The Hooch is Ready

Thirty five years ago, I brewed several batches of beer, with mixed results. I recall sleeping upstairs, being awakened to exploding bottles downstairs after one of these batches was made. Fast forward thirty five years, and I'm back in touch with my inner bootlegger. When we harvested thornless blackberries a couple of months ago, I put three cups of them in a quart size Mason jar, and added sugar and vodka. I shook the jar daily. Today the berries got strained out, and strained again a couple of times more, and it was time to sample:

I'm very pleased. Very nice blackberry flavor, but also very potently alcoholic, without it being intensely sweet. We may have the technology to all kinds of things, but berries ripen at a certain time.They ripen when they're ready. Last night Diane and I stopped in at the Lowercase Brewery in the South Park neighborhood of Seattle, a fabulous neighborhood community gathering spot. They don't have a kitchen so there are only a few foods you can buy there. Instead, they encourage you to bring your own food. We brought with us a pizza from Napoli's ,a few blocks away. Lowercase brought us plates and napkins. Why am I telling you all this? Because it's hop season, and they had a fresh hop pale ale on tap, using hops grown a couple of blocks away. Sure you can use dried hops or pelletized hops to make beer all year long. But the local hops is ready to be harvested when it's ready to be harvested. The south Seattle/Kent/Puyallup area was once one of the largest hops growing areas in the world, until some hops beetles destroyed the crops, and the growing of hops moved to eastern Washington. But hops still grows quite excellently west of the Cascade mountains. They've more than likely nowadays bred hops plants to resist this beetle( I'm talking creating hybrid varieties, not GMO crops.). But the economics don't allow for it here. There's more money in building townhomes and strip malls. If it were up to me, some of these 900,000 dollar homes would be demolished to make way for hops farms. Old can be new again. The beer was delicious. The pizza was delicious. The blackberry liqueur( or whatever you want to call it. I'll just call it hootch.) is fantastic. The aronia berry hooch will be ready around election day. There's a lot of locally harvested stuff out there, fresh from the garden , wherever you are. Take advantage of it.