behind airplanes. Simply make a gigantic banner that says something along the lines of "The Fermented Man - A Year on the Front Lines of a Food Revolution is in stores now!!!!" and trail it behind your airplane while you fly around your region, or the closest beach.

Thank you very much for helping out a dude who really likes writing books. I hope you enjoy it.

How Could Someone Live Off Of Nothing But Fermented Food?

Finally! The Fermented Man: A Year on the Front Lines of a Food Revolution is available today.

Get your copy (physical or e-book) from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Or stop by your local independent book retailer and support small business!

(If you work at a store that doesn't normally get books like this through your distribution channels, just email sales[at]overlookny[dot]com)

Also, catch me at one of my upcoming events, including this Friday at Inquiring Minds in New Paltz, the Beer Belly in Albany on Saturday night, and the Rhinebeck farmer's market on Sunday with Oblong Books.

Some background, in case you aren't familiar with the book already:

The Fermented Man: A Year on the Front Lines of a Food Revolution follows a year I spent living off of nothing but fermented foods, while chronicling their history, cultural significance, and evolution. It demonstrates that fermented foods are so varied and ubiquitous that you could literally live off of them, if you were for some reason so inclined. It's informative. It's occasionally somewhat funny. It's contemplative. It's got drama. To say this diet was not easy is an incredibly understatement, but the structure of it — this meta-diet I came up with — allowed me to explore the sort of extreme dieting Americans are obsessed with. I didn't start the fermented diet thinking this would be the sort of diet craze I'd be taking to Dr. Phil — I wanted to use it to explore not just fermented foods, but the nature of diets themselves.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. It's a book that I very much wanted to be approachable and interesting to anyone, regardless of their level of fermentation awareness. Even if you never intend to make a jar of sauerkraut yourself in your life, I think you'll still enjoy The Fermented Man. Tell your friends, tell your family, get them all copies for their birthdays.

Besides recommending the book to people you know, and sharing on social media, another way you can give a huge boost to an author (especially a first-time author), is writing a review on Amazon. It seems like a small thing, but Amazon reviews, regardless of their length or content, immensely help a book's visibility. By taking a few minutes to write a review, you'll help to make the book something other shoppers might discover and enjoy themselves. And I'll be really grateful and probably consider you my favorite anonymous reviewer person from the internet.

The Fermented Man: Soft Release This Week, Full Availability Next Week

Over the last two years, I wrote a book called The Fermented Man about the importance of fermentation in our diets and lives, and the curious things one learns when you live off of nothing but fermented foods for an entire year. It's a book about microbes, weird foods, culinary history, Americans' obsessions with health trends, and what it's like to follow a hyper-challenging meta diet.

Just wanted to let you know that The Fermented Man, while officially technically released this week, is making more of a soft gradual roll-out. Full availability will come next week -- by then most stores, and Amazon, should have the book in stock. An e-book version is available right now. IndieGoGo backers should be receiving their copies over the next few weeks as well.

If you aren't ordering online, please stop by your local bookstore or homebrew shop and ask them to keep The Fermented Man in stock, if they haven't already gotten copies!

If you are in NYC, come out to Covenhoven tonight (7/20) for a book launch party and Kent Falls rare beer night (there's gonna be some awesome stuff, and a limited number of copies of the book for sale), and if you're in the Hudson Valley, I'll be doing a very cool event with Stock Up in Beacon this weekend, also with beer, and fermented food pairings as well.

Beyond that, here's a list of events I will be at for the rest of the summer and early fall.

A few things you can do that will tremendously help out a first-time author: please share word and photos of The Fermented Man on social media to help get the word out, and please leave me a review on Amazon once you're done! Both are very small things that are surprisingly enormously helpful for the book's visibility.

Thank you for reading, and I very much hope you enjoy the book!

Catch Me At These Events for The Fermented Man This Summer

The Fermented Man will start hitting stores and releasing through online retailers next week. If you haven't yet, now is a perfect time to order yours through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or saunter on down to your local bookstore and pick up a copy there.

Undoubtedly, after you have hungrily devoured The Fermented Man in one sitting like a person coming off of an arbitrary meta-diet and experiencing guacamole again for the first time in a year, you might have some questions. Things that come to mind that you wish to discuss with me. Given that I am absolutely terrible at responding to emails, what means of exploring these questions could be left to you? How about asking me in person, at one of the many events I will be hosting / attending this summer to promote the book? My busy calendar includes everything from Kent Falls beer nights at fine drinking establishments, to fermented food and beer pairings, to bookstore speaking engagements, to a fermentation workshop on the world's largest rooftop farm, to fermentation festivals, to a hop harvest festival, to me keeling over in a parking lot from exhaustion.

This schedule is, of course, not entirely complete just yet. I am open to suggestions, and if you know of a place / business / organization that might be interested in coordinating an event with me, please feel free to reach out at bearflavored [at] gmail [dot com]. More distantly on the agenda, but not yet organized, is a trip to Vermont in the middle of October, and a trip to Louisville, KY around the Shelton Brother's Festival, October 28 and 29. If you live in either of those areas and would like to coordinate an event, hit me up!

Finally, after all this is over, having been working on this project for some three and a half years, I will be throwing down a smoke grenade, abruptly vanishing into the night, and spending the next several years in a cabin on some remote mountain peak in Colorado or Oregon, never to trouble myself with the concerns of human society again. At least until I write a book about it.


July 29 - Inquiring Minds, New Paltz, NY
7 pm going until 8 pm — I'll be doing a reading, followed by Q&A. Facebook event with more details here.

July 30 - Beer Belly, Albany, NY
Kent Falls beer event, where I'll be answering questions and slinging copies of the book. Fingerprint wild ale will be making an appearance.

July 31 - Oblong Books at the Rhinebeck Farmer's Market, Rhinebeck, NY
Stop by from 11 am to 1 pm as I'll be there with books to sign, as well as answering all your fermentation questions. Event page here.

August 4 - DeCicco's Market Armonk, Armonk, NY
Kent Falls beer event, where I'll be answering questions and slinging copies of the book. Fingerprint wild ale will be making an appearance, and many other cool beers besides.

August 9 - Brooklyn Grange, Brooklyn, NY
Brooklyn Grange is an insanely cool project -- it's currently the largest rooftop farm in the world. From this amazing setting, I'll be leading a fermentation workshop and answering questions to a handful of attendees. This is a smaller, ticketed event, so reserve your spot now. [Just got word that this is already sold out! Will update if any spots open up.]

August 13 - Burial Beer, Asheville, NC
I actually don't have any particular specific events schedule at the moment, but we will be in Asheville to brew a collab beer with the fine folks at Burial, and thus hanging out in their taproom quite a bit. Come say hi!

August 20 - People's Food Co-Op, Portland, OR
More details TBA.

August 21 - The Kitchen at Middleground Farms, Wilsonville, OR
More details TBA.

August 22 - Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR
More details TBA.

August 28 - Boston Fermentation Festival - Boston, MA
Cool festival that's also a great market for picking up fermented goodies, with lots of different information sessions. I'll be participating in the Fermented Reading Room, signing books, as well as at the Fermentation Help Desk, answering your fermentation questions.

Sept. 8 - Spotty Dog Bookstore, Hudson, NY
Signing books and answering all your fermentation questions.

Sept. 10 - Kent Falls Hop Harvest Festival, Kent, CT
Last years first annual Kent Falls / Camps Road Farm hop harvest festival was a really super fun day, actually, This year's should be no different -- we'll be brewing up another wet-hopped farmhouse ale, hanging out and chilling in the brewery while demonstrating the process, picking hops (obviously), and ending the day with a pig roast. Beer is available, hanging out on the farm is available, asking me fermentation questions and such is available, and I'll be in the brewery with copies of the book as we're brewing.

Sept. 11 - Berkshire Fermentation Festival, Great Barrington, MA
More details TBA.

Sept. 12 - City Beer Hall, Albany, NY
Beer dinner with Kent Falls and Grimm.

Sept. 18 - Brooklyn Book Festival, Brooklyn, NY
More details TBA.

Sept. 25th - Golden Notebook Bookstore, Woodstock, NY
Reading and Q&A.

Sept. 25th - Inquiring Minds Bookstore Saugerties, Saugerties NY
4 pm — I'll be doing a reading, followed by Q&A.

About That Time I Ate Nothing But Fermented Food For One Year (The Fermented Man Pre-Order)

In two months, on July 19th, The Fermented Man will finally be released, so I think it's time for a little update on the book. Many of you have no doubt been waiting for The Fermented Man these last few years as ravenously as the masses anticipate a new Star Wars film, so if you don't require any further elaboration from me, I'll here point out that the book is already available for pre-order. For more details, please read on!

In Case You Don't Know About the Book-
During the year of 2014, I lived off of nothing but fermented food for the entire year. Yes, an entire year consuming only things which were fermented. However, this isn't a new lifestyle diet I'm going to be endorsing on Dr. Phil, but more of an experiment (a thought experiment turned into a challenging reality), and a means to journey through the world of fermented food in an interesting and immersive way. I wanted to write a book that would be entertaining and informative for any reader, whether you know a lot about fermentation already, or absolutely nothing at all.

Even though fermentation is as old as civilization itself, studies into our microbiome and our relationship with microbes are only recently entering the public consciousness. One might be tempted to conclude that probiotic foods are just another new health fad, but fermentation is anything but. It is a fundamental element of the culinary world. So fundamental, you could even, just for example, live off of nothing but fermented foods. The influence of fermentation really does permeate just about everything.

There are many excellent guides to making fermented foods at home out there. In fact, that is primarily how the publishing world has dealt with fermentation thus far. I wanted to write a different type of book, one for hobbyists and general readers alike. Maybe you can't even pretend that you'll ever be motivated to go home at night and spend a few hours packing cabbage into a jar to make sauerkraut. That's totally fine — not everyone needs to be (or has time to be) a hobbyist, and fermentation is far more important (and interesting) than as just as DIY activity for foodies. Maybe you've spent most of your life convinced that you need to slather your hands in sanitizer gel to lead a healthy lifestyle, and are simply fascinated that anyone would risk eating food crawling with living bacteria, much less a whole year of it. After all, we go to great lengths to eradicate microbes in almost every area of our lives. Why would we want more of them?

This is a book for those terrified of microbes, and those who love them.


What To Expect From The Fermented Man-
The Fermented Man is a narrative non-fiction journey into the world of fermentation. Living off of fermented foods for a year posed a host of challenges and educational opportunities alike, and allowed me to structure the book as a walk-through of the entire world of microbe-made foods, as well as an exploration of the very nature of diets. You will hopefully learn a lot. You will probably read some thoughts about diets and health that you weren't expecting. You will hopefully be entertained, and get a few chuckles out of my ordeal, here and there. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be inspired to post passionate memes on Tumblr demanding a sequel. In the back of the book there is even a brief recipe section, so after traveling with me through this eye-opening culinary realm, you can try your hand making a few of my favorites at home, if you are so inclined.

When Does The Fermented Man Come Out?-
The book will be released (both online and in bookstores) on July 19th.

How To Get a Copy Of the Book-
The Fermented Man will be available through all the typical channels that books are typically available.

You may guess that authors generally take home more money when you order from the author directly, rather than, say, Amazon. And while I could probably make a few more bucks by setting up a sale for the book through my merch store and encouraging everyone that reads this blog to order the book that way, it's actually probably better for me in the long run if you just order the book from a regular store — either your local bookstore, or Amazon. While I might make less on each sale, Amazon is also a very powerful marketing platform, in a sense, and the more visible my (or any) book is on Amazon, the better it is likely to do. So, it's probably ultimately better if Amazon sees that my book is selling well, versus trying to squeeze out a few extra dollars by selling a bunch of copies myself. Likewise, your local bookstore can always really use your support, and their interest in my book is also supremely helpful. So, please visit them and ask if they'll be getting copies of The Fermented Man in. If they are not already, you can always request that they do so. A win for everyone!

One more thing: after you have read the book, please consider doing me a huge favor. I mentioned that Amazon also essentially works as a marketing platform. Along those lines, the more reviews a book has, the better for its visibility to other shoppers. So please consider doing me a major solid and adding a quick review to the Amazon page. Even a short review is immensely helpful to an author — especially a new, unknown author like myself.

How Many Copies Of the Book Should I Order, Just To Be Safe?-
At least four or five, but up to 10 if you really want to improve your social standing. Copies of The Fermented Man make excellent gifts for any family member, friend, significant other, or all 527 of your Facebook friends!

How Can I Order Copies To Sell At My Store?
If you work at a bookstore, you'll be able to stock the book as you would any other. However, if you work at a store that isn't able to order this book through your usual distribution channels, you can email Ross Gerstenblatt at my publishing company (Overlook Press), who will set you up.

Will You Be Doing Events To Promote the Book?
Indeed I will. I don't have a ton of details on this front that I can announce just yet, so I'll save this stuff, mostly, for another post.

Will You Be Doing Any Events That Are On A Big Roof?
One event that I can reveal now is a fermentation workshop I will be doing with Brooklyn Grange, who operate the world's largest rooftop soil farms. That workshop will be on Tuesday, August 9th. This will be a really fun, very unique event, and you can sign up now by clicking here.

Will You Do An Event At My Venue, Please?
Possibly! If there is some place you know of, work for, or run that would like to organize an event with me, please get in touch with me at bearflavored @ gmail dot com.

What If I Donated To Your Indiegogo Campaign?
You are truly a hero, and thank you for helping to make a vital section of the book possible. If you were one of the supporters on my Indiegogo campaign back in 2014, I will already be mailing you a copy of the book directly. If you also got a t-shirt through the campaign, I will eventually ask you what size and stuff you want, or go ahead and just let me know now.

What If I'm Impatient, And Wish To Hear More Right Now, But In Audio-Only Format?
I'm glad to hear you are so eager. Go ahead and listen to a podcast I just did with Fuhmentaboutit, a lovely fermentation podcast that interviewed me on a broad range of book-related subjects.



Thank you all very much for helping to support my writing career and fermentation education efforts. July 19th will be here very soon! Until then (and after then), follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more regular updates.

Popular Science Interview: What Are You Doing For Thanksgiving?

Here's a crazy thing that happened: the other day, I talked to Popular Science for a "What Are You Doing For Thanksgiving?" series, alongside a whole roundup of people way more famous, successful, knowledgeable, and interesting than me. Nonetheless, I think my interview was pretty interesting, thanks to a fun starting premise: what weird things are you doing for Thanksgiving this year due to your particular occupation and interests. Basically, I seem to be the "fermentation guy" in this roundup of notable food folks.

You can check out the whole list of responses with that first link, and my interview right here.

In the interview, I mention a wild beer I fermented with nothing but squash. Rather than viewing squash or pumpkin as a flavoring ingredient, I thought it would be more fun to use the stuff as a source of native wild microbes. (The fermenting squash is in the header picture above). Obviously, there's a lot to delve into there, and I'll be writing more about that beer in the future.

A Curt Nod In The Direction Of 2014, The Hardest Year Of My Life (But Hopefully The Most Productive!)

Having just finished doing the craziest thing that I have ever done, and having lived off of perhaps one of the most extreme diets that someone in the modern day US would ever voluntarily choose to subsist on, I obviously need to comment on the matter now that I'm finely done.

So, yep, that was a thing that happened.

Honestly, I really have no idea what to write for this entry. I debated various posts I could make; a lot of them in the vein of the typical "Top 10 Something of 2014" or formatted Year In Review posts that every blog is basically required to do. But I think I'm going to wait to chronicle my top 10 favorite fermented concoctions or top 7.5 weirdest things I ever put in my mouth until the end of 2015, maybe. Now just doesn't feel like the time.

But anyway, I did it. I'm done! Yes, it was exhausting. For a variety of reasons only 36.2% related to this diet and this book project, 2014 was probably the most anxiety-inducing and sanity-challenging and overall difficult year of my life. The downside of that is that my mind has been and remains a smoldering crater of stress fires for a number of months now, but the upside of that is that the book is going to be very interesting! Only 36.1% due to my resulting insanity, but in large part due to the sheer interestingness of fermented foods, the weird quirks of committing to a pseudo-fad diet, and also sharks.

Mostly, in writing some kind of entry reflecting back on the year, I wonder how much I should really try to encapsulate or summarize my experiences right now, online, before the book is actually done. As I sit here writing, still digesting my first tacos (so many tacos) of the New Year, I realize I need some perspective before I try to boil anything down to a blog post. And anyway, I don't want to spoil my own book, right? So I guess I'll just ask everyone to be kind and give me a little time on that front; finishing the damn manuscript is an increasingly daunting task that's going to require most of my energy for the next couple months.

A few things you may be curious about that I can talk about now:

-Yes, I will be writing about my experience trying rotten shark meat (hakarl) in Iceland. I'm finishing up that post now and will have it posted either later this week or early next week. You will enjoy that tale, I think; it ended up being an absolutely perfect experience and thank you again very much to everyone who contributed to my little pre-order thing to get me there. Stay tuned!

-The book itself is coming along very well. By my rough calculations, I estimate that I have somewhere around 75% of the rough draft written now. Of course, (unfortunately for my sanity) that's far different from the book being 75% done. I'll have a lot of sawing and polishing and trimming and cleanup to do before I even pass the book along to my editor, and then we'll see how much he wants to hack and slash at it for subsequent editing runs. Here's a secret: editing is at least half of good writing... probably more!

-The first thing I ate at 12:00:01 on January 1, 2015 was half a tub of guacamole. Obviously. It was delicious.

-I spent most of the rest of January 1 eating tacos and burgers in NYC. I had hoped for a little more diversity, but even there, most restaurants were closed. Oh well; can't go wrong with tacos. In fact, I just ate some more. (Disclaimer: I have since eaten almost nothing but tacos I can't remember what other food there is).

-No, I am not going to keep doing the diet. There is no sane reason to avoid eating guacamole.

-No, I am not sick of fermented food, and will continue to eat most of the same things I have been eating this last year, just with the addition of guacamole.

-Cheese.

-If you're in the Hudson Valley or nearby, check out a club I'm starting up: the Hudson Valley Fermentation Society. I have very poor organizational skills but will hopefully be getting that running more smoothly and regularly in the future.

-Also, butter. I am now obsessed with butter.

-Lots of beer stuff coming up, but I'll hold off on that.

Keep your eyes peeled for #sharkstuff, coming soon!

Well Fall Sure Has Flown By, But I Took Some Pretty Pictures, At Least ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well, the time is really slipping away from me again. I have not the slightest clue where the month of October went, but I do know that I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off, and am generally so exhausted that I couldn't be bothered to come up with a clever joke in place of the tired cliche "chicken with its head cut off." How many times have any of you actually seen a chicken minus its head, let alone one still able to run around? I'm surrounded by chickens on a fairly regular basis and I've never personally seen this occurrence. The whole thing just doesn't make sense. Anyway, I digress.



I've been awfully terrible at social media lately, and uh blogging too I guess, and I apologize sincerely to anyone who has emailed me and didn't get a response for like 10 days. In my defense, I am a terrible person. Further dampening my social media presence lately, I enjoy doing things like holing up in the woods of Vermont for 5 days like a crazy hermit. You'll be happy to know that I got a lot of writing done, though, which was the main goal. I did get to try a few of the local beers, as well.



How is the book going, you ask? Oh, well thank you for asking that. It turns out, writing a book is a lot of work! Like, an insane amount of work. So is a novelty diet of eating only fermented food for a year to provide a narrative backbone to, hypothetically, a book. Only two more months to go! I'm hoping a good chunk of the book will be written by the end of the year as well, as the plan is to turn in the first draft around spring time. I'm liking what I have down so far, though there are many days I stare into the void of Work Yet To Be Done and the very fabric of the universe opens up before me, a horrifying plateau spanning infinity, and I can see Time Itself. More than that I can't say, but I'm particularly happy with my chapter titles. If you'd like a preview of the book, an evening of fun tales of fermented shark meat, enriched by an "open bar" of sorts of my Bear Flavored creations, there's still time to sign up for the super special private reading event thing I'm going to have next spring.

Speaking of which, you also have a few more days to pre-order a signed copy of aforementioned book. Both fantastic and unbeatable deals end this week, so reserve your signed copy of The Fermented Man while you can. While extended exposure to the contents of The Fermented Man have not been shown to cure illness, aid digestion, prevent vomiting, or counteract insomnia, you will be hard-pressed to find much peer-reviewed evidence suggesting that it causes these issues, either.



















































Obviously, you may have noticed that I stopped doing reviews some time ago. I'm not going to bring those back, but I still do very much enjoy taking pretty pictures of pretty-looking beers and being all artsy and stuff. I'm considering every now and then just doing a beertography round-up similar to this post. Maybe with super short (couple sentence) thoughts about the beer. I don't know if, like, that's something you guys would be into.

Also coming up: lots of recipe posts I have to find the time to write, somehow. So many saisons, new yeast experiments, more single hop experiments, and this week, a maple strong ale. Plus much more exciting stuff further down the road.

No-Hop, No-Boil, Lime-Zest & Kiwi Gose - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Beer: Alagoas
Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Gose
Brewed: 8.05.14
Kegged On: 9.06.14
ABV: 4.2%

Appearance: golden yellow, slight haze, ample head, good retention
Smell: lime, citrus, lemon, lactic sour, mild funk
Taste: lime, lemon, upfront lactic sour, rounder soft fruits, tangy acidity, slight salty finish
Mouthfeel: high carb, light body, crisp, puckering lingering sour in finish

Perhaps being the Fermented Man has its advantages as far as my control of bacteria, or perhaps the lactobacillus strains I welcomed into my house last year have gotten a whole lot more comfortable since I began inviting so many of their peers to party. Whatever the reason, I took an even bigger gamble with this summer's "quick sour" beer, but in spite of the added difficulty, the result is far more delicious than any of last year's attempts. If I'm feeling really generous, I might even go ahead and call this one of my favorite batches of sour beer that I've made.

Why did I decide to do a sour, salty gose with kiwis and lime zest to be ready just in time for late September? Let's pretend it's not just because I don't have very good organizational skills to keep my brewing schedule on track and say it's a f*** you to July-released pumpkin beers via reverse seasonal creep. Sure.

There was actually a brief window in which I considered dumping this batch, funnily enough. Not because it tasted bad or anything, but because I thought my sheer, glaring negligence must have ruined it in some way. I had always wanted to do this as a gose with no hops added and no boil — just run straight off the sparge into a keg. I would then purge the keg of oxygen because kegs are really great for that kind of thing, and oxygen is bad for sour mashes and can lead to domination by bacteria that make your beer smell like puke. I've tested out various methods to avoid this with last year's Bearliner Weisse and a few other previous brews, but the basic strategy is pretty straightforward: avoid oxygen when doing something like a sour mash and using bacteria from raw grain. 

A keg is the perfect way to purge oxygen from headspace and keep it out. But you'll have to excuse my short-sightedness here: this summer was, quite frankly, a bit rough. I was a little fried, a lot stressed, distracted, and disoriented. And it didn't occur to me until I already had the not-boiled wort in the keg: what would happen if the bacteria started kicking off a lot of CO2?

My original plan beyond this point was not to rely on just the lactobacillus from the grains (whatever survived the mash, since I wasn't boiling anything at any point), but to pitch some of my house culture to ensure ample souring. As this was all happening in early August, I even thought about putting the keg of souring wort in my car for a day, which was the hottest location I could think of at the time. But okay: what if I put the keg in my car and it started fermenting furiously? Not all strains of lactobacillus produce much CO2 — there are homofermentative strains and heterofermentative strains, but it's hard to know which you have, especially when, like me, you planned to pitch a blend of house cultures. And while I could check on the keg fairly frequently to pull the pressure relief valve, I suddenly didn't feel very comfortable about those sporadic purgings of CO2 build-up being the only thing between me and a car bomb.

So I stalled, kind of got busy and distracted and unfocused, and the wort / beer sat in the keg in my apartment for a few days without any additional microbes pitched. Once or twice a day I would pull the pressure relief valve to vent any built-up gas that might be accumulating, should some spontaneous fermentation be occurring. After a day or two it was clear that there was no gas building up, and therefore likely not much fermentation happening. Should I pitch bacteria into the keg anyway and just keep on pulling the pin, hoping that would be enough? Or should I just transfer the whole thing into a bucket, even though that maybe defeats the point of my oxygen-avoidance plan in the first place? And should I be worried about some sort of unfriendly microbe taking up residence in the wort due to the multiple days it sat without fermentation to ward off hostiles? Cthulhu knows I've read plenty about botulism this year, and still haven't been able to determine exactly why it never seems to be a concern in unfermented wort. While debating the safety of this batch — and yes, even briefly considering dumping it — I reminded myself that many breweries buy wort and ship it in sealed containers. In Europe especially, a lot of this packaged wort is destined for lambic production, where the full onset of fermentation may not occur for a few days. There are definitely situations out there where it sounds like botulism should be a concern, and yet I've never heard of anyone dying of botulism from beer (have you?). My guess is that the pH of wort even before fermentation may already be too low or something. In either case, I had also added 14.5 grams of sea salt to this batch, it being a gose, and with that added buffer, I decided I'd once again embrace my destiny as a death-defying, botulism-dodging crazy-person badass and go for it.

[Editor's note: Speaking of which, while I have your attention — please consider pre-ordering my book, which will allow me to tackle even more crazy experiments, and allow you to read about them. In addition, if you'd like to drink some of my crazy experiments, such as this gose and many other sours, I'll be hosting a book reading preview party / fermentation sampling event next May. I will go out of my way to ensure epicness. Sign up for it now via my IndieGogo dealy. Okay, thanks, cheers, back to the brewing!]

The exact fermentation of this gose would be hard to replicate for anyone lacking the means to break into my apartment and steal some of the jars I keep sitting around, as much of my souring cultures are not available commercially, and, I'm guessing, have mutated quite a bit as I've maintained them and let them adapt to their new bear-focused environment. However, with this batch, I did introduce Lactobacillus brevis, newly available from Wyeast, to the cocktail. But in general, I've found that I'm getting a much cleaner, rounder, fuller lactic sourness from letting the lacto do its thing over time, rather than trying to pump it up for a frenzied, brief sour mash period.

As this entry is already getting long, I won't get into how brewers have this weirdly intense fear of letting lactobacillus survive in their beers... even brewers who are otherwise happy to embrace Brettanomyces. We'll save that one for another day. But as you may have noticed, this beer was never boiled or in any way pasteurized (other than from the temperature of the mash itself), and so the bacteria remained very much alive throughout and to the present. I don't find any danger of lactobacillus making the beer "too sour" or something; but then again, I like my Berliners and gose to have a very full tangy sourness. (For comparison, if you've had Westbrook Gose, I would say the sour character in this batch of Alagoas is very comparable). Nor does letting lactobacillus live require extended aging periods, in my experience. I always add Brettanomyces to my quick sours, and even so, they're done after about a month. Speaking of which: why add Brett when there's already so much going on here? The main danger of having an aggressive sourness in a beer like this is that Saccharomyces could stall out due to the pH level falling too low before it can fully attenuate. Brett is much more pH tolerant, and will help the beer finish out dry; at least, that's the idea. This finished out at 1.008, which might be on the high side for the style, but has the benefit of providing some body and balance that a drier version might otherwise lack.

Finally, what says "October" better than kiwis and lime zest? I had 2 lbs of kiwis sitting in my freezer for months that I was just waiting to use for something, and while I knew they wouldn't add much character (especially at that very low ratio — typically I'd add fruit at 1 lb per gal. or more) I figured I'd toss them in anyway. I added 2.8 grams of lime zest (and also squeezed out the juice from the limes into the beer as well), targeting about 200 ICUs based on Shaun Hill's scale. The plan was to add more, almost double that, but when I tried the beer a few days after that first addition of zest, the lime aroma was beautiful and the flavor perfectly subtle, supporting of the sourness, it was already exactly what I was looking for. Not wanting this to be an aggressively lime-forward beer, I decided to keep it at that lower dosage and went ahead and kegged the beer.

The result is the most crushable beer I have ever made, and a base I'm looking forward to trying with many other variations of fruit and zest.

BRB time for a keg-stand.


Recipe-
5.0 Gal., All Grain
Double infusion mash at 122 F / 148 degrees F
Fermented at room temp, 72 F
OG: 1.040
FG: 1.008
ABV: 4.2%

Malt-
43% [#3] Pilsner malt
43% [#3] white wheat malt
14% [#1] special roast

Hop Schedule-
N/A

Yeast-
House Lactobacillus cultures

House Brettanomyces cultures

London Ale III

Other-
14.5 g sea salt
2 lbs. kiwi fruit
2.8 g lime zest
juice from 3 limes

Book Pre-Sale and Private Reading / Rare Beer Night Invitation

Here is a link for you to click.

A few weeks ago I had a realization: I really needed to eat rotten shark meat before the end of the year.

A month or so previous I had eaten some Century Eggs that I'd acquired in Chinatown. These mucus-green, gelatin-like fermented eggs were — while surprisingly innocent in taste — almost certainly one of the most horrifying-looking foods I'd ever consumed. But they were fairly easy to acquire, and they definitely didn't smell like death incarnate. As far as bizarre and unusual fermented food traditions, they were fitting as a marker of the halfway point of my year. But I'd need something even more bizarre and challenging to end on. After all, while much of the mission of the book is to educate people on the ways microbes impact us and our food on an every-day basis — far more than most of us realize — part of the goal also is to illustrate what fermentation is. And what better way to illustrate how deep the magic of fermentation goes than to personally gag my way through one of the most pungent, unique, and intimidating foods in the world? Rotten shark meat from Iceland, for example. Truly, I understand the fundamentals of education.

Hákarl is made by burying the poisonous flesh of a Greenland shark in the ground for months. After fermentation, it is theoretically fit for human consumption, but retains some delightful properties: the high content of urea is gone, but an overwhelming odor of ammonia remains. For unfathomable reasons that I hope to get to the bottom of, this food has become a cherished delicacy in Iceland.

Various notable eaters-of-things have described hákarl as one of the most horrifying foods on earth. It's reputation for smelling like something that should kill you while not actually killing you is fairly impressive. One of my favorite descriptions from a hákarl-tryer will have to be paraphrased: like encountering a Dementor in the Harry Potter series, the experience is not only a terrifying experience in the present, but from that moment onward robs you of the ability to ever feel joy again.

Sadly, in spite of its popularity, hákarl is unavailable outside of Iceland. But we can all agree, I clearly must try this stuff for the book, which means I must go to Iceland for a few days at the end of the year, which means I am doing a pre-sale of my book to raise the money necessary to go to Iceland (because I am a writer, and therefore cannot afford trips to Iceland). I am happy to try hákarl so you don't have to, but it's going to take some planning and effort.

Another thing we can all agree on: crowd-funding is pretty silly, so I want to keep this as straight-forward as possible. Consider this no more than a pre-sale, if you want — a pre-sale which happens to ensure that a very fun chapter of the book can be written.

You can, right now, pre-order a copy of The Fermented Man, right here. So go ahead and ease your future self's purchasing obligations and avoid the tedious, dangerous experience of shopping online for books at Amazon. Instead, I will sign a copy of the book just for you, maybe even doodle a picture of a bear or a little anthropomorphic lactobacillus or something, and mail the book right to your address of choice (when it's released, of course).

Or, if you wish, consider it an invitation to a very fun book preview event I'll be holding next year (most likely in May, but exact date and location TBA), during which we will all enjoy a lovely sampling of various fermented foods and destroy my extensive collection of vintage Bear Flavored beverages, as well as several Very Special Kegs containing even more delicious beverages. I will regale those select few in attendance with tales of fermented shark meat, and great times will be had by all. (You will also get a signed copy of the book once it's out, of course). I'm going to pull a lot of strings for this event to make sure it's something special.

More details, of course, over on my IndieGoGo page.

So, lock down your signed copy of The Fermented Man now (it's going to be awesome), consider joining me for an Evening of Good Times (also awesome), and sleep better at night knowing that I'm going to try to put one of the most foul-smelling foods on earth down my mouth at the end of December.

I'm getting closer and closer to the end of the year, and the next few months will certainly be interesting. Thanks to everyone for your support and interest in the book, I can't wait to share it with all of you!

Dry-Hopped Sour Farmhouse Ale - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Beer: Goatpants

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Farmhouse Ale
Brewed: 1.06.14
Bottled On: 3.30.14
ABV: 4.4%

Appearance: pale straw yellow, ample head, lingering foam, good retention
Smell: apricot, unripe peach, lemon, lime, grapefruit, funk, dew, tart raspberry
Taste: tart apricot, sour peach, lemon, grapefruit, clean lactic sourness, succulent fruit finish
Mouthfeel: high carb, medium body, slight bite, clean puckering finish

I sometimes wonder how I manage to write a thousand words or so on every freaking beer I brew. Unless there was some kind of jarring mishap along the way, or I'm trying out a new technique, or testing out some totally novel series of ingredients, does every beer need (or deserve?) such elaboration?

No. I'm just really bad at keeping my shit succinct. I have a whole book to write in the next seven - eight months, and I'm not so much worried about cramming all that writing time into my chaotic schedule as keeping it short enough that my editor doesn't murder me.

When drinking Goatpants, a sour farmhouse ale / saison (where I took the rare path of flippancy with my naming schemes), I really don't feel like writing... anything. Maybe in part because I wonder if I should be keeping at least some tricks of my sleeve (nah?), but mostly because I wish I had infinity bottles of this beer (or preferably, cans of this beer), and the fact that I don't causes me to focus on how much I'm enjoying it while I'm drinking it. Maybe it's just that I really love sour farmhouse ales, but this and White Mana are in strong competition for my favorite batches so far. Some of my IPAs are making a strong push too, but I think the batches that I tend to age, savor, and share with as many people as possible, unsurprisingly make a more lasting impression in my memory. And it's no coincidence that my two favorite batches so far were basically shooting for the same target — Goatpants is my attempt to reverse engineer the microbial makeup of White Mana, which used Hill Farmstead saison dregs to achieve its pleasant lactic tartness. I wanted to see if I could build up a house culture to reach the same end.

Complex, long-aged sours are a wonderful thing — there's no beating the complexity of a lambic — but there's something to be said for the paired-down, refreshing pucker of a tart, lively simple sour. When any kind of sour is done right, the succulence triggers that salivation reflex in your mouth that inspires you to keep drinking, like you have to wash down the beer with more of itself. When the beer is light and juicy enough, this refreshing combination is hard to beat.

Essentially, that's what I'm aiming for here. The sourness is on par with a particularly tart Berliner Weisse, but drinks juicier and richer — which is probably a result of the large Citra dry-hop addition this sat on previous to packaging. The saison base gives it a very nice boost in complexity, too, especially for a sour that only aged for a couple months. Another reason I love this style — it doesn't have to have lambic-level complexity, just a distinct farmhouse quality and a pleasant backbone of acidity. Not necessarily easy to achieve, but easier, or at least much faster if you're working with the right microbes.

The right yeast and the right bugs are going to make an excellent beer, but modern brewers, for all their fascination with IPAs, don't yet seem to fully appreciate the relationship between hops and funk. And why do saisons have to be limited to Noble hops? Nothing wrong with those, and they can't be beat for a certain type of saison, but if a vibrant, alive, succulent sourness is your goal, fruity hops work even better than spicy herbal ones, in my humble opinion. I'm far from an expert, and I'm definitely not claiming to have discovered any part of this correlation myself, but seriously: the magical pairing of juicy dry-hops and succulent sourness is simply not exploited often enough. The result is just, like, so much more juice.

But like I said at the beginning, is there much point to me rambling on about my silly personal preferences and the flavor profiles of the beers I make, at length? The most important thing would be any tips I happen to discover along the way. So I was telling you all about how I think the dry-hops helped enhance the juicy vibrant character of this (at least while it's fresh), but probably more important than that subjective observation is the fact that I did not add any hops to the beer at all prior to that point. So yes, the entire boil and fermentation of this beer was strictly 0 IBU, no bitterness or alpha acids or vegetable matter to get in the way of the bacteria. Why? Because I wasn't really looking for bitterness here, so I figured — why not give it a try? I didn't need the boil hops for flavor, and theoretically, at least, they'd only get in the way of the lactobacillus' acidity development.

Was that truly the case, or did I just happen upon a few particularly awesome bacteria strains (and complimentary Brett strains)? We'll see. I saved the dregs, and hopefully those dregs perform as they did the first time. I liked this batch enough that, in fact, I just brewed it again twice this week, but this time I threw some old Citra leaf hops in the whirlpool. After sitting in my freezer for two years, poorly sealed, I don't think they'll contribute enough IBUs to really inhibit the bacteria, but... we'll see. Depending how they pan out, one of the re-brews will definitely be getting some fruit. As my friend pointed out, this beer is absolutely screaming for apricots.


Recipe-
5.25 Gal., All Grain
Brewed 1.06.2014
Mashed at 150 degrees for 60 minutes
Fermented at room temp, 72 F
OG: 1.038
FG: 1.004
ABV: 4.4%

Malt-
78% 2-row malt
11% white wheat malt
11% rye malt

Hop Schedule-
4 oz Citra dry hop for 8 days

Yeast-
White Labs Saison II
Mangrove Jack Belgian Saison
Brett L
Brett Custersianus
Brett Trois
4 Lactobacillus strains*

*Only 2 of the lactobacillus strains I used are commercially available from White Labs and Wyeast. Culture or select strains that will create a nice strong blanket of lactic acid. A blend of strains seems to work much better than a few isolated strains.

Introducing Bear Flavored's Line of T-Shirts - Cover Yourself in Wild Yeast

Well, this has been over a year in the making. I'm neither a graphic designer nor experienced in online retail, so it seems like I've had the above shirt idea — Wild Yeast Appeared!, a design which hopefully makes sense to a sizeable-ish portion of my readers — either in my head or in various draft stages since, I don't know, forever. The first time I thought of it, I thought: "Holy crap. That must exist." And while I was figuring out how to make one design exist, why not some others?

While I decided to tackle that initial design on my own, a friend of mine is an actual, legit, real, professional graphic designer, and I hired him for the rest. If you like his work here, his name is John Bryan, and he works under the name Revolution Dream Design. The same artist that drew the awesome header for my Fermented Man blog, Lena DeLeo, drew the artwork for the Bear Flavored "Fermenting Bear Skull" design.

Now, here we are, and Bear Flavored has a little line of t-shirts. Why does my blog need t-shirts? Well, it probably doesn't, but I liked these ideas too much not to see them on an actual shirt, and I figured maybe a few other beer lovers / yeast aficionados would appreciate them as well. Plus, I wanted to focus mostly on visual shirts, rather than slogan shirts. There are already lots of clever, well-designed 'slogan' shirts out there for homebrewers, from vendors such as Barley Knew Her and Hop Cloth. My hope was to make a series (or, depending how this goes, multiple series) of shirts that beer nerds will 'get,' but will just look cool regardless of whether you're in the know. Even if you could give zero hoots about bear-flavored.com, maybe you will want to wear a shirt that's a fermenting bear skull because... why would you not want that. The second reason that I decided to make some t-shirts was, of course, monetary. I've been writing this blog for almost three years, and enjoying every second of it, and meeting wonderful people through it, but some months I spend enough time on this thing to accurately consider it a part time job. I do it because I love it, but I also love having money to buy more beer with, you see. Now that I'm focusing on my writing career / book project and running a tiny homebrew shop, everything extra helps quite a bit.

Thank you for humoring me these last few years of adventuring with wild yeast, investigating experimental hops, and subsisting off of only fermented foods. I hope you enjoy these sweet shirt designs as much as I do. Isn't it about time you covered yourself in yeast? 

Head over to my brand new merch store at bearflavored.storenvy.com to see more. But for those stumbling across this entry without any idea what's going on, let's run down the designs here too.

Wild Yeast Appeared! - My first shirt idea, and I'm quite thrilled with how well it came out. Of course, it would look far less awesome if it weren't for the invaluable tips of my graphic designer pal John Bryan. You'll see his work in a second. This shirt is for everyone that has ever gazed wistfully into the distance and thought: "There's probably some really sweet wild yeast over there."

Fermenting Bear Skull - Bear Flavored still doesn't really have an official logo, because apparently I am a fan of overly-complex designs, but it's not like I'm worried about fitting these on a bottle cap just yet, right? The artwork for this was drawn by the incredibly talented Lena DeLeo, who did a pretty sweet representation of a bear skull dissolving, despite having limited experience with the subject matter.

Space Metal Brett - My idea for this series of Brettanomyces-themed shirts was essentially "What if Brettanomyces was a band [of various genres of music]? What if beer shirts just looked like rad genre t-shirts? What if Brett got to show-off its badass side a little bit?" I think it's pretty self-explanatory: Brett has taken to space and formed a band with Cthulhu.

Created by John Bryan of Revolution Dream Design.

Black Metal Brett - We all know that Brettanomyces is the most brutal of yeasts. If I ever have a brewery, you can bet your britches there will be a pentagram made of mash paddles somewhere. 

Created by John Bryan of Revolution Dream Design.

Funky Brett -  Brett uses his many powers to travel back in time to the 70's and make its beer a little less boring, while finding himself perfectly suited to the decade's musical tastes. I expect this should be self explanatory for any and all devoted beer nerds.

Created by John Bryan of Revolution Dream Design.

There you go. Once again, the link to my webstore is here. Thanks for checking these shirts out — my hope is that they will be an ongoing thing with perhaps new "series" in the future. Other yeast and bacteria could use their own shirts too, right? If you're a designer and interested in perhaps collaborating on a future run of shirts, or even a single isolated design, feel free to get in touch. 

Keep it funky and rock on, my friends.

Finding Fermentation in New Orleans

Well, I'm now over two months into my Fermented Man diet. Only... ten more months to go, huzzah! In short: yes I feel healthy, yes it is a lot of work and at times frustrating, and yes it is getting easier the longer I go, and the more creative I get. The hardest thing is finding food when I'm out of the house, and that's especially true if I'm traveling for a couple days at a time.

My first significant trip this year was to New Orleans for a couple days last week. I wrote about the experience over at my Fermented Man Tumblr, so if you're curious what sort of unusual and enlightening fermentations I was able to dig up in a city best known for cheap booze, check it out. And as always, www.thefermentedman.com for regular picture posts.

How To Make Fermented Pizza

Your immediate, gut-level (pro-biotic pun intended) response to reading this headline was probably either "Oh god, why in the world would you want to ferment pizza?", or else it was: "Yes! Finally a way to ferment pizza!"

I, of course, have to eat fermented pizza. For one year, I'm living off of only fermented foods, and clearly I'm not going to give up pizza for an entire year. Why should you do it? Well, it's tasty. It's also fun to point out that you're eating an entirely fermented pizza. And fortunately, it's quite simple to prepare, so today I'm going to show you how.

Here's what I'm curious about, though: what was the first image that popped into your head when you saw this headline? What form, exactly, might fermented pizza take? How would one consume it?

Might one, for example, take some pizza — unbaked, so as not to kill off the naturally-occurring bacteria — and ferment it for 4 - 7 days in a salt brine?

Well, okay, no. Sorry. That header up there is a bit of a fake out; it was too fun to resist. Making fermented pizza at home is far easier and much less gross than that horrific pickled pizza slice vision you may have in your mind right now. The whole reason fermented pizza is such an awesome concept, in my opinion, is that most of the ingredients already are fermented. Yes indeed — that's the funny thing about fermentation, and half the reason I'm doing this book. So many staples of our everyday lives involve fermentation in ways we don't realize, because so much of our food is simply presented to us these days. Many of us don't understand the similar forces at work behind the varied foods we eat.

Let's walk through it, shall we? In a week or two — just in time for that big football game everyone is always on about — you can be enjoying fully-fermented pizza too.

1. The Dough

What is dough? Bread, basically. It rises through the action of yeast. This is fermentation; one major ingredient in your fermented pizza that's absolutely no different. You can make your pizza dough various ways, and you can make it 'more fermented,' so to speak, with some sourdough pizza crust. It will also probably be more delicious this way. But I'll sometimes just buy Whole Wheat pocket-less pita bread from the store. It's the perfect size, shape and consistency for pre-made pizza dough, and it tastes almost as good.

2. The Sauce
Here is the one core ingredient of a pizza that's not already associated with fermentation. Fortunately, fermenting tomato sauce is insanely easy. I don't want to get terribly in-depth with the basics of veggie fermentation today, since it's a sub-recipe for the overall recipe, but below is a quick how-to.





2b. How To Make Fermented Tomato Sauce (In Brief)
Take 4 - 5 lbs of tomatoes, some Italian seasonings (oregano, thyme, basil, bay leafs, etc.) and 1 tablespoon of coarse, non-iodized sea salt. Cut off the stem end of the tomatoes, chop them up into chunks, and mix with salt and seasonings. Stuff into a quart-sized wide-mouth mason jar (or fermentation vessel of your preference.) Leave an inch or so of room at the top, then press down with a flat surface (the bottom of a beer bottle or a smaller mason jar works well) to compact the tomatoes and form a brine. If the tomatoes are not fully submerged in liquid, add a small amount of filtered, de-chlorinated water to submerge. Twist on the lid almost, but not-quite all the way, to allow ventilation of CO2 during fermentation. (Or put an airlocked lid on the jar, or use another fermentation vessel of your choice.) Fermentation will begin in a day or two and should take 7 - 10 days.

Following fermentation, press down on the fermented tomatoes to squeeze out some liquid. Pour off excess liquid, then dump contents of jar into blender. Blend well. Pour back into jar. Screw lid on tightly; refrigerate. Continue to Step 3.

3. Cheese
This should hopefully seem like an obvious one — of course cheese, a major component of all pizza, is fermented. Sadly, this is one you'll actually have to be careful with when you're shopping for ingredients. The go-to cheese for pizza for mozzarella, and most mozzarella cheese today is made quickly through an enzymatic reaction, rather than bacterial cultures. Traditionally, mozz was fermented as well, and this type of mozzarella is probably more flavorful too. When buying your mozzarella cheese, look for it to say something about "cultures" in the list of ingredients. If you aren't sure, I have no qualms with using other types of cheese. Softish cheeses like Monterey Jack (which is aged for about a month), work well.

Sidenote: it is curiously difficult to make cheese look appetizing in pictures. Which is weird, because cheese is the most delicious thing ever.

4. Toppings 
Add some fermented toppings. Get some veggies on there — you know, for your health. As you can see, I enjoy red onions, red peppers, and jalapenos on my pizza from time to time. Most veggies can be fermented just as easily as the tomatoes above.

5. Pepperoni
Oh, what's that? The most classic pizza topping of all is already fermented? My goodness, this is all just so convenient.

6. Bake That Pizza
You'll want to pre-heat your oven to 500 degrees in advance. Finish things off with some umami-packing Parmesan cheese or Balsamic vinegar, if you like. When the oven is ready, pop that pizza in and bake for about 10 minutes, or until the crust looks nice and crusty and the cheese is starting to form little almost-burnt bubbles.

Sorry, this pizza isn't pro-biotic. But if you eat a lot of fermented food as it is, not every meal has to be.

7. Pizza
Get yourself ready for the most savory, umami-rich pizza you have ever had. And it's totally fermented. Guys, when this whole crazy year is done, I just might open my own pizza restaurant. Or maybe... a brewpub that specializes in fermented pizza?

Hmm... this could go somewhere. Any capital investors out there want to get in on this?

And So Begins My Year of Fermentation

Hopefully by now you've caught my big news: that I'm living off of only fermenting foods for 2014. The book I'll be writing is (probably going to be) called The Fermented Man, and in addition to the longer write-ups I'm doing here at Bear-Flavored.com, you can follow along at my new Tumblr, www.thefermentedman.com. And as always, follow me on Twitter @bearflavored, or on Facebook.

Well, today was the day of reckoning, and so this crazy experiment is really now happening. I put my photography skills to the test over the last couple weeks and tried to document the journey up until now, which mostly involved staying up really late one night and cutting up a bunch of veggies. I won't be posting a ton of food-fermentation pictures (regularly) here on Bear Flavored, so if you're more into the visual thing, make sure to check in with that whole thefermentedman.com business.


Earlier in December, I spent a Sunday afternoon driving around to local farmer's markets and came home with a very nice bounty of veggies ready for fermenting. Food fermentation isn't really based on exact recipes like cooking — it's more of a general, adaptable process. Think two vegetables sound like they would be good 'pickled' together? Go for it. My cucumber pickles fermented alongside baby red potatoes may be super weird — don't know, but I'll find out soon.

My girlfriend Lena kindly helped me dice and trim veggies, which was very nice of her, because otherwise I would have been up the entire night. (I was still up until 2 AM, as it was, and didn't even finish everything.) While she got started on hard work, I enjoyed a California Lager from Anchor. It has a bear on the label, therefore: must buy.

An absurd amount of red cabbage went into this 1-gallon jug. With no advance plan of how much to make, I ended up going back to the store the next morning to buy a couple more heads of cabbage to fill the kraut up to the top.

 I had to do some pickles.

Some Napa cabbage, ready to be kimchi'd.

Fermented peppers, red onions, tomatoes, beets, and some other stuff.

Later today I’ll be trying them out. Fingers crossed they all turned out good, but there's enough fermented goodies in my fridge right now that a bad batch or two won't kill me. 

On Monday, the FermUp podcast had me on as a guest for their "New Year's Resolutions" themed episode. If you want to listen to me speculate about any possible super-powers I may develop, stumble / ramble as I attempt a succinct explanation of sour beer, and realize that there is a very real possibility some generous soul might ship fermented sharkmeat to my apartment so that I have no choice but to try it, give that a listen. And let me know how I did — it was my first podcast and I would be a liar if I said I wasn't a little nervous. After that, give the rest of the episodes a go too; there's lots of great info there on a variety of fermentation subjects.

Now, catching up to the present — I started my adventure on New Year's Day with a light breakfast of yogurt and coffee (black), got in a few hours of reading to prepare for my next round of ferments, and then, at long last, had my first fully-fermented meal of 2014. I kept things simple: bread with labne (a spreadable cheese that’s somewhere in between yogurt and cream cheese), Beemster goat gouda, Spanish olives, and naturally fermented pickles. Washed down with some homemade kombucha. All tasty, all impossible without fermentation.

Of course, this is only the beginning. Thanks for reading the blog in 2013; it proved to be a great year. I've got a number of new and exciting projects in the works for 2014. Here's to an even beerier, bearier, and fully fermented year!

Cheers!

The Awesome Symmetry of Self-Fermentation - And How It Applies To Beer

A couple weeks ago when I announced that I will be eating only fermented food in 2014 — which I will write a book about, as an insane experiment to educate people about fermentation — one thing I promised was that I would try to learn as much as I could from the weird and wild world of food fermentation and apply it to the world of beer... and vice versa.

Well, one thing already stands out to me — in fact the first thing that truly surprised me about food fermentation. I haven't come across an exact term for this process / phenomenon, so unless someone can point the right word out, I'm calling it "self fermentation" (maybe "self inoculation" works too?) What I mean by this: in the world of food fermentation, the matter being fermented very commonly is already host to the microbes best suited to ferment it. Most foods, introduced to an anaerobic environment, will ferment themselves. The ideal bacteria best suited to those flavors and conditions are already there; the fermentation creates its own best-case scenario. It really can't get any easier.

This fascinated me when I first read about it, because it is quite foreign from how we beer brewers approach fermentation. While cleanliness is always important, sanitation with products like Star San is almost unheard of in food ferments. Is it that we brewers are extra paranoid control freaks, or is it that the world of food and booze ferments are more of a Venn diagram than a free-flowing continuum? The more I thought about the concept of self fermentation, the more it made sense. Why wouldn't the ideal bacteria already be those adapted to live on a food? Nature tends to follow a certain symmetry, and perhaps it's over-thinking our importance to assume that fermentations are meant to taste good for our benefit. We are simply reaping the spoils of a natural mini-ecosystem. An Ouroboros.

But as always, I have to come back to beer. Why doesn't beer follow this self-fermentation trend? Or, to pose a(n easily solved) riddle: can it?

The big difference between beer and other ferments is, in my opinion, complexity. And this isn't meant to sound like a beer snob putting down everything else: making beer is simply more complicated than fermenting vegetables, or even wine, mead and cider. For starters, these other fruits and vegetables can be fermented in their raw state, with very little human engineering necessary. Beer requires malting and mashing to unlock the sugars necessary for fermentation. Very few other ferments include so many factors, ingredients, and variables of process to determine the desired flavor profile. Even down to the fermentation itself: if you are fermenting vegetables, you aren't really thinking about the characteristics of the bacteria fermenting them — they're simply there, and they either do their job or they don't. Yeast seem to express a lot more versatility in their flavor profile. Therefore one strain of the generally-desirable Saccharomyces genus may create unpalatable, medicinal off flavors, while a host of others will turn out beer that is pleasantly clean and fruity, or enticingly funky and wild. When fermenting vegetables, you will end up with the right bacteria as long as you set up certain conditions for the ferment. With beer, a lack of control is more a game of chance.

So, yes, brewers are control freaks, to an extent. But this isn't a devotion to chemical-cleaning paranoia: brewers have spent thousands of years crafts hundreds of styles of beer based on the dominance of unique local strains, and now, with the ability to put those strains into vials and send them across the world, we can recreate any beer from anywhere. These strains may now be "commercial," but they were not first born in a lab — they have grown with us. The microbial landscape is a war zone (or at least a very competitive game of Risk) and we have formed alliances with a small set of Saccharomyces strains. They don't have the killswitch enzyme that their siblings in the wine world possess. They don't have the ability to drown their foes in acid, like lactobacillus. We have made a bargain with them: they will create flavors never tasted before outside of beer in return for their own exclusive playground. It is a compromise, and a small betrayal of the natives of the land. But they were all natives somewhere.

Fortunately, microbes don't hold grudges (as far as we know...), and we are able to form new alliances whenever we want, to create a totally different beer from the very same ingredients. Saccharomyces is far from the only organism to ever play a role in beer fermenations, especially if we're talking about self-fermentation. Yes, beer can self-ferment, and you've probably already solved my little riddle if you're familiar with the style of Berliner Weisse. (You should be, I just wrote about it again last week.) In fact, many old European styles rely on lactobacillus. Gose, similar to Berliner Weisse but with the addition of sea salt, is even closer to the world of food ferments. Historic farmhouse ales of Belgium and France were likely slightly sour due to the presence of lactobacillus. And that's not even getting into the rich, varied world of lambic and aged-sour beer, which relies on a slightly broader set of a organisms and a technique closer to magic than self-innoculation. (Over time, the microbes terraform the entire brewery, and brewers rely on environmental innoculation. Though one could argue that the wood in which these microbes live is itself the self-perpetuating environment... a topic for another day, perhaps.)

Sure, a lactic beer fermentation fits right in with the acidifying fermentations of vegetables and the clabbering of milk into yogurt, but there's something really awesome about a beer ferment looping back into the Ouroboros, given the added complexity of process. Barley must first be malted and mashed, and only then came fermentation begin. But the lactobacillus will return, even after the grains have been kilned, settling in and ever-ready to make the transition from solid stable food into bubbling liquid. The grains will ferment themselves... sort of. Like I said, beer is complicated. But with any food, it is incredibly interesting to view the fermentation as a magnification, a looping echo of flavors, rather than some outside alchemical magic.

Also, I call dibs on the name Ouroboros for a Berliner Weisse. My lawyers are standing by. Sorry.