Fermenting.

Fermenting.

To ferment is to alter the structure of something. To transform. To transmute. Sometimes the universe offers us something. This week the universe offered me fermentation.

Last week, I was having lunch with a dear, dear friend, someone who brings out the best of me, and isn’t afraid to call me on my shit. She mentioned kombucha, and I made fun of hipsters and their refrigerators full of jars of tea with globs of yeast and bacteria floating like turgid ghosts at their surface. 

It turns out, kombucha is tasty. Yesterday I drank my first glass, I was meeting a new friend and Yves, who is an avid fermenter, picked a place that serves kombucha. I figured in for an inch. Yves and I feed our dogs raw food.. Soon I expect to be feeding my dear mr sparkles Yves’ “Scoby Snacks” fermented vegetables that are part of feeding a dog a raw food diet. Her dog is named Scoby; Scoby is also the name for the gelatinous, symbiotic mass that turns sweetened tea into delicious, fizzy, vinegary kombucha.

Yesterday a new acquaintance told me that she ferments kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut, yogurt, and honey wine. I love sauerkraut, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it was fermented (I thought that it was simply soaked in vinegar (itself the product of fermentation). What other surprises does fermentation hold for me?

What is the universe offering me? It is time for transformation. I am returning to the world of making. I am becoming a teacher of making. This fall I become a student again, a beginner. This week my brain worked liked a designer. I began with an idea; I moved to express that idea in a concrete form, and I was bounded by the materials at hand. Exploring the intersection of the materials and the idea a new thing emerged. I began with sadness, and added a block of Oregon Myrtle wood. What came forth was a box in Koyaanisqatsi, a form in disequilibrium to express “What Comes from Not Speaking”.

There is a small fountain in our back yard. Water is pumped up six feet and then swirls down seven red funnels. The humming birds often came to look for a sip of water. Last summer the uppermost funnel overflowed, and I reached in to remove the clog. Rather than rotting leaves I removed a drowned humming bird plug, and the water began it’s spiral dance again. This year when the hummers returned, we added a small pot to the topmost funnel, I have yet to see a hummer touch it’s long, long tongue to the water that it can now reach without danger of drowning. We also added a ceramic bird bath below the lowest funnel, propped on top of a large, upside down terra cotta pot, the bath this moment has it’s first visitor a juvenile Scrub Jay. The fountain which has always provided lovely sounds, and positive ions now provides for others as well.

I am nearly 50, and starting some things fresh. I will be buying a new home this summer, and I will be sharing it with my mate, my partner, my love. The land we will have will be fallow, and raw, and the first thing will be to add compost. Isn’t compost fermented? Not literally, no alcohol is provided by the squirmies and worms that break apart the chunks and bits changing shit and dead to nourishment and richness. But it is the transformed product of tiny things digesting one thing and their waste being a resource for something else.

Fermentation is change. Change is not loss. Sugar becomes alcohol and CO2. Nothing goes away, but where there was sweetness there is the bite and transforming power of alcohol. Fermentation has made it different. I have been feeling a tremendous sense of loss lately: home; career aspirations; fiscal wealth; a decade old garden; friends each aren't the way they were before. Divorce is a kind of death. All relationships change. Gardens grow and decompose in endless cycles. Cash is only one kind of fuel.

Fermentation is yeast eating fuel to change the fuel into another kind of fuel; fermentation has products. Some of these products we call “by products.” The CO₂ that yeast create in making beer and wine and wort is released by the brewers, a five gallon carboy will burp and belch through a tube submerged in a bucket of water. Of course the barely malt is the product of a plant eating CO₂ and sunlight. 

The gurgling of CO₂ happens because the bucket of water acting is used as a one way valve to keep the “good” microbes in and the “bad” ones out of the brewing carboy. The scoby on the top of a fermenting jar of kombucha is also a valve; the mat of yeast and microbes acts as a kind of lid protecting the process inside the jar.

When you know that you want beer or wine or kombucha, you know what yeast you want in, and so you know that you want all the other yeasts to stay out. When we know what we want in our life we think we know what to let in and what to keep out. 

Except, except even when you know what you want, sometimes you must be open. Belgian Lambic is the product of luck, and trust, and the universe providing. The brewers in the Zenne valley allow wild yeast and microbes into their wort and deliciousness ensues.

If I open my wort to the universe, what will dive in?