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cidre de glace
Tuesday, November 10 2009
David (of Penny and David) invited me over for a lunch of homemade pizza, and that's one food I never tire of. So I came over with a sixpack of Corona (because everything else at the Stewart's seems inappropriate for bringing places) and a chainsaw. Part of what I would be doing would be gathering firewood. David is always talking about wood gathering opportunities, though these stem mostly from Penny's desire for a low-entropy woodland adjacent to their house. The fractal complexity of a normal functioning ecosystem is inherently incompatible with the modern designer's economy of line.
Meanwhile Penny was working, which meant that she was sitting at her laptop and occasionally fielding phone calls, forcing David and me to communicate by whisper and wild gesticulation.
I'd had two beers by the time I went out to cut up some firewood (it took the form of a smallish and very dry dead oak, though David tried to interest me in a few scattered arm-sized trees at various non-vertical angles). I wouldn't normally recommend operating a chainsaw even after one beer, so I was extra careful. It's easy to get lazy or impulsive when you've had even a small amount of alcohol.
After we'd loaded all the wood into my car, David introduced me to an "ice cider" ("cidre de glace") called Frimas (from the Quebec, the heartland of ice cider). He's been raving about it for days, wondering (as he often does) whether we should attempt to make some ourselves. To me it tasted like a fairly typical mead: sweet, but not distractingly so, and quite alcoholic (11.5 percent). It also had that reddish-yellow hue I remember from the mead my mother used to make. It's prepared in a manner similar to that of mead, though to get apple cider to the sweetness level of honey it is first concentrated by freezing out a fraction of the water. Then it is fermented. This is the opposite of the manner by which an ice beer is prepared; with ice beer, the freezing follows fermentation and is done to concentrate the alcohol.
Today in brownhouse news, I cut a hole in the "shitting bench" (the bench with the toilet seat on it) to accommodate a ten gallon LDPE container that will form the basin of my "lower sink." This lower sink will hold onto grey water drained from a stainless steel "upper sink," making it available for the sorts of cleaning that do not require pristine water. My hope is that it will support some sort of balanced ecosystem capable of maintaining the water in an acceptable hygienic state.
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