Boozy Weekend

Though we're usually beer drinkers, this past weekend involved an unusual amount of hooch. On Saturday, following a hike in Kenscoff with the lovely SF,

(that's water in Ben's canteen, I swear)

and the foraging of nasturtium seeds for pickling,

we warmed and numbed ourselves for the long taptap ride down with 20-gourdes worth of pineapple-infused kleren (100 proof sugarcane liquor that will make your eyeballs pop out).

Our options included kleren infused with sour barbados cherries, pineapple, sitwon (key lime), saffron, the aphrodesiac bwa cochon (literally pig wood, or in English science-speak, Sterculiaceae), and a bitter herb that I can pronounce but not spell. 

On Sunday, we used the hose from a discarded water filter to siphon 5-gallons of ginger honey mead into smaller containers for a second round of fermenting.

Turns out, this process is considerable when it involves scouring the city for affordable demijon (or, carboys, the kind of big bottles with narrow necks pictured on Ben's knee). They're usually sold on the street as antiques. Finally, we found a friendly, half-drunk kleren vendor who sold us empty bottles (with their original labels) for a reasonable price. "Antiques," indeed! That, my friends, is a label for worm medicine:

After being carefully scrubbed and siphoned, our bottles of mead are happily bubbling away. (We didn't find enough carboys, so we used some wine bottles, too. We also didn't have enough airlocks. Instead, we stuck balloons over the mouth of each bottle, to slowly let out air without contamination. It looks like a party on our kitchen counter.)