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Peach Melba Melomel

PMelbaW1Nellie Melba was one of the most famous opera singers of the Victorian Age. Such a colossal superstar was she that the esteemed chef Escoffier created for her a delectable dessert, Peach Melba, which he presented to the attendees of the Duke of Orléans’ grande fête for her on the back of a swan ice sculpture.

Peach Melba combines two flavors that are made for each other: peaches of course, and raspberry puree. Put these on vanilla ice cream, top with spun sugar, and you are in bliss of operatic dimension.

Peach Melba easily suggests itself to interpretation as a melomel, that is, mead flavored with fruit. It should certainly hint of sweetness, as Nellie Melba’s voice did, but not cloyingly, rather, surprisingly strong and clear.

As raspberries are intensely fragrant, they will dominate the nose of such a melomel, but will not overpower the taste of the peaches. The flavor of the honey should be something of an embellishment, as was the spun sugar atop Nellie’s dessert.

To this end choose a lighter honey, which can reliably be found among the selection of wildflower-based products from the Pacific Northwest. This example uses premium fireweed honey from western Canada, which had a lovely amber color and mildly caramel flavor.

The mead is lightly sweetened with wine conditioner to an off-dry state, leaving some tartness on the tongue, but with the very smooth finish created with three years of bulk aging. You can be sure this is going to come out for a spring celebration on the Vernal Equinox!

Tamarango: Tamarind Mango Soda

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In addition to the creative factor in selecting beverage ingredients for their flavor balance, it’s interesting to add an overall theme to the selection process. The following recipes establish a thematic spectrum that develops the “idea” or state of mind that the beverage expresses. Tamarango suggests a trip to the Tropics, where all of its ingredients are well-established culinary items.

The tamarind fruit is a common beverage ingredient there. It is actually a legume, not a berry. Tamarind trees originated in North Africa, but because of their value as food and a provider of building materials, cultivation has spread throughout the tropical regions. South Asia and Mexico are the two areas where tamarind is most popular as a food item; there it provides a sweet but tangy contribution to sauces, curries and beverages. It also forms an important part of the flavor of Worcestershire and steak sauces said to have originated in India.

The pulp inside the tamarind fruit is the edible part, but most types are very sour. A variety of tamarind has been developed in Thailand, however, that is quite sweet, and used for snacking right out of the pod. It is this variety that goes into Tamarango.
Sweet tamarind
Mango provides the second most prominent flavor component in the beverage. Indeed, it can be found sold as dried slices mixed with tamarind paste and dusted with sugar to make a sweet and sour confection.

The mango puree in this recipe is from the Ataulfo variety discovered in the Chiapas state of southern Mexico. They are seasonally available in Western supermarkets, and can be identified by their moderate size, lozenge shape and golden-yellow skin. While any well-ripened variety will work, this one is known for its exceptional sweetness (15-18 percent sugar), and lack of fibrous interior. Ataulfo mangoes are also quite aromatic. The larger Sindhi mango would be another excellent choice.

Galangal is a spicier relative of ginger, featured in many examples of Thai and Indian cooking. Galangal and lime juice tonic is well known in parts of Southeast Asia.
The wild herb epazote is a nod to the popularity of tamarind in Mexico. This weed is quite common throughout Mexico and the American Southwest, and adds a peppery, minty flavor to Tamarango.

Clockwise from top left: Tulsi Krishna, Tulsi Rama, Epazote

Clockwise from top left: Tulsi Krishna, Tulsi Rama, Epazote


Tulsi, sometimes known as Holy Basil, is a plant held sacred in Hinduism. It is known in Auvedic medicine for its ability to protect against the effects of stress on the body. The recipe calls for two varieties of tulsi, purple-leafed Krishna, with a peppery crisp taste, and Rama, with a mellower, minty flavor.

Top it off with a twist of lemon peel. Fantastic.

True Root Beer

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Eight roots, two barks, one leaf, and one seed pod make this one true root beer. Start with a root tea, sweeten and carbonate it, it’s as easy as that. True root beer has been around for millennia, but gathering roots and berries is too time consuming for the commercial producer–hence the renaissance of artificial flavor and color.

True root beer flavor can be tweaked to an infinity of preferences. Large portions of sarsaparilla and birch bark make a classic base. To this you add sassafras and wintergreen to establish the distinctive high notes. In between can be as many interesting and subtle flavor layers as you like.

The results will resemble the pop-shop stuff you remember. But as with crafted versus commercial beer, the flavor will surprise you with its complexity. It has been rumored to transport maidens into sublime repose.
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There are two parts to the root beer tea brewing process. First, simmer the roots and bark for 20 minutes and remove them from heat. Then steep the herbs for another 20 minutes. Strain the decoction/infusion into a pot, then add sugar. Heat the syrup to 70C, add vanilla pod, cool to room temperature, and freeze 150 ml in each 500 ml bottle. Top up with club soda.

Traditional home made root beer relies on baker’s yeast, with its low alcohol tolerance, to create the carbonation and umami taste of classic examples without fermenting out all the sweetness. It is true that yeast in the beverage provides a real roundness and fullness.

The problem with this method is that the carbonation results are very unpredictable. Gushing out of the bottle is almost inevitable, as baker’s yeast continues to slowly ferment over time, even under refrigeration. It does produce a great creamy root beer head though!

The club soda top-up method yields a mildly carbonated drink in the English style, with a minimal head. On the other hand, there’s no surprises when it’s time to crack open a bottle.

Blackberry Brojash

BlackberryWBrojash is an attempt to remember the seven ingredients of a full-spectrum soda: berry, root, oil, juice, acid, sugar, herb. Sometimes you just need an acronym. This soda brings the berry idea way forward, taking advantage of a sale on usually quite expensive blackberries.

The root in this case is the very mild astragalus, which provides a creamy, smooth background note. The oil comes from fermented cacao nibs, which offer a slight but noticeable chocolate cast, and Seville orange zest. The juice is also from Seville oranges, and it provides an acid tang. Raw cane sugar adds restrained sweetness and apple mint a diaphanous herbality.

Either fresh or frozen berries can be used, as the fresh ones are frozen anyway to help extract juice by breaking their cell walls. If they are fresh, they can be processed just before they start to turn overripe. They are pulped and strained to remove the seeds, and the pulp is macerated with the nibs, juice, and herb for 48 hours in the fridge. It’s heated to 65C and the sugar and astragalus are stirred in. The syrup is cooled and the soda is bottled with the frozen syrup method. Pour it over ice, stir it with a cinnamon stick, it’s a softly minty blackberry chocolate delight.

Junmai Jizake

SakeWThis is a sake made with only water, rice, koji, yeast, and lactobacillus culture. It is in a way a brew similar to beer produced under the strictures of Reinheitsgebot, the German purity law.

Traditionally, pure rice sake, Junmai-shu, has been made with rice that has had as much as half of its grain surface milled away. This process removes, in addition to the husk, much of the protein and fatty acids in the grain, which can contribute undesirable flavors to the finished beverage.

However, since about 2005 a specialty sake has emerged, known as Teiseihaku-shu. This style is made with rice that typically retains about 80% of its volume, producing a drink that presents more of the charateristic rice flavor. As the proportion of amino acids rises, the result is an increase in aminosan-do, the taste of umami or savoriness.

The example here is made from the short-grain rice variety Kokuho Rose, from California. This premium rice is mist-polished to remove bran dust, and is well-known for making excellent sushi. Steamed in the manner required for sake making, it comes out firm and tender without excessive stickiness. The addition of a lacto culture means that the brewer need not wait weeks for a natural souring process to take place in the moto starter, with the potential for infection by unwanted organisms.

The photo here shows the sake in a clear state, but it is actually nigorizake, that is, unfiltered. The cloudy grain particles have settled to the bottom of the bottle, but can be shaken up into suspension to provide the additional flavor and characteristic look of the style. As the clear presentation shows, this sake is slightly golden in color, a result of it having been aged for two years at cellar temperature.

Finally, this is a Jizake, or microbrewed sake. Obviously, because there are only six bottles in existence, it is among the most micro of the microbrews. Warning though, homebrewing sake is illegal in Japan, so if you’re there, take advantage of your proximity to those out-in-the-boonies sake microbreweries instead.

Gnomen von Zürich Starkbier

ZurichLagerWFor all the perception that “Zürich Lager” is something special to experience, it seems that most reviews of Swiss beer, at least those that refer to pale lager, report finding nothing special. From Lowenbrau Zürich, Quollfrisch Hell, Feldschlösschen, Calanda, Schützengarten, to probably a dozen more, the reviews go from “Swiss Bud Lite” to “nothing spectacular.”

I’ve only been to Switzerland once, and that was to Geneva, which, while beautiful, has a pretty nondescript beer scene. So what’s the deal with the legendary Zürich lager? Apparantly it all comes down to Hürlimann Samichlaus, a rare Christmas beer whose Swiss manufacture ceased in 1996. The gnomes of Zürich managed to cram an entire six-pack of flavor into a 335ml bottle, and at 14% ABV, there are still some cellared examples being consumed now and again to rave reviews. In 2000 the brand was revived by Austrian brewer Schloss Eggenberg.

Albert Hürlimann was a recognized expert in the scientific development of yeast, and his extremely alcohol-tolerant strain survives as White Labs WLP885. Equipped with a vial of this venerable strain, what is one to do who does not have the patience to wait three years for a lager to mature?

In this example, a brew of 16.5 degrees Plato starting gravity will turn out to be very drinkable in less than six months, finishing at 3 Plato with an ABV of about 7.2%. The beer starts with a hefty grain bill of lager malt, to which the brewer adds Munich, Vienna, Melanoidin and CaraPils specialty malts.

The Zürich lager yeast throws off a lot of phenolic flavor which comes through strongly in this beer, giving it a quality almost like a Belgian brew. It is a long, slow fermenter, and four to five months in the secondary is about the minimum necessary to bring the gravity down to a manageable level.

It is a very flavorful and full-bodied beer, and will improve with age for quite some time. I plan to keep a bottle at least another six months to see how it develops.

Barrel Body Winter Warmer

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I’m not a big fan of winter. In late October, scraping enough frost off the windshield to make a frozen Daiquiri, I’m dreading the ice to come. White Christmas is great. January skiing is fun. But as a California guy, by February I’m ready to go on a picnic.

That said, one thing that sustains me through the frigid season is Winter Warmer. A roaring fire, a good book, and a righteous, spicy ale make all the difference when the wind blows cold, the snowflakes fly, and the nights are long.

In the old days, folks could huddle around the barrel body of a pot-belly stove to keep warm. These days, even a gas log will do if there’s a fine winter warmer close at hand. Barrel Body Winter Warmer fills the bill.
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Barrel Body starts out as a pretty straightforward copper ale. A full grain bill augmented with lots of caramel and crystal malt is topped off with Melanoidin malt to boost the red color, and provide plenty of heavy mouthfeel. The recipe adds golden sugar and Belgian dark aromatic candi to raise the starting gravity and tweak the umami.

The baseline spiciness comes from cinnamon and nutmeg. To kick it up a notch, a hint of Voodoo Elixir in the secondary fermenter adds flavors of coffee, chicory, cubeb, gumbo, licorice, sassafras and sarsaparilla.

Safale US-05 ferments this one out full and dry. At about 7.9% ABV, Barrel Body Winter Warmer lives up to its name.

Hakkō Chairo Amazake

HardAmazakeWAmazake can be considered a “precursor” to sake. In sake fermentation, steamed rice starches are converted to sugar with the use of a catalyst named kome koji–fungus-infected rice; then the sugar is fermented using conventional saccaromycetes.

And as is with the unfermented barley-based soft drink Malta, there is a Japanese version using rice: amazake. Amazake is, theoretically, the sugary mash that is formed when the fungus A. oriazye saccarifies starches in the rice, but before yeast turns those sugars into alcohol. Amazake is refrigerated or consumed shortly after the conversion is comeplete.

However, if the mash is allowed to continue sitting at room temperature, it will start to bubble and fizz, as sugar is metabolized into alcohol and carbon dioxide. You get a mild sake anyway: hard, “Hakkō” amazake if you will.

If you make amazake out of brown (chairo) rice you get a drink that is much more flavorful than the traditional recipe that calls for glutinous white rice. Sweet glutinous white rice forms the key ingredient in the Japanese dessert “mochi.” This sweet rice is available in a brown version too, with all the more rounded umami flavor characteristics you would expect.

Because koji has fermented out all the sugar that is in a conventional amazake, this version adds back a bit of rice syrup solids to balance the tartness of the citric acid used to prevent wild yeast infection. The drink is back-sweetened, then pasteurized in bottles. Served slightly chilled, the flavor is a sweet-tart burst, balanced with umami flavors of toast, caramel and mushroom.

Triple Twichell

TripTwichWInspired by the type of strong Belgian brews known as “Dubbels” and “Tripels”, Triple Twichell takes the idea of a Mandarin/Seville orange soda and multiplies the amount of ingredients–except the water–by three.

As with the original Orange Twichell recipe, this drink blends two kinds of orange juice, and two kinds of orange zest with raw cane juice, ginger, Veronica spicata, and Sedona juniper berries.

The result is an intense, yet well-balanced soft drink that is bursting with flavor and orange aroma. The drink is made with a fruit syrup and herb infusion, finished with sparkling mineral water. It will improve noticably with an aging period of several weeks in the refrigerator. Aging allows the fruit pulp to settle out, and this can be suspended again with gentle agitation. Alternately, the drink can be carefully decanted off the settled pulp to provide a clear, golden yellow beverage.

Scott’s Revenge BC Brown Ale

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British Columbian brewers have been trying hard to establish a unique style of beer, in the shadow, alas, of the huge brewing scenes of Washington and Oregon. Those two states, in turn, have led with their own brewing evolution, against the mega-hopped IPAs of Southern California.

The trend in all three Northern areas has been to less aggressively bitter, but no less flavorful beers, including Northwest Pale Ale, with the characteristically citrus-flavored hop varieties now emerging from the Oregon/Washington growing region.

In the 1940s B.C. grew more hops than any other region of the Commonwealth. The Molson Export recipe of that time specified only “B.C. Hops.” But since 1997 or so, there had been almost no commercial hops grown in British Columbia. Recently, however, that trend is reversing, as the demand from craft brewing again makes hop growing a viable industry in B.C.

What does not seem to be occurring though, is the expansion of flavor sensations accomplished by full-spectrum recipe formulations. B.C. beers, though tasty, frequently lack complexity. Scott Beauchamp, manager and buyer at Nelson Liquors in Nelson B.C. has tasted a lot of British Columbia beers, and he agrees. That’s why I brewed a full-spectrum beer using B.C. hops, with him in mind: Scott’s Revenge. The color is really more of a dark amber to copper, and the aroma is dominated by malty notes, with very light hoppiness.

Scott’s B.C. Brown has plenty of caramel flavors from five grades of crystal, plus CaraAroma and CaraMunich malts. Chocolate and Black Prinz malts provide deep roasty flavors.

The hops were grown in Nelson, B.C. and consist of a blend of Nugget, Willamette, Fuggle and Golding varieties. They were lightly air-dried for a week before going into the brew in three additions. Safale US-05 fermented it out nice and dry.

Next season I will likely get a bigger Golding crop, and I plan to try this recipe again with wet-hop and dry-hop additions. Then Scott’s revenge against bland B.C. ales will be complete.