goodbye.hello

Tough day for me this Saturday.

Usually best to get the bad stuff out of the way first...I had to concede defeat, and finally let go of the garden that I've tended for the last 7+ years...little plot M20 at the Victory garden in the Fens.

This 16ftx24ft patch of rich earth wasn't perfect, but it was mine, for a while.

I've had several interactions with intruders (insectivorous, rodent, and..most frustratingly, human) that led to untimely destruction of hours worth of work. But, you learn to keep the water averse plants up on higher ground. You don't replant trees and shrubs that seem to have bark that's the favorite late winter snack of the river rats. You keep the most tempting of flowers and fruit out of arms reach and spike the garden gate with lock jaw inducing rusty finish nails and thread rose thorns along the fence tops. Top notch garden regulation approved security systems (and, no, razor wire isn't on the list).

Its not easy having a garden that you treat like its going to be yours forever. You set up a mini irrigation system, you drag in 18 inch pavers and haul in puddingstone from under the deck of my old Mission Hill apartment. Plonk down mail order perennials and tiny trees with visions of growing them to a more sturdy, landscape worthy size.

You grow things.

Black eyed susans. Blue hosta. Purple clematis, purple heuchera, purple potatoes.

Spicy thai basil, sweet smelling mock orange, pungent garlic chives.

Japanese everything (almond, Stewartia, maple, holly, cypress, iris, peony, painted fern, redbud trees...you get the point).

And, in recent years, hops. The true lupulin wolf of the garden. I set up 10 foot galvanized poles and coir twine trellis, knowing they were undersized, but were also likely maxing out the stifling garden's regulations. They were a nice start, but the apexes were reached about 1/2 in to the active growing season. They caught the attention of the neighbors, and initiated hour long conversations about their care, and eventually about their favorite kinds of craft beer.

I found out Saturday that I was known through the tight garden clique as the 'hops guy'. Huh. That's cool, but I was only mildly disappointed that I wasn't known as the 'peony guy'.

Centennial, CTZ, Cascade, Sterling, and Fuggles. The mature Sterling and Fuggles were already ~6ft tall, and shooting up bines far from the crown. The thick ropey rhizomes were lifted, bines cut way back, sectioned and carted back to my parents house, and are resting under a layer of well rotted compost, just waiting until they get to their new home at Sticks and Stones farm.

So, in recent years, I've pacified my need to have my hands in the earth today while nurturing the visions I had of a firmly rooted and floriferous tomorrow. This is why it was so tough to walk away from it this Saturday. The clock had run out, and though I've never lived closer to the gardens I was paradoxically no longer living in Boston proper, and these gardens are strictly reserved for her residents. Knowing this was coming for quite some time, so this weekend was actually just the final bit of it. It sort of felt like raiding an already picked over garden center, but there were still some longtime gems in there. Probably, the most important of which was the scrub pine seedling that my aunt Norma gave to me when I first started the garden. I've been going Miyagi on its ass for years, and it is starting to resemble a tree that would be at home in the master Bonsai collection at the Arboretum. But, I still must wait, as he is in good hands for the time being, until I can call a more permanent patch of earth my own.

so, a day where I needed to let go of a lot...

...this loss, albeit small, helped to magnify and highlight a truly inspired evening.

An evening of visions, possibilities. Building momentum toward what will be our future.

Brookline Hopfen Weisse: large format bottling

Man...there's something about popping the cork on a large format bottle...it just tells you and everyone with you that 'today is a special day...fun will ensue'.

I've squirreled away a few of these thick walled bad boys (a handful of magnums, one 4.5L and one 9L (!!!) knowing I wanted to eventually fill it up with my own beer, and cram a cork back inside the neck. There's discussion in the wine world that the larger format bottles are more 'age-able' and lead to a more complex and refined quaff. Perhaps it has something to do with the reduced oxygen available in the headspace/liquid ratio. Or maybe its due to the larger volume leading to a larger number and volume of flavor compound to compound interactions.

Or maybe its just because huge bottles are 100% hilariously awesome.

(yes, this is the 9L bottle of St. Feuillen tripel that the lovely wife surprised me with for Christmas a couple years back).

So, eventually I knew one day I'd dig out one of these funny bottles and fill 'er up.

Trouble was... I don't have a stand-corker that could accommodate the skyscraping height...the Colonna capper/corker that I normally use to cork and cage champagne and belgian bottles maxes out on a magnum bottle height, so after scratching that idea off the list, I was left to try to rig something with the wine kit included double lever corker.

This corker is designed for 1. wine corks (not larger diameter Belgian corks) and 2. inserting the cork flush with the top of the neck of wine bottles.

The corker has only been pressed in to service once before, and the price tag isn't staggering if it were to get injured in any wrong tool for the job attempt. So, I figured I'd do a dry run with a Belgian cork in a regular champagne bottle to see if I could overcome problem #1.

Luckily, I quickly discovered that the reducer orifice in the corker can still accomodate the larger diameter Belgian corks. I promptly removed it with a corkscrew and wondered how (if) I could mimic the same half-way-in/half-way-out insertion that I rigged with the Colonna. Feeling emboldened by my initial success, I grabbed another cork, made a quick dip in one-step sanitizer (provides just enough lubrication to help ease it through that almost too small reducer), and depressed the levers until I had plunged the cork down with the levers just slightly less than parallel to the counter. I held it up the whole apparatus to the light, and could see about 3/4 of an inch of cork in the neck.

OK...what do I do now? I would have to then interrupt the mechansim of the levers and their leverage point, but still allow the plunger to continue, otherwise the cork would just continue to get driven in to the neck, and I'd have no real way of pulling it back out, save for a CO2-seal-destroying corkscrew. I pulled the levers back a bit, and braced my left hand just under the corker's orifice chamber, right where it meets the bottle, which in effect falsely extended the neck of the bottle. Holding on tight to the bottle with my pinky and ring finger, I pushed down on the plunger directly, and with a little wiggling, the cork slipped through the remainder of the orifice, and I had that half-in/half-out cork I was looking for.

Good thing I held on to the oversized cage that came with the bottle...the regular cage wire is probably about 3 inches too short. I'm sure I could cut and twist in another length of wire, but this sure looks cleaner.

Oh, for the bottle nerds out there (oh, I'm on the only one? I don't think so.)...here's a chart of the proper names for the larger format bottles, including its correlation to the standard 750ml bottle. reference

(there are others, here's the exhaustive list from wikipedia, including the source of the bottle names)

You can just tell...there will be fun had when this bottle of Brookline hopfen weisse gets popped.

(...and no, this isn't camera trickery...the hopfen weisse is right next to that bottle of cantillon to its left).