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Beers Made By Walking at Owens Farm

What another super day with the Greenbelt Land Trust and local brewers. I think I could get used to doing this every Saturday! Unfortunately I’d never make it to the Corvallis Farmer’s Market if I did, which would be sad because it’s where I get honey and salsa I eat straight from the container.

You may want to read this lovely piece in the Gazette Times:

• “A taste of home: Corvallis brewers tour Owens Farm for inspiration”

You may want to check back for more pictures:

• Yancy Faulkner, one half of the dynamic Hopstories duo, was on hand to take pictures with a real camera. 

This week we were led by an excellent botanist named Matt, who had a cute little baby strapped to his chest, appropriately named Owen. This also happened to be the name of the farm. Convenient for remembering things eh?

Who were the brewers? Phillip Lorenz from Nectar Creek Mead, gave us tons of good info on mead and honey. Joel Rea was also there with his cool ship, which had a honey and maltose mixture that he’d use to collect wild yeasts on our walk to use in a brew later in the summer. You can see the bucket below.

Finally, there were two guys from Sky High, Andrew Heaston and Paul Miller, who shared some details of beers they’d made using invasive weeds and other naturally occurring local plants.

Of course the silent star of the day was Beers made by walking, which I wrote about at length last week. We were at the Cole farm, which has a cool history.

Prior to settlement in the early to mid-1800’s, habitats at Owens Farm were much more open than at present as a result of frequent burning by the native Kalapuya people. Surveyor’s notes from the General Land Office survey of the area indicate that most of the site was occupied by oak savanna. Owens Farm has been used agriculturally since the 1850’s. Aerial photos from 1936 to 1969 show increasing encroachment by woody vegetation except in cultivated areas, eliminating nearly all prairie and savanna. 

Read more on the Greenbelt Land Trust page. 

Within the area we could see there were lands held by the Greenbelt Trust, the City of Corvallis, and Good Samaritan Hospital. They hope to have the entire area open with public trails, but for now the bulk of the properties are only open if you are on a guided tour like the one we were on. Yes we were VIPs.

I thought I took good notes as I was taking pictures, but when I tried to match up pictures with captions I realized my thinking didn’t match reality. If you see I’ve called a cherry a plum, just enjoy the blue sky. 🙂

We saw an “Indian plum,” which has a fruit that is initially bitter but has a nice follow up mellowness. It also has a big pit relative to the fruit flesh.

There are remnant orchards all over the valley, like this feral cherry with a lone piece of reachable fruit.

We headed into a native prairie, where the stars were glorious oaks and wild flowers like yarrow, checker mallow, heal all or self heal depending on how you know it, and Oregon sunshine daisies. The land trust staff tilled and planted native species throughout the property. It’s notable that many useful plants from the edible standpoint are actually native species, but it’s also notable that depending on the time of year these plants might have different tastes or be poisonous. So pay attention and do your homework.

We saw some wild currants, which don’t get a picture by me because the light was odd and the one I took looked like a mess of green.

The tree above got the introduction “this is cascara” and a follow up about Boy Scouts and diarrhea? Something about them using the smaller branches for roasting and the inner part having a compound that caused digestive distress? These trees bloom for a long time, slowly opening  through season, bridging the gaps between other plants blooming cycle. They have tiny white flowers that provide lots of nectar for bees. The result is a dark honey.

Also of note here are all the Armenian blackberries. Yes Armenian and not Himalayan, we’ve been giving them the wrong region of orientation. Blackberries in this space have a prolonged bloom because of shade and visiting bees, which is different from the plants in the city that ripen earlier and have a shorter life because of all the asphalt. Apparently the mead makers love the honey that comes from blackberries; it’s light and has a nice flavor. I didn’t take any pictures of the blackberries. It’s likely you all know what they look like.

As we ventured deeper into our walk we talked a bit about the oaks and their use in brewing. There are white oaks and other oaks. I was too far back to hear the details, but from what I did hear some woods make nice barrels or a nice addition in chip form to a brew, other colors make beer that tastes like band aids. I’d recommend doing research if you are a professional or home brewer who is reading this. If you read regularly you’d already know to check any brewing recommendations, but if you stumbled on this post know that I am parroting here and have never brewed anything other than coffee.

We saw a lovely filbert tree, which some might call by the fancy name “hazelnut.” I didn’t take a picture, but I did learn that there is a native hazelnut, which is much easier to identify earlier in the season by the tassels. Squirrels and jays love to carry non-natives into woods.

Another thing I didn’t get a picture of that was very cool were the non-native beetles they introduced to the area so they would eat the non-native St. John’s Root. The bugs were a lovely iridescent blackish copper color, but trying to capture the hue was a disaster, so just trust me that they were cool, and doing their job.

We headed back into an oak grove and talked more about restoration. This is a good time for me to pause and say, pointedly, that the work this group is doing to restore native habitats AND THEN SHARE!! with people on public hikes and walks is incredible. So go do your research! But finish this post first.

We saw some lovely snow berries. You’ll have to trust me because I didn’t take a picture because the lone berry was snapped up before I could snap a picture.

I did get this one of some yarrow, one of my favorite plants.

At some point we saw wild oats, but I didn’t get anything more than a reference to them in the past tense. I did get this picture of some native barley!

I also got this nice picture of heal all.

When we paused in the shade the brewers talked about when and how they would use some of these ingredients. Some are delicately flavored, and you’d need to put them in at the end of the boil or risk losing all the flavor. They might also put the flower or plant in the tank and then pour the boil directly over it.

Phil gave a good lesson on mead, starting by proclaiming that beer is harder because there’s more to make and to do with the process. With mead you just mix honey and water, and then you have your sugar water. But the next steps require more attention. Because there are no nutrients present in the sugar water mixture they have to “babysit” the fermentation. Apparently fruit can help out with this because it is a good source of nitrogen. They also add other organic items, but I didn’t catch any of them because I was showing a 2 year old those neat beetles.

Speaking of neat, have you stopped to learn how many types of honey there are? White clover and blackberry, sure, but radish honey and clary sage honey? Never heard of it. I learned that the big leaf maple trees can be tapped for sap/syrup when there are freezing nights and above freezing days. So a mead maker is tuned into the flowering plants, but also fruit.

Now I already admitted that I can happily eat honey out of a jar Winnie the Pooh style, but I tipped over the edge of geeking out when Phil started talking about how we can see each honey as a different variety – like hops – that has a different flavor or aroma profile. And because of that every flower produces a different color or flavor profile. He targets ingredients with the end product goal.

Switching to grains? Did you know that mead can’t use grain because of federal regulations? So while brewers have some control over residual sugar, it’s hard to control fermentation just with ingredients; add to that the chemical compounds in honey are really delicate. You can burn it, and while that might speed up the process or give you a more concentrated (maybe predictable?) sugar what you’ve really got is a flavor akin to molasses. Not subtle. To add another flavor level mead brewers use tannic or tart things to balance out the sweetness. This can be ingredients added or the barrels used.

Joel said that for him anything that’s edible is fair game. He judged a recent homebrew competition with an American pale ale wonderful combination of raspberry and smoked chipotle. It’s an exciting time to see what different people are doing because there is a lively market for different types of beers. Someone asked if there was an excitement about fringe? He said that in the 1970s the few breweries were producing two types of beers, but with the food renaissance we’re seeing wide range of flavor profiles in all foods and drinks.

When we got back it was time for a sample!

I’m sorry to report that I was talking during the description of Sky High’s offering, but according to random words I wrote it was a lemony beer aged in a used wine barrel that had housed a sour before. Lemon gosa? Is that a thing?

Joel’s homebrew was a “flavor of his garden.” Last year he put out his same bucket of sugar water, combining it with nasturtiums and other garden flowers for a peppery, light, delicate and refreshing brew.

The standout for me was the mead. There were two kinds, one a strawberry and cranberry that had white clover and white carrot blossom honey. The other was spicier, with nettles and ginger. Yum.

-Reposted with permission from OSU Curator of Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives and guest blogger, Tiah Edmunson-Morton. From her blog, Brewstorian- Oregon Hops & Brewing Archives posted on May 31, 2016 HERE.

Where, exactly, is the middle of nowhere? What is it?

“Not in or to any place; not anywhere,” if we’re to trust Google. Also: “a place that is remote, uninteresting, or nondescript.”

And that’s the key—distance from ourselves. To say somewhere is “the middle of nowhere” says nothing about its intrinsic properties—”nowhere” doesn’t exist on maps¹—but it does speak to its human properties. We dismiss a place as “nowhere” when we don’t see our values or history or influence in it.

Land isn’t “of a place” (somewhere) or “not of a place” (nowhere)—only we are.

If we understand conservation as an effort to re-value natural places, we could also understand it as a movement to erode the notion of nowhere—to include everywhere in our value systems, regardless of distance.

 1. If it did exist on maps, it appears certain portions of Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona all qualify, using distance to roadways as a proxy

Chris Bliss finding the notion of nowhere.

 

Reposted with permission from guest blogger, Chris Bliss. From his Gullies May 6, 2016 blog post HERE.