Author, teacher, and forager Pascal Baudar joins me to discuss his exploration of primitive brews and fermentation, the basis for his latest book The Wildcrafting Brewer.
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He shares with us the way we can combine local ingredients as flavor, with water, sugar, and yeast to create sodas, beer, wine, and mead with local flavor and sense of place. If you are familiar with his first book, The New Wildcrafted Cuisine, then you know his thoughts push the limits of what we might think of when considering what to toss into our brew pot. Taking these methods, he again takes us in an unexpected direction that goes from the social drinks we might expect, to discuss how we might consider making culinary, healing, or even psychotropic beverages.
Find out more about Pascal and his work as a forager and teacher at urbanoutdoorskills.com and his books, including The Wildcrafting Brewer at ChelseaGreen.com.
Stepping away from this conversation, though he and I spoke about brewing and making wild-flavored beverages, I’m thinking more generally about how easy it is to complicate and over-analyze our journey and arrive at a place where the results we wish to accomplish gets lost in a messy process requiring more work than needed. Pascal shows us that with his primitive, or as he also says archaic, brews and how the modern steps, and commercial flavors, limit the range of experiences we create as we scrub and sanitize our pots and fermentation vessels, or leave our brews alone; watched but untouched as the liquid transforms from sugary concoction into alcoholic elixir.
How often do we do seek this same sterile approach in our other work, only to find the effort falls flat because of a singular direction and only considering one way? What if we tried more simplicity and creativity in our work as permaculture designers, and in our relationships and initiatives for community building? Can we strip away the unnecessary and arrive and something more concise, clear, whole, productive, and enjoyable? I think so, and the skills of creating wild foods and beverages provide a place where we can safely explore these patterns, before searching for similar details in our other work.
What do you think of this conversation with Pascal? Leave a comment below.
Resources
Outdoor Urban Skills
The Wildcrafting Brewer
The New Wildcrafted Cuisine
Chelsea Green Publishing