By Harley Zipori. Spring is in the air. Even though we had a bit of rain and the temperatures are rather cool, even for this season, the trend seems to be more sun and the days are definitely longer.
The winter flowers are already starting to fade. However due to the abundant rain of the last 2 months or so, there is lots and lots of green. It’s a good time to get out in the country.
And that is exactly what my wife and I did last weekend, taking advantage of one of the regional food festivals to get some fresh air, enjoy the scenery and meet up with friends.
The festival is the Mateh Yehuda Country Food Festival (see link, Hebrew only). This is an annual event taking place during the entire month of March so there is still one weekend to try and fit it in. The Mateh Yehuda regional council is located between Beit Shemesh and Beit Guvrin and includes a number of moshavim and the Britannia Park. It’s always a lovely area but after the recent rains, the rolling hills are covered with green.
This blog is my anniversary blog. It was one year ago that I started wrote about the mini beer festival last March during last year’s country food festival. Well quite a few blogs have flowed under the bridge since then and sometimes it difficult to keep up with all the goings-on. There was a beer festival on March 9-10 with 6 of the regional brewers in the area (and there are quite a few actually for such a small area) showing their wares on Moshav Tsafririm, where our friends live. Unfortunately that weekend was not conducive to outings and our trip had to wait till the following weekend. Even though there was not festival, the brewers were hosting people at their homes or breweries so it’s a better opportunity to get a bit of quality time. Not that they aren’t busy anyway as the festival draws people from all over the country and they all want to eat and drink.
I did manage to visit 2 breweries and have brief chats with the brewers.
Gal Sapir lives and brews on Moshav Aviezer, right next to the Elah Valley, which is mentioned in the Bible as the location David fought Goliath. Gal brews a variety of beers in what appears to be an old chicken coop that he fixed up rather nicely with a rustic tasting room with a fantastic collection of bottles from Israel craft breweries (see picture).
Despite Gal being a bit pressured due to the imminent arrival of group of motorcyclists who would be demanding food and refreshment, he sat with us and gave us some of his time and of course, some of his beer. We tasted his Spicy Monster freestyle pale ale using local herbs for flavoring. It’s light and refreshing and definitely a good spring beer. We also tasted a special seasonal beer which was dark and rich and a bit sweet. This was clearly a winter beer, brewed in a European tradition and went down very smoothly. I took a few bottles of Gal’s beer home and shared the winter ale with a friend that night. Gal, in Hebrew, means “wave” as in the waves on the ocean and is pronounced with the AH and not like the American old fashioned word for a woman. Let’s hope this Gal is really the start of a new wave in Israeli Craft Beer.
Together with our friends, we wandered around Moshav Tsafririm where there was hand-made chocolates, home-style sourdough breads (see write-up in Haaretz) and of course, Aram and Bat Sheva’s hospitality. Aram makes beer labeled Abir Ha-elah, the Knight of Elah (as in the aforementioned Valley of Elah), and his beers are always on the creative side, using local and some not so local flavorings. We decided to have lunch on the deck of their home (full disclosure; our friend from Tsafririm build the deck with his father so there is a family connection here). Bat Sheva makes wonderful cheeses. I am not just being nice. Her cheeses are really good running from mild all the way to kick your butt aged hard cheeses.
Aram’s beers have evocative names like Crispy Wheat, Touching Blade and Black Ice. He likes to use herbs and spices to give sometimes exotic flavors to his beers. For lunch, we shared a bottle of Crispy Wheat, which was a perfect accompaniment to the bean soup in a bread bowl.
Their place was packed and Aram was busy cooking behind a counter so exchanging more than a few words was impossible. It was nice to see people who were coming and asking for the beers by name. Obviously he has a few fans.
I also bottled my most recent batch of beer on Friday. It will be a couple weeks before I can taste it and this is a beer that will benefit from some time on the bottle. This particular batch is what I call a dark steam beer. A “steam” beer is one that is brewed using lager, bottom fermenting, yeast but fermented at a temperature more suitable to ale yeasts. I fermented this during 3 fairly cold weeks, so that for most of the time the temperature was around 15C, sometimes getting down to 13C. It never got above 17C. So it was a nice cool fermentation and should be interesting.
During bottling I tasted the as yet uncarbonated beer and was pretty pleased. It should only get better in the bottle.
This beer was inspired by a dark lager I tasted in Germany during my trip there in November. The Germans call this a schwarzbier, literally a black beer. This is not to be confused with what is known in Israel as Birah Shechora (literally “black beer”) which is an unfermented malt beverage that is terribly sweet with few redeeming qualities (one of which being it goes well with a good plate of hummus!). German schwarzbier is a lager that looks almost like a Guinness but is actually much lighter without the roasted malt bitterness. It should have a nice chocolaty-coffee flavor with low bitterness and a good malt taste. If you want to get an idea of what I mean, get a hold of a Samuel Adams Black Lager. It’s an amazing beer and has more depth and flavor than the one I drank in Germany.
In my next blog I will report on the results of my efforts, good, bad, or indifferent.
As usual you can reach me at [email protected].
