All About Brewing

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#1

Birch tree tapping.
No tips on how it was done in the spring, but I learned of this from a Finlander years back!
I think he simply tapped the trees like you would with a sugar maple.
(Do you have sugar maple in Slovenia ?)

It makes a wonderful adjunct to beer.
You should be able to source a local Hops similar to Saaz
Very soft spring water to brew with, and some light malt.
You can also improvise and if you have some dark rye bread ends too stale to eat add this to the mash ( czarny clehb )

The birch sap adds a smoothness that compliments the aromatic hops and the rich toasty flavours from the black bread…
Laggar it of course ( you will need an active cold fermenting hops starter )

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Working toward food self sufficiency
Discovering my freedom in Minnesota
#2

No sugar maple in Slovenia. But if someone is willing to sell seeds l am willing to buy them.

Ha, good idea on beer. There is a fellow in the souther part of the country that botles the sap, sells it with sucsess.

Btw, that czarny clehb, what language is that from? Becouse in Slovene ÄŤrni hleb (reads about the same) means black bread.

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#3

Just FYI. It takes about 30-40 years for the tree to be big enough to tap without killing it.

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#4

I know, but l have kids :wink:

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#5

Thanks for the kind words Kristijan. I had 4 kids and a business when I lived in the city. Once all the kids were grown, we moved up here. It wasn’t planned that way. This property just fell into our lap. The timing was perfect.
Birch syrup. We learned a lot this year because it was our first time. The most important thing to remember is to never let it get over 190F. It has different sugars that are suspeptable to burning. So you never want to let it boil. Some say you can do it in the beginning, I say you can still taste burnt sugars in the final product. Slow and easy. I bring it to the same brix as maple syrup. The finish product won’t be as thick as maple syrup but then again, birch syrup isn’t for pancakes. Birch syrup is a flavor enhancer for meat such as salmon, chicken or pork. It would also be good in a vinegrette salad dressing. It was a big hit at the farmers markets. It did not last long at all. My wife didn’t like the taste of the birch syrup until I put it on some pork chops 5 minutes before they were ready to come off the grill. Then she thought it was amazing.

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#6

I have read that it tastes great. However, it takes 110 to 200 gallons of birch sap
to make 1 gallon of birch syrup. Yah, it’s expensive as hades!

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#7

I really appreciate this attitude. We are losing it here in our culture I think. And the next generations will not have the benefits that we had from our previous ones. Good thinking K.

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#8

That’s Polish.
Polish Ukrainian are real close in some respects.
In Ukrainian its almost the same but bread ends in a long A sound and black uses a different vowel… “Charna klib”

Bread in your beer is a really good idea though.
If you decided to do any brewing.
Very common with northern Slavs to make beer and fermented beverages with fruit or bread instead of soft drinks ( this was in past and I don’t know what people drink today ).
Little alcohol but just a light carbonation.
They make a lot of very sweet wines fruit wines in Georgia but you have to have a taste for it.
My sister In law Yana was one of the few people I know that liked that stuff so I used to might some sweet honey wines for her.

Pretty much anything you can taste the sugars in or that have easily convertible starches like bread can make some very nice refreshing beverages even if they are low in alcohol they still taste good ( but do not keep very long ).
I know some home brewers here in Canada that use bread now too.
It’s a trendy and cool thing up here.

You must have a perfect climate for fruits and I bet there is all kinds of fruit wines and beers you have up there I would love to talk about.
Not a beer and brewing forum though.
I don’t want to hi-jack this thread.

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#9

I’d gladly eat all the copperheads. Just glad they aren’t around to bite my kids or dog… :relaxed:

There’s a saying, “A wise man is one who plants trees whose shade he will never enjoy” Our lives are short, but life goes on eternally.

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#10

Maybe someone should start a thread about brewing. I have done a little of it myself , and would be interested in what what some of you guys have to say. Larry

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#11

33 years alcohol free, but that’s just me.

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#12

Good idea Larry, we culd ask @Chris to split this one.

Wallace, you speak those languages? Yes all slavic languages are more or less similar. We can understand each other loosely.

I always wanted to try the Kvass. Never got to it thugh. Thanks for the reminder.

Indeed, Slovenia has a rich brewing tradition. The most traditional drink is JabuÄŤek, hard apple cider. This was the everyday isotonic energy drink people drunk working hard. And in vast quantitys. When men went to scythe the hay fealds they took 5l of jabuÄŤek and a sausage with them, drunk it all till the work was done but no one was drunk.
The drink is nothing near in taste of what l have tasted anywhere else thugh. Its made out of some specific Slovenian apple vorietys and a wery important ingridient, wild apple. This added some bitternes and acidity but mainly acted as a preservative.
The traditional way of drinking JabuÄŤek is pour in a glass and throw in a pinch of baking soda. It fizzes and sligtly carbonates it as well as destroy some acidity.
Ofcorse fruit spirits are traditional too but thats a different story.
the wine grape became popular somewhere in the midle ages and is now a importat part of the economy. A wineyard and a cellar is a must in allmost every household.

I have a planted a small vineyard too and hope for a first crop this year. However l must expand it a lot more.

Personaly I like the traditional vorietys, some wild grape desendants and crosses between European and American winegrape. They produce rich wine with a wery low alcohol content (7-10%) and do not require any petrochenical treatment. Every other fancyer voriety requires spraying with poison every other week. One you might know is Clinton, a American voriety. I have about 100l of it in the celar at the moment. And about 700l of a nother red blend of old vorietys wine.

I make apple cider too, have it about 400l on stock.

I used to brew a lot of beer. But l do not have a suitible cellar yet so fermentation was a chalange and about 3 years back l had to discard 3 baches in a row, 150l of beer all together becouse it went bad. I decided not to try again till l finish my root celar.

Personaly l like ales. A rich lightly carbonated ale is a great companion at reunions and partys, but for thirst and everyday use l brew black lrish stouts. Low alcohol, no carbonisation.

I did want to make Chinese plumb wine this year but culdnt find the time. When l did the plumbs were on the ground already and only good for schnaps.

Allso, mead is on the list for this year.

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#13

That’s awesome Pepe! 32 years free of alcohol for me.

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#14

> Wallace, you speak those languages? Yes all slavic languages are more or less similar. We can understand each other loosely.

No not really.
I speak food and drink and a lot of swearing.

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#15

Haha the swearing part got me laughing :smile: yes we slavs have a rich repertoar of swears beond limits of imagination :smile:

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#16

Looking at your post I picked out this.
“traditional drink is Jabuček, hard apple cider”

The word jabucek reminds me of the polish word for Apple. (
jabłko ).
The old Latin letters and accents make reading and trying to sound out for me.

Cyrilic I find is easier.
Serb Seems to follow the same rules and most of the same letters of the alphabet as Ukrainian.
I often get tripped up is a letter like Đ“.
How will the local dialect use it?
Will it be Ge or He?

Language shifts with time.
A good Ukrainian friend of mine will sometimes say something to me in his mother tongue and I will try and reply if I understand ( very questionable most of the time unless what he says is very simple ).
In my response he will find a Polish word or pronunciation, or an archaic word not used anymore.
Or he will just cringe and laugh at my response.
Even this is still extremely useful when we want to communicate a simple idea in in a morning meeting where we are mostly with people that speak English/French and maybe Finnish.
He can say a nasty word or mock a stupid boss and we can chuckle to ourselves knowing we both think he is an idiot or wrong without letting others in the room understand.

Borrow words shift languages.
We have a Russian fellow here post a while back and I could read some of his text because I could sound it out and read the borrow words.
PeakTop = reactor for his reaction zone .
Other times we have common borrow words like magnetophone (маґнетофон ) for tape recorder that come from German not just English, or gahlosh for rubber boot from French

But like I said I speak mostly food.
patychky, Bigos Kobasa/Kielbasa…
Here is a side note now that I think about about it pronunciation of Sausage has developed a vowel shift in Canada to Kubasa.
No one can explain this and it leads to crazy spelling!!

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#17

I’m with Pepe and Bill. Not a religeous thing, just experience. French Canadian people brought recipees for hard cider with them from France, about 300 years ago. In winter old people would get together and play wist and drink cider. When I was ten I saw an old guy, about 70, go out in the back yard and pee in the snow. Then he went back in the house and played cards again. He didn’t realize he had done anything wrong. The lady whose house it was didn’t have any more of those parties after that. Then I was in the Marine Corps and saw a good friend turn into a total jerk over time. I have many more experiences, all bad. I think the human race would be better off if it just used alcohol as engine fuel and didn’t drink it.

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#18

Unfortunately there has become many addictive “Demons” that can lead folks astray to ignore self-worth, family, friends and common scene.
Alcohol: after sex/lust, and killing/lust just one of the older ones.
I can handle these all just fine . . . . caffeine is my crippling addiction says my oldest brother-in-law. And interactive video gaming I tell him he fell into back in the 1980’s is his. Once Atari came into that house the marital bliss bled out.
Whole millennium of “take-a-chance” glitz games evolved for those who seduced-in that way. Crying shame what I seen happen to co-workers, former friends, and family members life energy bled dry trying to game these gambling urge-gaming systems too.

I do not have anymore any pat answers.
Sometimes I will break the supplier side of it. Mother of the two little girls that we foster care for wanted them to have the latest Amazon kid’s fire-something tablets. Mistake. Some one gifted them these. Now they want to read to less. Play less active with each other and individual imagination toys play less. The touch screens interactive giving them their dopimine hits/fixes.
So . . . . Big Mistake that JeffBozo, the latest of tech-addict makers!
So sorry . . . these tablets will just have to die ignobly.

Mostly I look into others I truly care for and understand their negative trigger points seductions. Help them strengthen, and steer clear.
And ask them to do the same for me.
Hide the salty big bags of chips. Only let me access to one small bag at a time.
Do not offer keys to fast, fun rides. Only let me drive old, slow and boring.
Limit my time access to bang-go-boom firearms.

Steve unruh

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#19

Here you go…

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#20

Hay Chris thank you .This is pretty darn nice. I brew mostly ales because I can get the malts and hops and the rest of the stuff within 50 miles from home and its easy to do. I have a few grapes and have made wine a few times. The first couple of times it turned out good but the last two times it was really bad , so like Kristijans beer I dumped it and dident make any this year .

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