Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (55 page)

The first time I ever tried to ferment
alcohol, I was only ten. My motive was not to obtain wine to drink; like most kids, I
didn’t like the taste of wine, though it had occurred to me that my parents, who
did, might appreciate my efforts. But my principal motivation was the alchemist’s:
I was from an early age obsessed with metamorphosis, and this was not the first time I
had tried to turn some common form of dross into something that might in some way glow.
Actually, my first stab at alchemy had come several years earlier, soon after learning
the astounding fact that, given enough heat and pressure and time, a lowly lump of coal
would eventually turn into a diamond. Imagine: a recipe for diamonds!

Back then, in the early 1960s, some ships
were still powered by coal-fired boilers, and at the beach I would occasionally find
shiny black lumps of anthracite. Surely there had to be some way to speed up the
transformation process. By my reckoning, the single most powerful energy source in our
house was a Tensor lamp. It looked totally high tech and gave off an unusually strong,
focused beam of light. So I put a lump of coal directly in its beam and left the light
on 24/7, checking each morning to see if the facets of my incipient diamond had gotten
any shinier or less black.

I had somewhat more success turning grape
juice into wine. It was September, and the wild grapevines around our house were weighed
down with a bumper crop of dark-purple berries, hanging in dense, downy clusters. I
picked several bunches of the ripest grapes and put
them in the red
plastic container my mother used to mix up frozen orange juice concentrate; it had a
matching red plastic screw top. I crushed the grapes right in the container, using a
potato masher—skins, seeds, and all. My plan was to make red wine. I don’t recall
whether I added any yeast; I doubt it. But I did screw the top on nice and tight and put
the container on a coffee table in the living room, where I could keep an eye on it.

Not a very eagle-y eye, apparently. Because
I have no recollection of the plastic container beginning to bulge, slightly at first,
and then cartoonishly, as the carbon dioxide built up inside it. What I do remember,
with a pained clarity a half century later, is coming home with my parents late one
evening and flicking on the lights to find the white walls and ceiling of our living
room evenly spattered with splotches of dark purple. Some were just smears of purple
pigment; others drooled jagged slivers of grape skin like wet confetti. Ecstatic fruit
flies were everywhere, and the living room had acquired an unmistakable new smell. It
smelled like wine!

“Plenty were drunk with nectar,”
Plato writes, referring to mead, or fermented honey, “for wine was not yet
invented.” Wine made from honey was probably the first alcoholic beverage humans
fermented on purpose. (And when we read of the ancients’ fondness for nectar, we
can safely assume they’re talking about fermented nectar.) Alcoholic fermentation
depends on sugar, and, at least before the advent of agriculture, the sweet nectar that
bees concentrate into honey was the richest and most readily accessible source of sugars
in nature. In the hive, however, honey is so completely saturated with sugar that
nothing can live in it, yeasts included. The hydrostatic pressure will promptly suck the
water out of any microbe that falls into it. This of
course is exactly
what the bees want. But I read (in Sandor Katz’s book) that as soon as honey is
diluted with water it will spontaneously begin to ferment.

I was curious to find out if making mead was
really that simple, and, if it was, to sample what the very earliest alcoholic beverage
might have tasted like. I happen to be blessed, or cursed, with a ready supply of honey:
My friend Will Rogers keeps bees in a neighboring town, and I seldom visit him without
coming away with yet another pint jar of the stuff. By now I had an entire shelf of
honey jars in the pantry. It’s a delicious, cosmopolitan sort of honey, a
distillation of the diverse riot of flowering plants that, here in the East Bay, are in
bloom every month of the year.

So I diluted a pound or so of Will’s
honey in a gallon jug of water, one part honey to four parts water, and fitted the jug
with an airlock. This is a cork attached to a curvaceous piece of plastic piping with a
little reservoir of water at the bottom of a bend that keeps oxygen from getting in but
allows carbon dioxide to escape. Every day I checked in on my jug, examining it for fizz
or escaping gas bubbles, but the pale-gold liquid gave no sign of life. It might as well
have been a lump of coal under a Tensor lamp.

I was tempted to add some yeast to get
things going. That’s what Will had suggested, as had the fermentos down at the Oak
Barrel, the local home-brewing supply store where I purchased the airlock. But after
spending time with Sandor Katz, I was attached to the idea of a wild fermentation using
local yeasts. So I e-mailed Sandor for advice.

“What I would have recommended that
you do differently,” he wrote back, “is to leave the diluted honey in an
open vessel for a few days and stir frequently until bubbling becomes evident, and only
then move to an airlock.” It seems that the aeration stimulates the yeast, the
spores of which might be in the air or in the honey itself.

His advice was based on an unusual fact
about the particular yeast
I was trying to entice.
Saccharomyces
cerevisiae
is a microbe that can operate equally well aerobically and
anaerobically, employing a completely different metabolic pathway depending on the
conditions in which it finds itself. In evolutionary terms, this dual metabolism is a
newish development for
S. cerevesiae
. Before the advent of the flowering plants
(and their fruit) some eighty million years ago, the yeast’s ancestors relied
strictly on an aerobic mode of metabolism to generate energy. This system was highly
efficient, and, among yeasts, nothing out of the ordinary. After the angiosperms arrived
on the scene, however,
S cerevesiae
acquired a new bag of metabolic tricks that
gave it a tremendous edge over its competition: the ability to survive in the airless
conditions deep within a fruit or nectar, and, once there, to transform sugars into
alcohol. This new metabolic pathway is a less efficient way to generate energy—the
alcohol produced by it still has plenty left to burn—yet it has the considerable
advantage of expanding the yeast’s habitat and poisoning its competition—not to
mention endearing itself to some of the higher animals, notably including ourselves.
^*

Because aerobic metabolism gives the yeast
the maximum amount of energy from its food, oxygenating the liquid in question is a good
way to kick-start a fermentation. So I started a new batch of mead, diluting the honey
with four parts water and leaving it out on the kitchen counter for several days,
uncovered. I had read that mead was often flavored with various herbs and spices, in
order to contribute a bit of acidity, some tannins, and nutrients for the yeasts, so I
added a bay leaf, some cardamom seeds, a star anise, and a few tablespoons of black tea.
(Mead to which such herbs and spices are added used to be called
“metheglin.”) And just in case I lacked for wild yeasts, I dropped
in an overripe, split fig from the garden that I figured must be
crawling with them.

Every time I passed the bowl of honey water,
I gave it a vigorous stir with a wooden spoon, working a little more air into it. After
about a week, I noticed a fizz of tiny bubbles on the surface. Day by day, the bubbles
got a little bigger and more vigorous. When I thought I could detect the faintest smell
of alcohol, I poured the liquid into the jug and plugged it with the airlock. The very
next day I had the satisfaction of watching a nice fat bubble of carbon dioxide shoulder
its way through the pocket of water in the airlock. Fermentation!

The jug perked along for a week or so,
rhythmically emitting a bubble every several minutes, and then seemed to grow quiet. A
shake of the jug would enliven things for a few hours, but after a while the
fermentation had subsided for good. It was time for a taste. So I pulled out the airlock
and poured some of the liquid into a wine glass. It was golden but cloudy, like a pale,
unfiltered cider.

I could smell the alcohol and the sweet
spices. The mead had a light fizz on the tongue and tasted like a mulled wine, sweet and
a bit heavy. So this was metheglin. It wasn’t half bad, I decided. Definitely
interesting. But perhaps a little too sweet to drink in any quantity. Clearly the wild
yeast had thrown in the towel before completely fermenting all the sugars in the
honey.

Apparently this is often the case with wild
yeasts. They will ferment a sugary liquid only up to about 5 percent alcohol, at which
point they “crap out,” as Kel Alcala, the young guy behind the counter at
the Oak Barrel put it. It seems that 5 percent alcohol—or ten proof—is fairly standard
for a fermented beverage in nature. This could explain why alcoholism doesn’t
appear to be much of a problem in the animal world. Also, honey presents special
challenges to yeast, since it contains various antimicrobial compounds to prevent it
from spoiling; from a bee’s perspective, fermented honey is spoiled
honey. Kel recommended that, for my next batch, I try some champagne
yeast, and he sold me a packet. “I call it the killer yeast,” he said.
“It’ll ferment anything you throw it at, until it’s pretty much bone
dry.”

I was curious to try it. But, honestly, I
was impressed with what my local wild yeasts had accomplished on their own, completely
free and voluntary. They had made me a jug of mead after all, Beowulf’s drink of
choice. It was low proof, true, but an alcoholic beverage just the same. By the time I
finished the glass of mead, I felt a pleasant buzz in my brain, a mild and agreeable
lightness. This mead might not impress the boys at the Oak Barrel yet, but as my first
home brew (not counting the living-room-ceiling cuvée of my childhood) it felt to me
like an achievement.

Figuring out how to make something like my
mead was a development of inestimable value to our ancestors. Leaving aside for a moment
the blessings of intoxication—which were mixed, it’s true, but on balance a
boon—fermented drinks offered a great many other benefits to early humans. Mead and beer
and wine were safer to drink than water, since the alcohol in these drinks (and the fact
that some of them, like beer, had been boiled) killed off any pathogens in the water. As
in the case of so many other fermentations, the process itself rendered the original
food or drink more nutritious, less perishable, and more interesting than it had
previously been. The yeasts that fermented my honey water also contributed vitamins
(B-complex), minerals (selenium, chromium, copper), and protein (the multiplying yeasts
themselves). Some anthropologists believe that beer making, which began in earnest
around the same time that farming did, helped the early agriculturists compensate for
the decline in the nutritional
quality of their diet as they turned
from hunting and gathering a great many different foods to a monotonous diet of grains
and tubers. The B vitamins and minerals in beer, for example, helped compensate for the
loss of meat from their diet.

The alcohol itself probably contributed to
the health, as well as the happiness, of ancient people. Alcohol is a rich source of
calories as well as nutrients. People who drink in moderation (which a 5-percent mead
pretty much guarantees) live longer and endure lower rates of many diseases than both
people who don’t drink at all and people who drink to excess. The exact mechanisms
for these effects have yet to be identified, but the scientific consensus today is that
drinking alcohol (of any kind) in moderation protects against heart attack, stroke, type
2 diabetes, arthritis, dementia, and several types of cancer. The teetotaler is at
greater risk for disease and early death than the drinker.