Monday, September 21, 2009

How Green Was My Weekend






There were four farmers’ markets over the weekend, and I worked two, New Hope and Uptown. Sam helped at Uptown. I’d asked if he would because I wanted to see if anybody at the cool-neighborhood market would be interested in my drawings. Selling Barsy’s Almonds is a constant performance, and I figured one of us could take care of business, while the other minded the art.

It turned out that only a handful of people checked out the drawings, and were entirely capable of flipping through the stack by themselves, so I could have handled themarket alone. It was nice to have Sam along, though, and he was a natural with the customers.

Sam opened his bucket of Mad Scientist India Pale Ale over the weekend, siphoning the brew out for the second fermentation. We had a little suspense when he tasted it. There’d been a little clumsiness with the yeast and the equipment sanitizer when he’d mixed the batch, and he said the beer might taste foul. It was great, though: not carbonated yet, but a nice combination of sweet and very bitter. Sam pointed out a faint floral note, and the slight sting from the alcohol. His first original recipe is a success. The used hops went back into the garden, via the compost pile, along with the yeast.

Barbara talked to Scott, a forward thinker and another urban farmer and brewer, at the Kingfield Market on Sunday. A commercial brewing start-up, even for micro-brewing is prohibitively expensive. Scott has plans for small-scale mead production, and believes that can be done with a conceivable amount of capital.

Saturday, at New Hope, I talked to a Princeton farmer who was selling Haralson apples. Taking a hint from somebody who knows more than I do, we picked Haralsons when we got home. Now they get juiced or sliced and frozen.

2 comments:

MBR said...

Would like to taste the beer. How do you price your art work? I've got a few minutes right now, so will continue reading some of your posts. What kinds of comments are you hoping for on 8/28? (PS--was prompted to create a Google account which then allowed me to post).

Tom Roark said...

Sam kegs it, so you'd have to come to his Halloween party. He's using it to tempt his mother and me to come.

The art...whatever. At my show in April, drawings were between one and two hundred dollars, paintings, five or six. At the market, they were the same drawings, fifteen bucks. What I really want is to draw for print.

Dunno about The Rabbi. I thought you'd enjoy hearing about it.

Thanks for the comment. Hits, comments, links, all raise my profile.