Midsummer Eve - St John's Eve

The astronomical solstice may have been two days ago, but the customary day for beginning midsummer celebrations throughout Europe was the 23rd of June. In England 'midsummer' seems to have been, more broadly, the time between St John's Eve and St Peter's Day on the 29th.

The customs associated with this time can be divided into four: love divinations; fire and lights; garlands and greenery; and civic processions. One particularly attractive type of love divination is the use of the wildflower orpine. What you do is cut two 'slips' of the plant and arrange them as a pair, then leave them overnight (in certain parts of the country, according to Steve Roud's The English Year they were arranged in the rafters). If in the morning they incline towards each other, it's love. If they bend away from each other it's aversion. If they wither, then it's death I'm afraid. They were also known as 'midsummer men'.

Both Roud and Ronald Hutton (in Seasons of the Sun) point out the importance of John Stow's description of midsummer celebrations in 1590s London. He gives a good description of the content of the garlands and boughs decorating houses (they were also used in churches): green birch, long fennel, St John's Wort, orpine, white lilies and any other flowers.

Stow also described the lighting of bonfires, during celebrations which brought communities together and which could be used for the reconciling of differences and for purifying the air. The use of fire to purify air has a particularly long history and as Hutton points out, this time of the year is when such rituals seem particularly necessary as communities passed into the season when crop blights and human diseases became more prevalent. It may also be that the midsummer bonfires represented a continuity of ritual from pre-Christian Europe up to the Early Modern period. The blazing wheels described in early sources from the continent and medieval British accounts fit nicely with sun symbolism at this time of year. More convincing in any case than the 'Druidic' rites dreamt up by fanciful antiquarians!

The final set of English customs associated with midsummer consists of civic parades held on the 24th of June and on St Peter's Eve, a show of pride and strength by local 'watches' and guilds. Roud describes these torch-lit parades 'with giants, devils, hobby horses, drummers, trumpeters, armed mounted and marching companies, and tableaux depicting famous scenes.' (p. 303) I never knew before that John the Baptist was the patron saint of tailors ('Any colour, sir, so long as it's hair') - and the tailors guild clothed the giant statues in several cities, including Salisbury.

The recurring theme you come across when reading about England's medieval customs is the great brick wall of the Reformation, which represented a revolution in public ritual and custom. This phenomenon is summed up pretty well by Hutton in his account of the midsummer parades and why these municipal pageants found the post-Reformation atmosphere so hostile:

[The pageants] were associated with the feasts of saints, howbeit important, and scriptural, figures. The notion of magical properties associated with the fires [...] was obnoxious to reformers already set on getting rid of holy water, ashes, candles and 'palm crosses'. Furthermore, the regular assembly of large numbers of armed citizens was disquieting to governments who feared rebellion against the religious changes which they were trying to impose. (p. 315)

The processions were pretty much finished off by this zeal and they steadily vanished between 1540 and 1640. Now, all midsummer seems to call up is hippies at Stonehenge and doing Shakespeare at school. Ignoring Shakespearean and 'druidic' dramas, if the weather's as nice tomorrow evening as it is tonight, you could recall the fire rituals by hanging lamps (maybe ones you've crocheted yourself!) outside and have a drink or two. And gather or buy a nice garland of flowers for someone (or yourself)...

The Fruits of our Labours

The elderflowers are still going nicely in this part of the country so we've been able to make another couple of batches of cordial. The latest lot is steeping in one of our fermentation buckets now and is just about ready to be bottled. Here's the recipe that we use:

1kg sugar
900ml boiling water
40g citric acid
15 large elderflower heads (best picked on a sunny day)
2 lemons, sliced
1 orange, sliced

Dissolve sugar in boiling water in the container you're going to be using, then add citric acid. Snip flowers from the stems and add to the water along with the lemons and orange. Cover container and leave to stand for around 5 days or so. Strain the mixture through muslin that you've scalded with boiling water and then transfer to sterilised bottles.

It needs to be kept in the fridge & will apparently last for up to a year. We've never been able to make it last that long! The picture at the beginning of this post is of the bottled cordial.

It makes a lovely summery drink called Devon Lemonade, a recipe we picked up a few years ago from the Plymouth Gin people:

Put 6 or 7 mint leaves in the bottom of a long glass, muddle them around with some ice cubes. Add 1 measure of gin and 1/2 a measure of elderflower cordial. Top up with fizzy mineral water or soda water. Garnish with a slice of lemon.

Speaking of summery drinks, the liqueur we made with vodka and forced rhubarb back in February is now ready to drink. It's an amazing bright pink colour, is thick and gloopy and totally delicious. It looked so nice we took a couple of pictures that I've put on the end of this post - one of the bottle and one of another great summery cocktail. A nice simple one that involves pouring a measure of the liqueur over ice and then topping up with ginger ale (to taste). Now if we ever get a nice period of summery weather this year, we'll have to choose between the elderflower and this rhubarb fizz. Tough decision...

Elderflowers!

One more post today - it was a beautifully sunny day today and we finally found some elderflowers that can hopefully make some decent elderflower cordial. We were wondering if we'd every find a reasonable quantity of elder trees or if the ones we did find were ever going to come into flower. This morning we had a lovely walk in Hanchurch Woods, just outside Newcastle-under-Lyme, and saw some elders with resolutely closed buds. No chance of finding anything we could use there.

However, as we travelled home along some quiet country roads we stumbled across a particularly good elder with what looked like plenty of blossom. As luck would have it there was a nice wide passing place (with room for someone else if they needed it) to stop the car in, while I dashed out, scaled the slightly steep bank (braving some belligerent stinging nettles), and quickly snapped off 25 or 30 good heads of flowers to take home. There they are in the picture at the start of this post.

We'll look for some more as we're out and about on sunny days. You can never make too much elderflower cordial - and it's always good to find places where you might find elderberries for later in the year. They make a great chutney and a wonderful clove-scented cordial for Christmas time...

We follow a recipe for elderflower cordial copied out of a National Trust book we got out of the library in Cambridge - elderflowers, boiling water, sugar, citrus fruits and citric acid, steeped in a bucket - a brewing bucket cleaned up from yesterday! - and then to be bottled for all sorts of nice things. I'm looking forward to Devonshire Lemonade - gin, elderflower cordial and fizzy water... We're permanently crossing fingers that all these treats will turn out all right at the moment!

Brewing day 4 - is it fermenting.....?

The day after the brew is a bit of an anxious one. Has the yeast started the business of fermentation? Has the beer or the yeast picked up some unmentionable nasty which will get started on the process of making it entirely undrinkable? Should I poke and prod it to see if it's ok? Or will this banjax the entire operation?

There's a lot of waiting in all this, which I find quite nerve-wracking.

Anyway, we got up this morning to find that there was a very promising looking cover over the beer as the yeast had indeed got to work in the night. Despite it being quite a cold night, even with the greenhouse heater that we use to try to regulate the temperature between 21c and 24c in the bathroom and the airing cupboard, everything seemed to be going according to plan.

And it keeps on going pretty well too. There's now a very nice looking 'rocky' head on the top of the beer, undulating in a slightly freaky way when we lift the lid (laid on loosely at this point to protect against airborne infections), and it's starting to smell very nice indeed. The picture at the top is from when we got up this morning, and the second one is from lunchtime.

Fingers crossed, then. This first stage of fermentation should keep going for 2 or 3 days, after which we'll clip the lid on, unclip a small bit of it and leave it for a few more days, until its reached its target gravity. It started at 1041.5 (or as near to it as we could get) and will be ready for the keg at 1010. Keep working, yeast....

Brewing day 3 - Tuesday - erm, brew!

No blogging yesterday because brewing really is something that takes all day - at least with the equipment I've got at the moment. I started yesterday at 9.00 in the morning and ended up pitching the yeast (as they call it) at 10.00 at night! Most of the time at the end was spent cooling the boiled beer* down to a temperature at which you can add the yeast. I might look into quicker ways of doing this for the future..

*One thing I've learned recently is that once you've added the hops (see below), you call the liquid you've got in your bucket 'beer' as opposed to 'wort'. So there you go.

I took a few pictures as the day went on and thought I'd post them up here for posterity. The first, at the top of the post, is of my most random Heath-Robinson type equipment. Constructed from a butchered sleeping bag and a load of bubble wrap of various sizes that we acquired while moving house, the insulating jacket is the most outre thing I use. It looks rather like some cut price Doctor Who alien - but it kept my mash at a nice steady temperature, allowing all that crushed grain to release its sugars (hopefully!) which will then ferment to alcohol. It's a nice moment, when the hot water's in the mash tun and you tip in the carefully weighed grains. For the recipe I'm following, the majority was Maris Otter pale malt, with some crystal malt (kilned slightly darker for body) and a little black malt (for colour). I was a little disconcerted by the flaked maize (cornflakes!) recommended as a replacement for the maltose syrup in the recipe - so time will tell whether this has worked or not. It all makes a great smell when it's tipped in and stirred into the water (or liquor). Those with sharp eyes will make out a stain on the bathtowel - which is from a near disaster when a tap started to leak. Fortunately I could replace the original bucket with a more reliable one before too much was lost. And hopefully it won't affect the end product..


This steeping produces, after a couple of hours or so, the 'wort' which will be boiled up for another couple of hours, with the hops, to produce the pre-fermentation beer. The mash tun contents are run off through the tap at the bottom, while all the grots from the grist are held back by the perforated false bottom within, into another container (the second pic above). What you're left with then is a dark, malty liquid which smells delicious. Sadly I don't have the equipment at the moment to then 'sparge' the grain left behind in the mash tun (basically, very hot water sprinkled gently on the grain bed to rinse more sugars out). What I do is a more primitive 'batch sparge' or re-mashing - topping up the mash tun with hot water, letting it settle and then running it off. I did this 5 times or so to get a good amount of wort for the boil. Pretty time consuming!

The boil is next - into the boiler, the hops thrown in as it starts to boil (the final picture is of the hops weighed out - working with leaf hops is one of the things that makes this such fun), lid on and boiled for 2 hours. This recipe uses three types of hop. Bramlings and Fuggles go in at the beginning of the boil; and East Kent Goldings a quarter of an hour before the end.

When the boil's finished, the mash tun turns into a 'hopback' - the beer is first bailed than poured from the boiler into the hopback, so that it can be filtered leaving the hops and other grots behind. Or as much as possible anyway! Then comes the worst bit - cooling it down. I really need to find something to make this easier and take less time. It's quite a relaxing job in itself - standing the bucket of beer in a container with cold water, stirring it, taking the temperature and measuring its gravity with the hydrometer. But it just takes so long - and all that time there's the danger of something nasty getting into it. Also, I've read that apparently if you cool it down quickly, some of the stuff that makes it cloudy can be precipitated out of it.

Anyway, by my inefficient methods, the beer finally got down to around 25c, at which point I aerated it, getting the oxygen into solution for the yeast to work on by pouring it from one bin to another, slowly through the tap. Then a final check of the temperature (around 22c) and in went the yeast, a quick stir and upstairs into the airing cupboard, which keeps a nice steady temperature between 22c and 24c, fingers duly crossed that the magic of fermentation would start soon....

Brewing day 2 - Monday - clean and sterilise!

Two things on my mind today when it comes to the second attempt at brewing. The first was to check how the yeast was doing. The first time I used one of these packs, I was really concerned that it didn't look the way I expected a yeast starter to look - there wasn't much going on on top of the thing at all, just the odd bubble. A quick trawl of the internet and I found the pictures at Jims Beer Kit and Beer Dude did look like what was in my bottle - and the 'yeast cake', the layer of creamy-white at the bottom, was the important thing to look out for. So after the starter had been going for 24 hours or so, I took a picture which shows everything appears ok. Thin foam on the top and a good layer of yeast on the bottom.

I also did something that's probably really not a good idea, which is before I started on today's jobs, I took the foil lid off the jar and gave it a sniff to make sure there wasn't anything obviously wrong with it. It smelt very nice - no doubt I was running the risk of letting some nasty in, but I find it very difficult to trust everything's going ok...

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Having done that, the main thing to do today was to spend an hour or so sterilising all the brewing equipment that I'm going to use tomorrow. That's my home-made mash tun / hopback (following the instructions in Wheeler and Protz's book) - basically one fermentation bin inside another. The outer bin has a tap at the bottom; the inner bin has no tap and has lots of 3mm holes drilled in its base. There are another two fermentation bins, one with a tap and one without. Then there's the boiler - a 27 litre Burco-type catering boiler. And the miscellaneous equipment - a paddle for stirring, the thermometer, hydrometer and trial jar, a big glass jug, the siphon tube (not used for a few days, but it's as well to clean it at the same time). I think that's everything! The lids were all sterilised too and then snapped onto the bins to keep it all safe and sound for tomorrow.

Brewing day 1 - Sunday - the yeast starter

No doubt this will jinx the entire enterprise, but I've decided to blog the second brew

I started on Sunday, to give the yeast starter a couple of days to do its stuff before it gets chucked into the beer. In the long term, I'd like to experiment a bit with cultivating yeast, either from packets or from bottled beer, if only to make it go a bit further. The instructions here look pretty comprehensive and not too frightening! Not to mention giving all the details I'm going through in this post... But for now I'm happy to keep using a Wyeast 'smack pack' yeast for each brew, after the first lot seemed to work so well. For this batch of beer I'm following the recipe for Belhaven 80' given in Graham Wheeler & Roger Protz's 'Brew Your Own Real Ale At Home', so decided to try the Wyeast 'Scottish' strain.

It gets the name 'smack pack' because that's what you do to it - when you're ready, whack the packet between your hands to mix the yeast and its nutrients, give it a shake and leave it somewhere with a temperature of 21c - 24c for 2 or 3 hours until it's swollen up.

The instructions on the back of the packet for making the starter are very straightforward. While you're waiting for the pack to start working, I sterilised all the equipment I was going to be using with a sterilising solution you get from homebrew places. So that's a litre storage jar that'll be used for the starter, a glass jug for measuring water and aerating the starter wort, scissors for opening the packet, a plastic spatula for stirring, a thermometer, and then a wipe of sterilising solution on some kitchen foil that'll cover the jar.

When the pack's been going a few hours it's time to make the starter wort - 100g of malt extract in a litre of water brought to the boil and then kept on a fast boil for 10 minutes. After this stage, to get the wort down to a temperature suitable for the yeast, I popped the jug in a sink full of cold water to which I added ice to bring it down more quickly. Stirring the wort brings the temperature down faster.

When it got to around 25c and falling it was time to aerate the thing. I poured the wort from the jug to the jar, quite slowly, twice to get the oxygen in solution that the yeast should feed on. Quick check of the final temperature (21c - 24c) and then shake the packet, snip it open and pour it in. That last picture's what it looks like when it's gone in.

Then it needs 2 days to produce more yeast...