This is more beer than wine I suppose.
September 9, 2009
Chew It Up, Spit It Out, Then Brew. Cheers!
By JOYCE WADLER
Rehoboth Beach, Del.
SAM CALAGIONE, the founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Ales, has a taste for exotic brews. There is Midas Touch, created from sediment found on drinking vessels in the tomb of King Midas in Turkey, and Chateau Jiahu, inspired by trace ingredients from a 9,000-year-old dig in China.
But his latest seemed extreme, even for an extreme brewer. He planned on making a batch of chicha, a traditional Latin American corn beer.
And in order to follow an authentic Peruvian method as closely as possible, the corn would be milled and moistened in the chicha maker.s mouth.
In other words, they spit in the beer.
.You need to convert the starches in the corn into fermentable sugars,. the always entertaining Mr. Calagione said by phone from his headquarters in Rehoboth Beach. .One way is through the malting process. But another way . there are natural enzymes in human saliva and by chewing on corn, whether they understood the science of it, ancient brewers through trial and error learned that the natural enzymes in saliva would convert the starch in corn into sugar, so it would ferment. It may sound a little unsavory. ....
A little?
.The fact is that this step happens before you brew the beer, so it.s completely sterile,. he continued. .It.s boiled for over an hour..
Won.t it take an awful lot of people to create a commercial beer?
.We.re going to have an archaeologist and historians and brewers sitting around and chewing 20 pounds of this purple Peruvian corn,. he said. .You kind of chew it in your mouth with your saliva, then push with your tongue to the front of your teeth so that you make these small cakes out of it, then lay them on flat pans and let them sit for 12 hours in the sun or room temperature. That.s when the enzymes are doing their work of converting the starches in that purple corn..
Dogfish.s best selling beer is 60-Minute IPA, an India pale ale. But since its brewery opened in 1995, Dogfish has made a name for itself with storied, unknown brews. (Its slogan: .Off-centered stuff for off-centered people..)
.Liquid time capsules,. Mr. Calagione sings.
Mr. Calagione hoped to make about 10 kegs of chicha, which would be available only in his Rehoboth Beach pub, Dogfish Head Brewings and Eats. He was confident that his team would be able to process the 20 pounds of corn his recipe required in about an hour.
On an August evening, at 6, I joined Mr. Calagione at his pub, a few blocks from the beach. The restaurant was packed with craft-beer devotees, many of whom had traveled from out of state. A large window between the restaurant bar and the small brewhouse was covered with newspaper.
.We want to keep it quiet,. Mr. Calagione said. .The last thing we want is some guy who came in from Ohio sitting there with his $18 crab cakes, sees a bunch of adults spitting in their hands..
.Bunch of adults,. overstated it. Only two people had shown up: Dr. Patrick E. McGovern, the scientific director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Clark Erickson, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. McGovern was the force behind Midas Touch beer and has a book on ancient brewing, .Uncorking the Past,. coming out next month. Dr. Erickson studies agricultural systems of pre-Hispanic farmers in the Amazon region of Bolivia. He brought along a wooden goblet called a kero, a traditional drinking vessel in the Andes.
Neither man had actually seen anyone using the spit method to make chicha, but they.ve drunk a lot of chicha and they.re pretty sure the method is being used in South America.
The three men took their seats on upturned plastic pickle buckets in the brewhouse. Beside them was a large container of milled, dried Peruvian corn kernels, which despite their purple skin are a dusty yellow white inside.
As befitting a bold craftsman, Mr. Calagione took the first chomp, grabbing a small handful of corn and plopping it into his mouth. A small puff of flour escaped his lips. Mr. Calagione choked, concentrated and then chewed. After a few minutes, he removed a gravelly, purple lump from his mouth and put it on the tray. It resembled something a cat owner might be familiar with, if kitty litter came in purple.
The professors cautiously followed suit, taking smaller amounts. I did the same, in the time-honored journalistic practice of verifying the obvious: chewing milled, dried corn is like chewing uncooked oatmeal.
Mr. Calagione called for water, but drinking didn.t seem to help. .It doth thoak aw the moisthture out of your mawff,. Mr. Calagione said choking. Mr. Erickson saw another problem: .Ideally, it would be half the size of the grind. In the Andes you use a rocker mill, mortar and pestle..
Mr. Calagione sent to the kitchen for a Cuisinart and added water to the ground corn. The drone of the Cuisinart, combined with the chewers. problems enunciating while dried meal sucked moisture from their mouths, made accuracy challenging, but I.m fairly sure Mr. Calagione, who did much of the chewing, said the following:
.I fwy to thew id foroughly to make thaw I haf enuff to weth it aw thwoo..
.Would it be bad if I thed we bit off maw than we could thew? Heh, heh..
At the end of two hours, there were but two trays of salivated corn. We took a break for dinner in the pub.
At 9:30 p.m., it was back to the brew room. A weigh-in of the larger tray showed but 14 ounces of salivated corn.
.It.s dismal, I.m not going to lie to you,. Mr. Calagione said. .I.d say everybody is deeply, unpleasantly surprised at how labor intensive and palate fatiguing this stuff has turned out to be..
Mr. Calagione said he would call in his staff to help.
.I.m going to be the Tom Sawyer of chicha production,. he said. .I.m going to have a whole lot of purple painted fences. I.m going to pay $20, make that $25 a person, to mass produce chicha..
That brought in one more chewer . and from a brewing point of view, the meter was running. The two experts were now exhausted. Mr. Calagione, bent over his bowl, was stuffing larger handfuls of purple meal into his mouth. His hands and mouth were stained purple, purple meal was stuck on the outside of his mouth. He exhorted his chewers to keep chewing.
.I want at least the next fawty-five minutes of yaw best wouk,. he said.
.I can.t imagine how they ever did it,. Mr. McGovern said to Mr. Erickson.
.It.s the flour in your mouth,. Mr. Erickson said.
.Fwin waaaah!!!!,. Mr. Calagione shouted.
.What?. Mr. Erickson asked.
.It.s better if you drink water,. Mr. Calagione said. .I take a drink of water before every time I do it. It.s not as pummeling on my gag reflex..
At 11:02, even Mr. Calagione had to call it quits.
.I feel like I just tongue kissed everyone in this room,. he said, getting up.
The salivated corn output for the evening was 7 pounds, significantly less than the 20 Mr. Calagione had planned. He had a sore in his mouth. He was also forced to reconsider the commercial possibilities of chicha.
.The 20 pounds that we were hoping for was going to go into a five-barrel batch,. Mr. Calagione said. .If we went to production, the smallest tank would be 200 barrels.. He did the math. .We.d need 40 times this much. We would have to chew 800 pounds of this..
Nonetheless, the next day, the group continued with the brew, using unsalivated corn to make up the difference.
As the ingredients of the traditional recipe they were using included 190 pounds of barley and 150 pounds of yellow corn, as well as 30 pounds of strawberries, a cynic might consider the amount of salivated corn negligible in any arena other than marketing.
Ten days later, four bottles of chicha arrived in New York from the Dogfish brewery. The color was cloudy pink; the flavor was mild and vaguely fruity. But experts were required for a real test.
The musicians of Agua Clara, an Andean band whose members come from Peru, Chile, Ecuador and Japan (hey, it.s New York), were asked to weigh in. They were playing in Times Square on a hot day last week. They smiled broadly as the cool chicha was poured. Then they tasted it and three made faces.
.This is not chicha,. Angel Marin (Ecuador) and two others said, almost simultaneously.
.It tastes like beer,. said Yanko Valdes (Chile).
.It.s supposed to be sweeter,. said Martin Estel (Peru). .It.s not bad though..
Asked about the chewing and spitting method, Mr. Marin said that it was .old school . in the jungle..
He also made a suggestion: .You want chicha, you should go to Queens, or any Peruvian or Chilean restaurant..
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------------------------------
* Dr. James Ellingson, jellings(a)me.umn.edu *
* University of Minnesota, mobile : 651/645-0753 *
* Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *
September 9, 2009
The Pour
Pop Goes the Critic
By ERIC ASIMOV
WHEN the refined British wine writer Jancis Robinson joined the frenetic Gary Vaynerchuk last fall on his video blog Wine Library TV it was as if Helen Mirren had shown up on an episode of .Dog the Bounty Hunter..
As Mr. Vaynerchuk began shouting his greeting into the camera as if he were hawking cap snafflers at 3 in the morning, the ever game Ms. Robinson could not help but look appalled. But she hung in there, and together they began tasting wine in the informal studio above Wine Library, his family.s wine shop in Springfield, N.J.
As they sniffed a 2006 Ridge Geyserville zinfandel, or .took a sniffy-sniff. in Mr. Vaynerchuk.s parlance, Ms. Robinson said she detected the aroma of violets. Mr. Vaynerchuk said it smelled .very candylike..
Ms. Robinson grimaced.
.To me, candy is a negative thing,. she said. .Candy is something I get on cheap zinfandel..
.In my mind,. he responded, .candy, you know, depending on the candy, for example, Big League Chew or Nerds, could be tremendous, whereas candy I don.t like, like Bazooka Joe bubble gum, could be a problem..
Gracefully, Ms. Robinson changed the subject. But a significant audience in the wine world loves Mr. Vaynerchuk.s tune.
Ms. Robinson and her peers like Robert M. Parker Jr. and Wine Spectator may represent the apogee of the classic wine critic, issuing influential scores and opinions from on high as both arbiters and exemplars of the good life. But Mr. Vaynerchuk.s kid-in-a-candy-store approach may represent the future. Mr. Vaynerchuk, 33, has broken through class barriers in a way that no other critic has been able to, making wine a part of popular culture.
He.s appeared on Ellen DeGeneres.s show and Conan O.Brien.s, where, in the guise of educating the host.s palate to wine terms like sweaty, mineral and earthy, he sniffed Mr. O.Brien.s armpit and persuaded him to chew an old sock, lick a rock and eat dirt (topped with shredded cigar tobacco and cherries).
.You.re an idiot!. Mr. O.Brien exclaimed.
Perhaps so, but Mr. Vaynerchuk now has a million-dollar 10-book contract with HarperStudio that will focus on wine and marketing. And the wine establishment, which initially saw Mr. Vaynerchuk as a retailer with a novelty act, is taking note. In its July issue, Decanter, the leading British wine magazine, anointed him No. 40 in its list of the 50 most powerful and influential people in the world of wine.
.His influence is less as a style dictator than as a new media pioneer, showing how things can and will be done,. said Ms. Robinson, who said she had pushed for his inclusion in the Decanter list.
Few people had ever heard of Mr. Vaynerchuk in early 2006, when he posted his first episode of Wine Library TV on the Wine Library Web site.
Before long his high-volume, hyper-enunciated delivery, sprinkled with bizarre tasting analogies and unlikely stream-of-consciousness departures, had earned him a rabid Internet following, along with ridicule from detractors in the audience. He was called a clown and the Human Infomercial, whose over-the-top style was dumbing down wine. Yet his fan base kept growing. He estimates his audience for each episode of Wine Library TV (he.s just recorded No. 733) at 90,000 people, and he has nearly 900,000 followers on Twitter.
The numbers have made Mr. Vaynerchuk not only a wine industry phenomenon, but a social media superstar who.s being held up as a role model for using the tools of e-commerce to succeed in any business.
.Gary V. is a one-man social network,. said Paul Mabray, chief strategy officer for VinTank, a wine industry think tank and consultancy. .He has the ability to get other people to believe in his product, and act as a megaphone for his message, and he.s the only wine writer we.ve seen adopted by mass culture, like Ellen and Conan..
His persona is as much about marketing as it is about wine. His first book, due out next month, is an entrepreneur.s self-help guide called .Crush It.. Future books, Mr. Vaynerchuk said, will focus on a combination of wine, marketing and building one.s personal brand.
He hopes to extend his marketing reach beyond wine and self-help books. With his younger brother, A. J., Mr. Vaynerchuk has started Vaynermedia, a marketing agency with a small list of high-profile clients like the New York Jets (Mr. Vaynerchuk is a huge fan) and Jalen Rose, a retired N.B.A. player turned commentator. Not surprisingly, the Jets are now among the most Twitter-happy N.F.L. teams.
For Mr. Vaynerchuk, it.s been a most unlikely journey. He was born in Belarus and immigrated to New Jersey as a child. His father, Sasha, ran a liquor store, while young Gary honed his entrepreneurial chops, selling baseball cards, he says, and franchising lemonade stands.
After graduating from Mount Ida College in Newton, Mass., Mr. Vaynerchuk took over his father.s shop, Shopper.s Discount Liquor, and rechristened it Wine Library, which he has built into what he says is a $60-million-a-year business.
Mr. Vaynerchuk might well have remained a successful but anonymous retailer, but in 2006 he initiated his video blog, Wine Library TV. From his first hesitant episodes, all of which are archived on the Wine Library TV Web site, Mr. Vaynerchuk quickly gathered steam, unleashing his frenzied delivery. He began wearing wristbands and calling his program .The Thunder Show a.k.a the Internet.s Most Passionate Wine Program.. He draped his minimalist set with action figures of wrestlers and superheroes, dubbed his audience Vayniacs, and bedecked his spit bucket with decals of his beloved New York Jets.
The unlovely ritual of wine tasting, with its swirling and sipping, punctuated with the slurping noise of air sucked through a wine-filled mouth and culminating in a swift discharge into a bucket, is few people.s idea of attractive television. But Mr. Vaynerchuk embraced the unattractive, showing utter disregard for production values.
.Many people who I respected were disappointed when I started Wine Library TV,. Mr. Vaynerchuk said in an interview one recent morning. .They thought I was dumbing down wine, but I always knew I was one of the biggest producers of new wine drinkers in the world, and people are realizing it now..
Of course, such extravagant claims are impossible to establish, but Mr. Vaynerchuk.s audience on his Internet bulletin board certainly seems to have a higher percentage of novice wine drinkers than in the forums on either the Parker or Spectator Web sites.
While Mr. Vaynerchuk does not yet come close to Mr. Parker or the Spectator in his ability to move the wine market as a whole, his words do sell bottles. In an episode of Wine Library TV in February, Mr. Vaynerchuk raved about a Sonoma Coast pinot noir from Sojourn Cellars, a small producer.
.We took 500 e-mails and phone calls in 24 hours,. said Craig Haserot, an owner of Sojourn. .Nothing has put more people on our database and sold more wine than Wine Library TV, and it.s not even close..
Mr. Vaynerchuk.s appeal is rooted in his undermining of the old-guard mantle of authority and detachment that wine critics of older generations like Ms. Robinson spent years trying to achieve. In many reviews, he seems to subvert the established vocabulary for describing wine.
He begins with the usual jargon, talking about nose and mid-palate, describing flavors like apricot, buttered popcorn and lilacs, as many wine writers do. But then he departs from the script, saying a wine smells like a sheep butt or that drinking it is like biting into an engine. He might improvise a dialogue with a bottle of riesling, and when he talked about another pinot noir from the Sonoma Coast, a 2006 Kanzler, he seemingly went off the deep end in describing its flavor:
.You hit a deer, you pull off to the side of the road, then you stab the deer with a knife, cut it, and bite that venison, and put a little black pepper and strawberries on it and eat it, like a mean, awful human being. That.s what this tastes like..
Audiences love it.
.I immediately identified with his passion and enthusiasm,. said Dale Cruse, a Web designer and wine blogger who started watching early on. .But I think it.s worth noting that passion and enthusiasm isn.t going to get you very far in the wine world without some knowledge to back it up..
Indeed, Mr. Vaynerchuk does know his Pommards from his Pomerols, and he clearly loves wine and wants his audience to love wine, too.
.My mission is to build wine self-esteem in this country,. he said. .I want people to know their palate is a snowflake. We all like different things. Why should we all have the same taste in wines?.
Mr. Vaynerchuk.s own taste is very hard to pin down. He will say that his palate is very different from most people.s, and that given a choice between eating a bowl of fruit and a bowl of vegetables, he.ll choose the vegetables every time. He rails against .the oak monster,. which can make many wines taste like two-by-fours. He freely acknowledges that his palate has changed over the years, away from big fruity wines to more subtle ones, and said he expected his tastes to continue to change.
While Mr. Vaynerchuk has been lauded for making wine more accessible to younger people through his populist vocabulary, the real achievement of Wine Library TV has been to break down the barriers around the omniscient wine critic handing down thoughts from the mountaintop, and to include the audience in the critical process. As Mr. Vaynerchuk tastes and spits, his brain is seemingly on display as it begins to churn and the words emerge unfiltered from his mouth.
.My natural inclination to be improv rather than an educated character serves me well,. he said.
While Mr. Vaynerchuk has done well bringing wine to a wider audience, he.s done even better using wine to market himself. For now, he is looking ahead to new ventures, including the leap to Internet marketing guru. With his new company, Vaynermedia, he wants to market commercial products, people, teams and even sports like boxing.
.It.s about stories,. he said. .If I can tell the story to America, whether it.s riesling or a boxer from Harlem, it will sell..
He pauses. .I know on my gravestone it.s going to be, .Storyteller.. .
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* Dr. James Ellingson, jellings(a)me.umn.edu *
* University of Minnesota, mobile : 651/645-0753 *
* Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *
FYI
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In-Reply-To: <mailman.1.1252431370.38234.mailman(a)thebarn.com>
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 12:37:52 -0500
Subject: Fwd: The results of your email commands
From: Alicia Anderson <sauternes76(a)gmail.com>
To: "Jim L. Ellingson" <jellings(a)me.umn.edu>
X-Greylist: Sender IP whitelisted, not delayed by milter-greylist-4.0 (smtp-relay.enet.umn.edu [128.101.142.227]); Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:38:08 -0500 (CDT)
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I know you're busy with college kids, but if you have time to help me
with this that would be great.
Thanks and Cheers,
Alicia
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <mailman-bounces(a)thebarn.com>
Date: Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 12:36 PM
Subject: The results of your email commands
To: sauternes76(a)gmail.com
The results of your email command are provided below. Attached is your
original message.
- Unprocessed:
I just wanted to post a short note to the list about my dad, David
Anderson of France 44 Wines and Spirits. Tomorrow morning, Sept 9,
he's going in for heart-valve surgery at Methodist Hospital. This is a
necessary procedure and as much as the doctors assure us it's routine,
I hope you will think of him and project some powerful karma his way.
It is likely he will be in the hospital for 5 - 7 days and then home
for a bit, where Gretchen will drive him nuts until he can go back to
work.
My dad loves visitors, so please don't hesitate to visit/call, if you
have time. Please contact me for room or phone number information.
Thanks and Cheers,
Alicia Anderson
612.275.9120
sauternes76(a)gmail.com
- Done.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Alicia Anderson <sauternes76(a)gmail.com>
To: mailman-request(a)thebarn.com
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 12:35:39 -0500
Subject: David Anderson, my dad
Hey Everyone,
I just wanted to post a short note to the list about my dad, David
Anderson of France 44 Wines and Spirits. Tomorrow morning, Sept 9,
he's going in for heart-valve surgery at Methodist Hospital. This is a
necessary procedure and as much as the doctors assure us it's routine,
I hope you will think of him and project some powerful karma his way.
It is likely he will be in the hospital for 5 - 7 days and then home
for a bit, where Gretchen will drive him nuts until he can go back to
work.
My dad loves visitors, so please don't hesitate to visit/call, if you
have time. Please contact me for room or phone number information.
Thanks and Cheers,
Alicia Anderson
612.275.9120
sauternes76(a)gmail.com
----- End forwarded message -----
--
------------------------------
* Dr. James Ellingson, jellings(a)me.umn.edu *
* University of Minnesota, mobile : 651/645-0753 *
* Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *
