Fixettwell Fermentations

1st beer Bea helped make

Once upon a time in 2009, Bea got interested in homebrewing.  She arranged to work with two separate friends with totally opposite personalities, serving as each friend's brewing assistant so she could quickly learn the gamut of basic brewing techniques.

The first friend was very precise and orderly, following his recipes perfectly and triple-checking each step.  The process with him was very scientific with little room for error, and was a great and comforting place to start -- no fear of encountering any food safety maladies since every sterilization precaution was taken, twice.

Condoms as makeshift airlocks on 5 types of mead

The second friend was like a chaotic whirlwind, making recipes up on the spot based on seemingly random herbs she pulled out of her backpack that had been whatever she happened to find and harvest along the road on her bike ride over to the brewing session.  Sterilization procedures were also followed, but there was a massive amount of room for creativity, experimentation, and making it up as you go along.  When this friend realized she'd forgotten to pack any airlocks, she washed and pricked a pinhole in the end of several condoms (which lets the air out without allowing bacteria in, just as an airlock would).  Ultimately, one of these 2nd-session brews exploded in the fridge, one was undrinkably horrible, two were average, but one was the most heavenly heather mead anyone had ever tasted -- too bad there is no way to replicate the recipe!

Highest honor achieved:
Winning “Most Sustainable Beer"

Homegrown hops

Bea's personal brewing style would end up being somewhere in between these two radical extremes -- room to make up flavor combinations but (touch wood) no more exploding glass shards!  About a year after this first introduction to homebrewing, together with a different couple of friends, Bea formed a brew-team that met semi-regularly and ultimately won such honors as “Most Sustainable Beer of 2011" (presumably because of the addition of Bea's homegrown hops -- which gave the brew a very weird flavor, but were definitely quite sustainable).  Several batches of beer were brewed before the brew-team disbanded due to scheduling conflicts, differing beer preferences, and the strife caused by hosting the brewing process.

Chris's aside:  Bea and her brew team were terrible at brewing!  They would get together at our house starting about 10pm on a weeknight, measure out a few things and stir a couple times, and then just sit around drinking beer until they fell asleep on the couches in our living room.  I always had to step in and slave over the hot stove, stirring this gigantic steamy cauldron of beer and waking them up when it was ready so our house wouldn't burn down!  I don't even like beer!  Why me?!?!  [Shakes fist in aggravation.]

5 gallons of slightly better than mediocre wine

When the brew-team disbanded, we talked about how to satisfy Bea's quest for homemade alcohol while also appealing to Chris's beer-hating taste buds.  We made 5 gallons of wine from an easy “wine-making" kit, but that wasn't really challenging or interesting to just follow the directions verbatim.  Around the same time, Costco opened in DC and suddenly we had a reasonably affordable source of cheap & gigantic bottles of booze.  Fixettwell Fermentations was born, with a small but growing portion of our kitchen area devoted to creating a variety of infused and fermented beverages.  Technically, infusions aren't fermented, but we've also continued to dabble in other fermentation projects such as sauerkraut, pickles, hot sauce, dandelion wine, and whatever else seems exciting at the moment.

Some examples of infusions/fermentations we made in 2013:

L -> R: Blueberry liqueur, jalapeño tequila, blackberry brandy,
strawberry cordial, ?? (can't remember!), and dandelion wine!

This winter, Bea has decided to eat low-carb foods (meaning she can only have up to 100 grams of carbs per day, which is actually fairly easy if you don't eat bread, beer, or sugary treats).  Unfortunately, most of our infused creations still kicking around from last year were created by combining fruit and alcohol and then adding a simple sugar syrup, so they're delicious but not especially suitable for low-carb eaters/drinkers.

Bea did a little research and came up with some low-carb liqueur recipes to try out.  Here are some that actually tasted good to both of us:

This sugar-free coffee liqueur was our first trial, although we used 1 cup of Truvia instead of the 3/4 cup of erythritol and 3/4 cup of xylitol called for in the recipe.  Turned out delicious for Chris, who loves sweetened coffee, but Bea drinks her coffee black & wanted something less sweet even for a liqueur.  She preferred the 2nd version of this recipe we made where we cut out all the sweeteners except for 1 teaspoon of powdered monkfruit extract.  It was less of a syrup and more just coffee-flavored vodka, but more versatile for making an unsweetened white russian -- yum!

Next we tried this version of low-carb Kahlua liqueur -- we substituted Truvia for the Splenda and reduced sweetener to 1 cup.  This recipe makes use of instant coffee, which we bought a large tub of back when Chris was working as a teacher and have been trying to find ways to use it up ever since!  It came out decently when mixed with half-and-half (instant coffee never has as much flavor as fresh-ground whole beans).

Figuring we now had enough caffeine stocked up in our bar, we turned to the minimal fruit we had on hand during the winter.  We had recently uncovered a couple of frozen ziplock bags of unlabeled mystery berries gifted by a friend & hidden in the bottom of our deep-freezer too long ago for anyone to remember what they were.  Once defrosted, the bag turned out to contain raspberries, which became a cordial through a modification to this recipe (we cut the sugar in the syrup in half).  The cordial came out very tart but delicious when adding small amounts to a cup of black tea -- perfect for winter evenings by the fire!

We also came across 2 slightly shriveled but not totally beyond recognition grapefruits that had been in our crisper drawer since we moved, which were far too ugly to eat fresh.  It's definitely not best practices to use shriveled fruit in infusions, since the water/juice content will be lower than if it's fresh & you'll get less flavor (and possibly off-flavors) -- but we didn't have much else to do with shriveled grapefruits, so we made up a batch of grapefruit infused vodka.  Bea had come across this recipe for a grapefruit cocktail some time ago, and we did give it a try -- decided it will be better in the summer since it's a cool & refreshing beverage.  Still, it did create an impressively bright-colored (and not at all sweet!) drink.  Bea was a fan but Chris is a super-taster, meaning his taste buds are extra-sensitive to bitter flavors, so he wasn't in love with the addition of the Campari.

Still aging on the kitchen shelf are a coffee bourbon and a spiced blueberry-lemon liqueur.  On the non-alcoholic end of our pantry are currently a dish of feral yogurt and a lion's mane indoor mushroom kit.  We just finished making our 1st sauerkraut which is one of Chris's favorite foods ever.  This extra-cold winter has allowed us to finally unpack enough boxes to find our pegboard hooks and get Bea's baking station organized which frees up COUNTER SPACE in our PANTRY which is just about her most favorite & exciting thing about our farmhouse.

We're excited for spring and more Fixettwell Fermentations coming soon!