by Amy Stewart
A FIELD GUIDE to ARTEMISIA SPECIES USED IN LIQUEURS
Black génépi, A. genipi
Glacier wormwood, A. glacialis
Roman wormwood, A. pontica
Sagewort, A. campestris
White génépi, A. rupestris
Wormwood, A. absinthium
Yellow génépi, A. umbelliformis
-- moving on to --
flowers
Flower: a complex organ found in angiosperms, consisting of reproductive organs and their envelopes, usually including one or more stamens or pistils, a corolla, and a calyx.
Chamomile | Elderflower | Hops | Jasmine | Opium Poppy | Rose | Saffron | Violet
GROW YOUR OWN
Elderberries | Hops
CHAMOMILE
Matricaria chamomilla and Chamaemelum nobile
asteraceae (aster family)
Two different plants in the aster family are called chamomile. Roman chamomile, or Chamaemelum nobile, is a low-growing perennial that turns up in lawns, and German chamomile, Matricaria chamomilla, is an upright annual. The German type is more widely used as a culinary and medicinal herb. It is also much less likely to provoke allergic reactions, which is a common problem with the Roman species.
The round, yellow center of the flower is actually a composite of many tiny flowers fused together, a common characteristic of sunflowers and other plants in the aster family. The German species is sometimes called M. recutita; the word recutita or recutitus in Latin means “circumcised,” suggesting that the rounded head looked familiar to some long-ago botanist. One constituent of German chamomile, chamazulene, imparts a surprising blue-green color to chamomile extracts.
Chamomile flowers contain a rich mixture of aromatic and medicinal compounds that are strongest just after the flowers ripen and dry. In addition to their well-known sedative qualities, pharmacological studies show that the flowers’ anti-inflammatory and antiseptic effects actually do help calm the stomach.
The makers of Hendrick’s Gin claim chamomile as an ingredient, and a few distillers have made it the central ingredient in their liqueurs. J. Witty Spirits in California makes a chamomile liqueur, and the Italian distillery Marolo infuses chamomile in grappa for a sweet, soothing, and surprisingly floral digestif. It is also a key ingredient in vermouth, and one of the few that vermouth makers will admit to on tours of their facilities.
ELDERFLOWER
Sambucus nigra
caprifoliaceae (honeysuckle family)
The flowers of the elderberry bush impart a flavor that, until recently, was virtually unknown to American palates. Then, in 2007, a pale yellow liqueur called St-Germain entered the cocktail scene. Although it was marketed as an elegant French liqueur, the taste is probably more familiar to British drinkers, who have been imbibing elderflower wine and nonalcoholic elderflower cordial for years.
The elderberry bush flourishes throughout Europe and the United Kingdom. It is a classic hedgerow plant: it grows wild in the countryside, pushing up new shoots from a massive root base every year. The bush produces tiny purplish black berries that can be pressed into juice, cooked into jam, or made into a homemade fruit wine. Elderberry wine has a robust, fruity flavor that is not to everyone’s liking, but unscrupulous wine merchants in the nineteenth century knew they could use it to extend wine and port and no one would know the difference.
But it is the flat-topped cluster of honey-scented flowers, not the berries, that contribute their remarkable perfume to elderflower liqueur. No other spirit tastes quite so much like a meadow in bloom; if one tries to imagine what honeybees taste when they dive between a flower’s petals, this drink is surely it.
St-Germain’s distiller reveals little of its recipe, and what is disclosed has been cloaked in fanciful prose. French farmers, the distiller claims, harvest the blossoms in spring and carry them by “specially rigged bicycles” from the foothills of the French Alps to “local depots.” They declare that the flowers are not macerated, but that a secret method allows them to persuade the flavor to reveal itself. The extract is then combined with grape eau-de-vie, sugar, and (although they are vague on this point) probably some citrus fruit. The result is a liqueur that tastes of flowers, honey, and the distant, spectral seduction of fruit—pear, perhaps, or melon.
IS SAMBUCA MADE FROM SAMBUCUS?
Sambuca is an anise-flavored Italian liqueur that is lovely all by itself after dinner. (Ignore that nonsense about soaking coffee beans in sambuca and lighting it on fire. Just pour a little in a glass after dinner and sip it like an adult.) In addition to its overwhelmingly licorice flavor, it can also get a note of fruity complexity from elderberries. Some black sambucas derives their rich midnight purple color from the crushed skins of the elderberry, whereas others use artificial colors.
ELDERFLOWER CORDIAL
4 cups water
4 cups sugar
30 clusters fresh (not brown or decaying) elderflowers (S. nigra)
2 lemons, sliced
2 oranges, sliced
1¾ ounces citric acid (available at health food stores)
Bring the water and sugar to a boil and allow to cool. While it is cooling, go outside and cut fresh elderflowers, preferably on a warm afternoon when the fragrance is strongest, and shake gently to evict any bugs. Bring indoors immediately and use the tines of a fork to separate the flowers from their stems. Combine all ingredients in a large bowl or jug and let it sit for 24 hours, stirring and tasting as necessary. After 24 hours, strain the mixture into clean, sterile Mason jars. Store in the refrigerator for up to a month or longer in the freezer.
ELDERBERRIES
Although elderberries are used to make jam, wine, and cordial, they can be mildly toxic. All parts of the plant contain a cyanide-producing substance along with other toxins; even the berries should be harvested only when they are completely ripe. North American species of elderberry, including Sambucus racemosa, S. canadensis, and others, may be more toxic than S. nigra, the species that flourishes in English hedgerows. Cooking the berries helps reduce these toxins.
Elderberries tolerate all but the coldest of climates, surviving winter temperatures as low as –30 degrees Fahrenheit. They are shallow-rooted and prefer a topdressing of compost and balanced fertilizer every spring, as well as regular water in summer. To keep a bush fruitful, cut back all canes or branches more than three years old in winter or early spring. Dead or diseased canes should be removed as well. York and Kent are two popular varieties, but find one that works best in your region.
* * *
full/part sun
regular water
hardy to -30f/-34c
* * *
An ornamental variety of S. nigra, sold as Black Lace, is popular around the world as a garden plant for its dramatic black foliage and pink flower clusters. It will bloom regardless of whether it has a mate, but to get fruit, there must be another elderberry nearby.
IMBIBING ELDERFLOWERS
Elderflower liqueurs like St-Germain or homemade cordials mix well with almost everything, adding floral and honey notes without ever seeming cloying. Here are a few ways to try it:
•Add a splash to Champagne; float a yellow viola on top.
•Mix a martini with ½ ounce each of elderflower liqueur/cordial and Chartreuse (the green variety if you’re brave, the yellow if you’re not) in place of the vermouth. Garnish with lemon peel.
•Use soda and elderflower liqueur as a substitute for tonic in a gin and tonic, and add a squeeze of lemon instead of lime.
HOPS
Humulus lupulus and H. japonicus
cannabaceae (cannabis family)
Beer is not made from hops. It is made from barley, and sometimes other grains, then flavored with hops. But it is impossible to imagine beer without this strange, bitter vine.
Before the discovery, in about 800 AD, that hops could be added to beer to improve its flavor and preserve it, brewers mixed all kinds of strange herbs and spices into their beer. The word Gr
uit is an old German term for the bouquet of herbal ingredients that once went into beer. Yarrow, wormwood, meadowsweet, and even intoxicating and deadly herbs like hemlock, nightshade and henbane all went into the fermentation tank, often with unfortunate results. But that changed once hops migrated from China to Europe in the Middle Ages.
One of the earliest hop farms was established in Bavaria in 736 AD. At that time, brewing and other such scientific and medicinal pursuits were in the hands of monks. Hop farms became common at monasteries throughout Europe and turned up in England by the sixteenth century. With their arrival, a new style of beer was born.
It is difficult to appreciate the storage problems early brewers faced. But just imagine tapping into the last keg in the basement at the end of a long, miserable winter only to find that bacteria had spoiled it months ago. Settlers arriving in the New World on the Mayflower may have encountered this very problem: Mourt’s Relation, an account of the Pilgrims’ arrival, suggests that a shortage of beer forced them to make an unplanned landing at Plymouth: “We could not now take time for further search or consideration: our victuals being much spent, especially our beer.” With no way to disinfect fresh water, and nothing but salt water all around them, beer might have been the one beverage keeping them alive on their long journey. Once it was gone or ruined, they would have been in real trouble.
But hops came along and turned beer into a far superior product. The hop vine’s cones (clusters of female flowers) are laden with yellow glands that secrete lupulin, a resin containing acids that help make beer foamy, give it its bitter taste, and extend its shelf life. These so-called alpha acids are so critical to good beer making that hops are rated according the amount they produce. Aromatic hops are lower in alpha acids but produce delightful flavors and aromas, while bitter hops are higher in alpha acids, make the brew last longer, and contribute more bitterness to counteract the yeasty flavor of the malt.
These vigorous, sturdy vines are closely related to marijuana; there is a vague family resemblance between the dank, sticky cannabis flower buds and the equally sticky and fragrant cones of the female hop vine. Like cannabis, hops are dioecious. Females can grow their highly prized cones without a male around, but they can’t set seed and reproduce. Hop farmers select female vines and scour their fields for any uninvited males, which they promptly evict. They don’t want the females impregnated, because brewers won’t buy seed-infested cones.
Hops can’t grow just anywhere: these tall, perennial vines require thirteen hours of sunlight per day while they are growing, and that can only be found in a narrow band around the world at 35 to 55 degrees north and south latitude. That means they are abundant in Germany, England, and elsewhere in Europe. In the United States they are grown mostly in the West: hop farming was pushed westward as powdery and downy mildew diseases made it impossible to grow the vine in eastern states. The hops industry had another advantage in Oregon and Washington: farmers survived Prohibition by shipping dried hops to Asia.
In latitudes 35 to 55 degrees south, hops grow in Australia and New Zealand, and in the north they are grown China and Japan. Attempts have been made to grow them in Zimbabwe and South Africa as well, but without the optimal day length, streetlights have had to be installed in hop yards. Meanwhile, optimistic botanists are working on a day-length neutral hop variety that doesn’t object to longer or shorter days during its flowering season.
During their growing season, hops are astonishingly vigorous, rising six inches in a single day. The vines stretch away from the central stalk during the day; at night, they wrap themselves around wires or other supports. “You walk through the fields in the late afternoon, and you’ll see all these vines reaching out at forty-five degree angles,” said Oregon hop farmer Gayle Goschie. “Then you come out the next morning and they’re wrapped tightly around the trellis again.” They spiral around the trellis in a clockwise direction, which has inspired a couple of botanical urban legends: one is that they grow counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere, and the other is that they grow clockwise to follow the sun from east to west. Neither is true. Like left-handedness, they are simply born with a genetic predisposition to grow clockwise, no matter where they are relative to the sun or the equator. (Botanists who study “twining handedness” have discovered that hops are unusual in their proclivity to twine in a clockwise direction; 90 percent of all climbing plants prefer to go counterclockwise.)
Hops don’t just climb wire trellises. Tiny barbs on the vines make it possible for them to climb trees or other plants as well. Romans thought the vine killed trees by strangulation and named it “little wolf,” which explains the origin of the plant’s genus, Lupulus.
Farmers are quick to point out that hops are not a very nice vine. Darren Gamache, a Washington grower, knows what it’s like to pick them by hand the way his grandparents did. “The vines have these rough little bristles that are very abrasive, and will even leave welts. Especially when it’s hot outside, and you’ve got salty sweat running into open wounds—it’s really uncomfortable,” he said. “And a lot of people have an allergic reaction to them.” Most hops today are picked by machine for this very reason.
The danger is not over after harvest: freshly picked hops heat up the way a compost pile does and have been known to catch fire. When large bales of hops are packed into storage, they can actually spontaneously combust and burn a warehouse down. Fires at hop yards were a frequent occurrence in the Pacific Northwest’s early hop-growing days.
Brewers, for the most part, have little idea that hop farmers must endure scratchy vines, fight warehouse fires, and chase love-struck males out of their fields to get the crop to market. Hops generally aren’t even recognizable as cones by the time they get to the brewery: they are pressed into pellets and shipped in vacuum-sealed bags. A few brewers use green hops straight from the fields in a seasonal beer around harvest time; to experience freshly picked hops, look in the fall for “fresh hop” or “wet-hopped” brews.
Hop kiln: Also called an oast house in England, these distinctive barns with cone-shaped towers were used to dry hops when they came in from the fields. The hops would be spread on a frame suspended in the upper part of the tower, and a fire would be lit underneath to dry the hops. They could then be bagged and stored in the barn.
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ALE AND LAGER?
That depends on who you ask, and when you ask. Go back two thousand years to the area that is now Germany and you’ll find that ale referred to some kind of beerlike fermented drink about which little is definitively known. Go to England in 1000 AD and you’ll hear ale and beer used to refer to two different drinks, ale being what we now think of as beer, and beer being a drink made with fermented honey and fruit juice.
Then along came hops, and with it the German term lager, which was used to differentiate brews that contained hops from those that didn’t. Today, however, virtually all beers are flavored with hops. The terms lager and ale are now used to describe beers brewed with species of bottom-fermenting yeasts or top-fermenting yeasts, respectively. To further confuse matters, Great Britain’s commendable Campaign for Real Ale advocates not necessarily for beer made with top-fermenting yeast but for beer made in the traditional English style, which means it’s allowed to undergo a secondary fermentation in the cask and is served from a cask at a pub, never bottled.
But where the yeast lived in the fermentation tank is of little concern to the average drinker. It is more important to know that most English beers are called ales, most German and American beers are lagers, and that in bars all around the world, some sort of hand signal will usually get you a brew when words fail.
WHY ARE BEER BOTTLES BROWN?
Brewers learned long ago that dark bottles protect beer from the light and prevent it from developing a skunky “lightstruck” taste. But it wasn’t until 2001 that scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found out exactly what causes that nasty flavor. Certain compounds in hops, known as
isohumulones, break down into free radicals when exposed to light. Those free radicals are chemically similar to the secretions of skunks. And it doesn’t take long for the transformation to happen: some beer drinkers will notice the skunky flavor at the bottom of a pint glass that sat in sunlight while they drank it.
So why are some beers sold in clear bottles? First, it’s cheaper. Second, some mass-produced beers are made with a chemically altered hop compound that doesn’t break down. But if you see clear-bottled beers sold in a closed box, chances are it’s because the brewer knows the taste will degrade quickly in light. And the tradition of adding a wedge of lime to the beer? That’s just a marketing ploy to disguise the skunky flavor.
HOP VARIETIES
AROMA (OLD WORLD) HOPS
Cascade
Cluster
East Kent Goldings
Fuggle
Hallertauer
Hersbrucker
Tettnang
Willamette
BITTERING (HIGH ALPHA) HOPS
Amarillo
Brewer’s Gold
Bullion
Chinook
Eroica
Nugget
Olympic
Sticklebract
International bitterness units: An international scale measuring the level of bitterness contributed by alpha acids in hops.