Beer

Beer.

Beer beer.

Beer beer beer beer beer beer.

Beer beer beer beer beer, beer beer beer beer beer beer, beer, beer beer beer.

Beer.

Beer beer beer.

The grocery store where I now (thankfully) work has a very nice wine aisle -- the only aisle in the store with faux wooden flooring, which makes me feel special -- and it has a fifteen-door beer cooler. Directly behind you as you stand facing the cooler is a wall of beer about 15 or 20 feet long, boxes of 6 packs and boxes of 12 packs and boxes of 18 and 24 packs, stacked higher than your head. Next to the wall of beer is a smaller tower of beer about the size of a sequoia in circumference, mostly 12 packs of specialty brews, and next to that is another tower of beer, perhaps 12 feet high, facing the deli. In close proximity is another tower of beer, of the same proportions, facing the bread aisle.

So I positively dreaded what had to come sooner or later, my first day spent restocking the beer cooler. I know nothing about beer, except how it's made, a little, because one of the first article titles I claimed for Demand Studios this past spring had to do with "using dry yeast to replace Hefeweizen yeast." And so I researched a bit into beer making then. (Originally I had hoped that title would lead me to learning and writing something about bread, of which I am not totally ignorant. No such luck.)

Anyway. Ten a.m. Saturday morning. Third day on the job. Make a list of what we're low on and restock the beer cooler from supplies in the beer walls and from the back room. Make sure to especially keep up with the "9 to 5" stuff, the Bud, the Miller, the Busch, that sells like hotca -- well, like beer.

Okay. I ended up with a list of forty or fifty items to restock, and then had the challenge of finding it all.

As the bloggers all say: Oh. My. God.

Who knew? I know that to make beer you start with malted grain and you mix it with water and add hops and you "pitch" yeast into the wort, and if you use top-fermenting yeasts you'll make an ale and if you use bottom-fermenting yeasts you'll have a lager, an invention of the 19th century and its concomitant technological marvel, refrigeration.

But the marketing? The packaging? Who knew? Oh my God.

Miller, Miller Lite, Miller Lite 6 packs, 12 pack bottles, 6 pack long neck bottles, 12 pack, 18 pack cans, 24 pack cans, Bud, Bud Light, Miller High Life, Miller High Life Light 24 ounce cans, Miller Draft, Miller Draft Light, Old Style, Michelob, Lite, Light, Draft, Draught, cans, bottles, 12 pack 6 pack 18 pack 12 ounce bottles 24 pack cans, Corona Extra, Corona Light, Coronita 5 ounce bottles 6 pack, Sam Adams Seasonal Ale Summer Ale Draft Light Lager Summer Beer Classic 12 pack, Mike's Hard Lemonade, Mike's Hard Berry, Mike's Hard Cranberry Lemonade, Mike's Hard Lime, Mike's Seasonal pink-ribbon-for-breast-cancer 6 pack. No kidding. It goes on and on.

I do believe I walked five miles yesterday in that store, just going back and forth between the cooler and the back room, learning beer. In short order, my list of What We're Low On became an exercise in nullity. There was always some detail re: beer that I had failed to write down on my list, necessitating my going back again to confirm matters. No no -- that's Miller Genuine Draft Light 12 ounce bottle 6 pack, plastic bottles. I even tried filling a shopping cart of random things from the back room and pushing that out to "the Floor," reasoning that some of it surely would be needed. No such luck. I had cleverly put my hands on everything we were not Low On. A young co-worker passing me in the back room looked down on me from his approximately eight-foot height, smiled and said, "Just walkin' back and forth all day, huh?" And I burst out, "Oh my God. I'm learning beer. I know nothing about beer. I'm doing this one 6 pack at a time ...."

Which I was. But, by golly, after about four hours of this -- plus keeping my eye on the wine aisle, helping customers, and setting up a wine tasting -- I began to understand beer. And when my boss returned to the store, by golly I had that cooler stocked to the doors with the "9 to 5" stuff. Then he finished stocking the more obscure products with me. Who knew that Beck's non alcoholic beer is called Haake on the shelf price ticket, but Beck's on the packaging? Why would any marketing department do that?

Oh my God. But at least the day is under my belt. Beer, beer beer beer beer, beer beer beer beer beer, beer beer.

Beer beer.

Beer.

Off I go

... and very lucky that the wine department of a local grocery store kept my job application for the better part of a year. Stocking shelves, part time, twenty minutes from home? You got it.

In which I, too, cook with Julia

Everyone came out of the movie (Julie & Julia) marveling at being "so hungry ... just starving." We went out to eat at our new favorite local restaurant, a Middle Eastern/Mediterranean place that specializes in lamb-stuffed grape leaves, fried kibbeh, shish kebabs, and baklava. And Turkish coffee, which is the closest I get to cardamom. By itself cardamom is $14 a jar at the grocery store.

The next day I took out my French Chef Cookbook -- I don't have the actual opus, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, though I promise I will soon -- thinking I might find a nice simple chicken recipe, quick to prepare on a hot summer day.

I found it. The first recipe in the book is for Supremes de volaille a blanc, chicken breasts poached in butter with wine and cream sauce. In the movie Amy Adams says, in a voice over as Julie Powell, that when you cook along with Julia Child, you cook with butter. And butter. And more butter. She's right, and what is odd is that it must be the butter and cream that make the dish. That, and the cooking of the meat just a point, just to the point of perfect doneness. Not that I got there, but I came pretty close. Those two factors must be the source of the flavor. Otherwise, they were just chicken breasts.

You begin with 4 supremes, half chicken breasts taken from a 2 to 3 pound chicken. In the 1960s, when Julia was buying provisions to cook on television, I suspect these were fairly small pieces of meat. Today, chickens are raised to mature as fast as possible with breasts as big as possible -- I seem to recall my brothers, who work in the wholesale meat business, telling stories of chickens ready for market 6 weeks after being hatched, and of their breasts being so big that the birds can't stand, but topple over from the weight. What manufacturers want, ideally, is an egg that just hatches fast growing, no maintenance breast meat, and they've nearly gotten their wish it seems. Not that they are some sort of bad guys. This is what consumers want, too.

Anyway, I bought the usual skinless boneless chicken breasts, modern, large, and lumpy, and I bought enough for a family of five. Already I was anticipating having to quarrel with Julia over her cooking time for these supremes. Six minutes in a 400 F oven, after a brief "roll" in hot butter? I don't think so.

You rub the meat with drops of lemon juice, some salt, and white pepper. Then, you heat 4 Tablespoons of butter in a heavy casserole until it foams, and quickly roll the breasts in the butter. Lay a circle of wax paper over the meat, cover the casserole, and put it in a preheated 400 degree oven.

This is the first time I did actually cut a piece of wax paper to fit a pot, and use it according to directions. I am not sure what good it does. Logic would suggest it helps steam the meat by acting as a much more close fitting lid than the pot lid can be.

Julia advises checking the meat for doneness after 6 minutes, and giving the breasts a minute or two more if they feel "soft and squashy" to your fingertip. For my part, I go in terror of undercooked meat, and so don't trust any old fingertip but must cut even supremes open at their thickest part to see if they are done. And I don't trust "carryover heat" to finish the job, either. All told, my 21st century supremes needed 16 minutes to finish, not six.

Upon removing the chicken to a warm platter, address yourself to making the sauce. Simply boil up the juices until they begin to thicken and reduce, and then pour in successively 1/4 cup stock, 1/4 cup wine, and finally 1 cup heavy cream. Boil and reduce away -- that's the cream reducing in the photo above. I must admit I cheated when it came to the stock and the wine. On hand, I had neither stock (not even canned broth), nor port, Madeira, or vermouth. I used the dregs of a bottle of an interesting but inexpensive white Rioja, and no stock at all.

But the cream -- ah yes, the cream. There it is. Add the last few drops of lemon juice to it, plus something green -- Julia says parsley, I had fresh tarragon -- and taste a spoonful, just like a professional, just like the characters in the movie. When you watch people tasting things in food movies, you might be skeptical there in the dark and think, for heaven's sake, how different and revelatory and sublime can it be? My cream sauce was not sublime but it was very good, and revelatory in a small way. After all, these were just chicken breasts, but my goodness, my goodness, yes, there is a way to do this right.

(Our wine for dinner was another grocery store selection, a bottom-shelf sauvignon blanc from Gallo's own Barefoot Cellars.)

Non-French killjoys, the veraison, and my new club -- more random thoughts

Not only in France are the killjoys at work, pulling shocked faces at the union of rose petals and champagne in advertising art. In Alabama, it seems, they don't like pictures of naked ladies with thick streaming red hair flying through the deep blue cosmos beside winged bicycles -- on wine labels. Like so:



(Image from the Wine Spectator website.)

Heaven knows what the wine, a cabernet sauvignon called Cycles Gladiator from Hahn Family Wines in Soledad, California, tastes like, but the Alabama Beverage Control Board has banned its sale. It used not to, oddly enough. I take a sort of proprietary interest in the label because I've seen it before. It used to be offered as a framed poster through a gifts, curiosities and home interiors catalog, Wireless or Signals perhaps. Originally the artwork served as a late 19th century French bicycle ad, and a smashing one, too, in my opinion. Leave it to the French of the Belle Epoque to sell bicycles via naked women flying through space. This must have been before an unpleasantly powerful, and thirsty, minority among them became killjoys.

It's time for the veraison in Missouri, as seen in the picture at A Day in the Life of a Missouri Winery. The veraison occurs when the grapes begin to soften and change color as full ripeness and harvest approaches. These grapes are seyval blanc, a French-American hybrid.

And, as Captain Jack Sparrow says in one of his less twitchy moments in Pirates of the Caribbean, "I'm havin' a thought." I think I'll start a club, right here in this space.

Still thinking of the Decanter story about the Champagne producer Moet & Chandon having to pay a big fine for devising an ad campaign juxtaposing images of pink rose petals with wine -- it's illegal, apparently, in France to gull consumers into believing that alcohol, beauty, and pleasure may go together -- I've decided to throw down a pink gauntlet. Preferably velvet, and embroidered. Incidentally, this story of the fine and the anti-alcohol lobby "jubilant" about it does date from January of 2008, but I like to think that At First Glass, like the mills of God, "grinds slowly but grinds exceeding small." I've decided to seek out, make, solicit, publicize, and otherwise celebrate, from time to time, just such promotional images, anything which slaps a wine glass or bottle out there, next to a pretty woman or flowers or crashing waves or whatever, and says Yes by gum, maybe it does equal "a euphoric approach to life." I call my new club the Pink Rose Euphoric Wine Imagery Anti-Killjoy Defiant Seduction Club (and Virtual Gallery), or PREWIAKDSC (and Virtual Gallery).

Please feel free to submit images. Notice, our acronym is longer and cooler than ANPAA (Association Nationale de Prevention en Alcoologie et Addictologie). Mind you, I have nothing against the good work of fighting human addictions, which are serious. But to ban the appearance of pink roses? Because it might trick somebody into thinking wine is nice?



No.

The Pink Rose Euphoric Wine Imagery Anti-Killjoy Defiant Seduction Club and Virtual Gallery begins here.

Old news, and French killjoys -- a few random thoughts

We have a large used bargain book warehouse nearby, where I like to go and shop sometimes. It's just next to the empty "big box" storefront which used to be a Sam's Club, until the Sam's Club left town to re-establish itself in the next town down the street, which has lower taxes -- now there's an interesting concept. I believe it was Margaret Thatcher who said, the facts of life are conservative.

Anyway, at the book warehouse I picked up a copy of the Wine Spectator from January of 2009. It's a good issue to keep, for it has a list of "the most exciting wines of 2008," specifically the Top 100 wines of the year, plus "our guide to great champagne." I am glad to tell you that the best wine of the year, for the Spectator's editors and writers, was Casa Lapostolle's 2005 Clos Apalta, a traditional Bordeaux blend of carmenere, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and petite verdot from Chile's Colchagua Valley. If you see it, expect to pay $75 per bottle; but more good news is that there are a few wines of $17 or $18 on the Top 100 list, and even one of $12 (Leasingham 2007 Clare Valley riesling, Australia). One wine on the list has earned the full, the magic 100 points -- Chateau L'Evangile Pomerol, of course a red Bordeaux (merlot-cabernet franc), and from the glory year of 2005. Expect to pay $260 a bottle, but expect not to find it, either.

I thumb through the Spectator, and at the risk of sounding snarky I wonder who finds this overwhelmingly rich and informative magazine really useful, coming out as it does twice each month or so. This one issue, perhaps so well stuffed because it dates from the end of a year, would suffice as a study guide for me for a year. Score after score of wine reviews, never mind the profiles of wine industry giants who have taken on new and exciting positions Here, following upon well known fifty-year careers There, and even the ads, some of which are breathtakingly beautiful, amount to little lessons (what is "fleur de champagne"?). I can only surmise that the magazine serves mostly as a shopping guide for very knowledgable people who have a monthly wine budget, and want fresh advice on the best value purchases for the next fortnight's next fifteen or twenty bottles -- or cases, possibly.

This particular issue also features a little story, in the front-of-book Grape Vine column on page 14, about the French postal service yanking from circulation a lovely little stamp "personalized" for a wholesale wine distributing company called La Compagnie des Vins. (I gather it would be as if Southern Wine and Spirits had its own, legal and usable United States Postal Service postage stamp. Now there's a moneymaking concept ....)

The stamp's artwork shows a colorful, pretty, cartoon like woman, a sort of female Caravaggio Bacchus only less overripe and sinister looking. She looks out at us happily, wearing her crown of yellowing grape vine leaves, deep blue grapes dangling at her rosy cheeks. She carries a glass filled with red wine just near her pretty red lips. The background is lime green and stark black, at once modern and cheerful.

La Poste pulled it, "deeming it illegal, right up there with images of war crimes and pornography." The manager of La Compagnie des Vins is quoted as saying " 'in the current climate, winemakers or merchants are considered more dangerous than cocaine dealers.' "

What current climate? For some time now, bloggers and writers have been noting uneasily and perplexedly that France -- Lord have mercy, France -- has an anti-wine movement which seems to hold the whip hand over the French government. Winesooth wants to know why. Tom Wark at Fermentation suggested his own simple plan to destroy the French wine industry more efficiently. He was referencing a story from Decanter, one of many, about a potential law that would have actually forbidden wine tastings in the country. When directives policing wine consumption and advertising do pass into law and are enforced, it's France's main temperance group, the Association Nationale de Prevention en Alcoologie et Addictologie, that exults. They "were jubilant," for example, in 2008 when Moet & Chandon were fined 30,000 euros for running an ad campaign in which a champagne bottle appeared next to some pink rose petals, evilly uniting images of alcohol with beauty. Holy smokes, we can't have that.

The Brenner Vineyards Historic District, Doniphan County, Kansas

A friend who collects stamps and other interesting documents recently gave me this, an envelope or "cover." Inside is a wine order written in English on a German language form. Destination: the Jacob Brenner Wine Company of Doniphan, Kansas, May 1904.



The customer, John Gruenewald of Wayne R.F.D. Q. (?) Nebraska, ordered ten gallons of Red Seal at $5.35, "extra packing" for 25 cents, and requested "wine corks not to (sic) big" for another dollar. Grand total, $6.60. Incidentally Mr. Gruenewald also had that excellent handwriting which bespeaks the epoch of fine-nibbed fountain pens and painstaking schoolboy classes in penmanship.

I hedge my bets and say it appears to be a wine order only because how can I know, before doing some historical digging, the intent of the customer confidently filling in a German language form? What with the corks and the packing and the gallons wanted, it looks as if the customer might have been ordering wine making supplies, not potables for his cellar.

But no. How remarkable are the tools which the modern world -- only a little more than a hundred years after Mr. Gruenewald placed his order -- gives you for historical digging. I have only to click "new tab," and open a few windows, and there laid out before me is the history of the Jacob Brenner Wine Company.

The Brenner family, led by brothers Adam and Jacob, arrived in this extreme northeastern corner of Kansas (here it meets the states of Iowa, Nebraska, and Missouri) from Deidesheim, Bavaria, in 1857 and 1860. The federal census for that latter year lists Jacob Brenner as a grape grower. Adam and later Jacob's son George would all settle down to the wine trade virtually in each other's backyards for years.

Strangely, though, the Brenners unknowingly arrived and began to farm, build houses, and sponsor churches just when the local town, Doniphan, began a long and irreversible economic decline. Only founded in 1852, the town seemed beautifully situated for both agriculture and commerce: its farm lands were rich, it stood right on a bend of the Missouri river handy for river transport, and after 1870 it was a stop on the Atchison and Nebraska railroad -- also a good thing for grain transport. Adam Brenner built an $18,000 grain elevator at this time, which tragically burned to the ground in 1872.

But Doniphan's main problem seems to have been simply that there were other, bigger towns nearby, to which businesses and populations naturally gravitated. Atchison, Leavenworth, and St. Joseph, Missouri, all beckoned. Still, human lifetimes and perspectives are short in the great scheme of things, and from the 1860s through the 1890s, the Brenner family did well by its wine, as Doniphan with its new grain elevator did well by the Brenners. Adam and Jacob each ran separate enterprises. For a time Adam owned the biggest vineyard in the state of Kansas (75 of his 450 acres), plus a warehouse on Main Street in Doniphan that held 30,000 gallons of wine. Jacob planted 15 of his 40 acres to vines, and a generation later, in the 1880s, his son George also planted about half his land to grapes and owned a cellar with a storage capacity of 10,000 gallons. They grew native North American species, like white and red Concord, catawba, Salem, Virginia Seedling (this is the excellent Norton or Cynthiana), and more obscure varieties with names like the Taylor Bullit, the Goethe, and the Martha. Brenner wines shipped throughout the Midwest and as far as the east coast. A reporter from the Doniphan Herald sampled the product and wrote about it in May, 1872:

"We visited the wine cellars of the Brenners this week, and to say that we enjoyed the sparkling fluid from the 1,000 gallon cask, would not half express our delight in that visit. Such delicious wines are not found elsewhere in the United States. Those Brenner wines are getting a reputation not to be excelled anywhere in the country. Hermann has heretofore claimed the laurel in wines, but Doniphan now so far surpasses her in quality that Hermann must stand aside. It will be observed that the wine went to the Herald editor's head in short order."

This was eight years before Kansas passed an amendment to its state constitution forbidding the manufacture and sale of alcohol, except for medicinal or sacramental purposes. The Brenners' wine businesses survived after 1880 partly because they promoted their product as medicinal and sacramental. (Being surrounded by wine-loving German immigrants may have helped.) By the mid 1880s, when Atchison newspapers warned travelers of Doniphan's poor roads and "unsuitable" river landing, the Brenner vineyards had become the sole bright spot of the area. The family still employed masses of schoolboys during harvest time, so many that Doniphan schools did not reopen until late September; in the best years the Brenners turned out 150,000 gallons of wine a season.

Adam Brenner himself left Doniphan for Atchison in 1885. He died there five years later; his brother Jacob died the following year, in February 1891. Four months later, on one night in June 1891, the Missouri River rose, flooded and completely silted Doniphan's railroad yards, and then retreated to a new channel, leaving the town landlocked as well. (This is precisely what Mark Twain describes the Mississippi doing, with equally appalling randomness, in Life on the Mississippi.)

In the next two years, as if throwing down a gauntlet at fate, the second Brenner generation, cousins who were the children of Adam and Jacob, founded two new businesses, the Jacob Brenner Wine Company and the Doniphan Vineyards Wine Company. Both lasted about twenty years or less. The Jacob Brenner Wine Co., from which our John Gruenewald ordered his Red Seal in 1904, was liquidated in 1912.

By the 1930s and '40s, the Brenner properties had passed out of the family's hands and into the ownership of other people, who farmed and raised new families there. Early 21st century Doniphan, Kansas has a population of about fifty.

All this information comes from the application, addressed to the U.S. Department of the Interior in 2004, to place the Brenner Vineyards of Doniphan County on the National Register of Historic Places. The application was researched and written by Susan Jezak Ford, a Kansas City architectural historian and historic preservation consultant, who was herself hired by the Doniphan County Heritage Commission after they had received a grant from the Kansas State Historical Society to explore a preservation project in the county. As she points out, the old vineyards themselves are not a part of the Brenner Historic District, since they are now devoted to other agriculture. The "contributing" properties are a church, a two-story winery building, a barn, corncrib, and pump house, a smokehouse, and the ruins of Adam Brenner's house and winery. All comprise about five acres of land west of the town of Doniphan, on bluffs that "once descended to meet the Missouri River." Ghostly residents of Doniphan, if they could come back from that June night in 1891, would probably grimly whisper would that it were so.



Photo courtesy Susan Jezak Ford

The Brenner Vineyards Historic District was approved and added to the National Register in 2005. Hermann, Missouri, which "had heretofore claimed the laurel in wines," is located about 270 miles east across the state of Missouri, and constitutes a major midwestern American Viticultural Area or AVA. Stone Hill Winery, established in 1847 -- ten years before Adam Brenner arrived to become "the father of Doniphan" -- lies in the Hermann AVA.

And Mr. Gruenewald's order lies on my desk. I hope he enjoyed his ten gallons of Red Seal.

"Frenched" green beans

So that's what it means. From Madeleine Kamman's When French Women Cook.



You use a vegetable peeler to strip away the unpleasant string of the green bean. It exposes the seeds inside. This is why, in pictures on bags of frozen green beans, and in pictures in old cookbooks, properly prepared beans look as though they have those strange oval-shaped holes along their sides. Who knew.



Drop them in boiling water, and boil vigorously, uncovered, for 6 minutes. Madeleine Kamman says that, too. Perhaps a minute more if they are quite thick, but you will want them thin and in season anyway, in late spring and summer. (I will take oath that truckloads of them are being put in cryogenic storage right now, to be brought out looking remarkably good, but a tad chewy in the mouth, at Thanksgiving. Otherwise no bean in its right mind should appear fresh and piled high in supermarket bins in late November.)

Drench them in butter, a squirt of lemon juice, and plenty of salt. They will accompany anything. Their own perfect vinous accompaniment -- a sauvignon blanc from New Zealand, surely?