Beer store reviews - The Jug Shop and City Beer Store

Reading a review of a beer that whets your appetite leads only to torment if you can't get a glass or a bottle for yourself. So today, it's time for a different kind of review, namely, of my two favorite places to buy beer (at least, bottles) in San Francisco, whose names I've mentioned in a number of previous posts: City Beer Store and The Jug Shop.

The Jug Shop

The Jug Shop has sat a couple of blocks from the western end of the Broadway tunnel, at the foot of Russian Hill, since 1965--before your Humble Author was born, in fact. Short of a big box like BevMo, The Jug Shop carries one of the largest array of wines, spirits, and beers to be found in San Francisco. If you want it, chances are, The Jug Shop has it.

Not only that, the staff is very knowledgeable and helpful. They also host frequent beer tastings, usually on Friday nights, led by Eric Cripe, a certified cicerone (beer somalier) and his brother Evan, who resemble nothing so much as a pair of jolly Vikings. Be forewarned, however, that their tastings showcase anywhere from a dozen to fifty beers (or in one case, ciders and meads), so don't come on an empty stomach, or plan to drive home afterwards. (Tip: If you're hungry, stop off at Cheese Plus across the street beforehand, which has an excellent selection of artisan cheeses, a deli, and is no slouch in its beer selection either.)

1590 Pacific Ave, at Polk St.

City Beer Store

City Beer Store opened in May of 2006 in the South of Market (SoMa) district, a couple of blocks from the criminal courthouse, an area that had been mostly auto bodyshops and wholesale appliances, but was revitalized by the in-flood of the tech industry beginning in the mid-90s. The original space was not much bigger than a living room, with some shelves, a couple of reach-in refrigerators, a couple of taps, and a handful of seats. Yet even so, they managed to showcase an astounding range of craft and foreign beers, things that you couldn't find anywhere else. They also offered tastings, classes, batch release/tapping parties, even art openings.

A couple of years ago, they expanded the store to probably 3 times its original size, so that their beer selection became even more astoundinger, around 300 beers, quite possibly the widest I've seen anywhere. They also added a real bar with about a dozen rotating taps, with actual seating for maybe 20 or 30. In particular, they feature beers from local homebrewers who've made the jump to professional like Triple Voodoo and Pacific Brewing Labs, as well as craft brews from across the county, and rarities from across the sea. The only problem is that, like so many great and trendy things in San Francisco, they're somewhat victims of their own success, as I don't ever think I've seen an empty seat any time I've gone.

Fortunately, there's always an excellent selection of bottles to take and enjoy at home, away from the madding crowd.

1168 Folsom St, between 8th & 9th Streets

Recipe #229 - Brit-a-porter Belgian caramel porter

This one is a bit of a fanciful hybrid that I made for Dr. P about a year ago, combining aspects of a British porter and a Belgian dubbel.

Malt:
9 lbs British 2-row
1.5 lb 120L crystal malt
0.5 lb chocolate malt
0.5 lb carafa malt

Additional fermentables:
1 qt caramel syrup. In a saucepan, heat 2 cups sugar carefully over medium-low heat until liquid and dark brown. You can move the pan off the heat or swirl it around to keep it from burning, but do not stir, or you'll get rock candy instead. Carefully add 2 cups water (watch for splatters, this shit is like napalm if it hits you), and return to heat until all caramel re-dissolves.

Hops:
1 oz Fuggles @ 5.6% AA 60 min
0.5 oz East Kent Goldings @ 5.6% AA 20 min
0.5 oz East Kent Goldings @ 5.6% AA 5 min

Yeast: White Labs Belgian ale yeast.

Recipes #226, #227, and #228 - Pink Nightmare, Grandma Dot's Bock, and Old Titan

It's time now for the last of my holiday beer recipes: Pink Nightmare cranberry wheat, Grandma Dot's Bock, and Old Titan spiced honey porter.

Grandma Dot's Bock

GDB was my very first holiday beer, and the 11th beer I'd ever brewed. I brewed it because I'd recently found out from my mom that her grandmother, Leora "Dot" Blaine, had homebrewed bock beer, presumably during Prohibition. Sadly, I don't have her recipe.

Bock beers are German lagers, and actually cover a range of beers, that generally tend to be stronger, heavier, and less hoppy than pilsners: helles, light-colored bock; dunkel, dark-colored bock; doppel,  double-bock (which is what GDB is); and weiss, bock with wheat.

Lagers can be a nuisance for the homebrewer, since they're supposed to, well, lager, meaning, age for several weeks around 55F, which is a difficult temperature to achieve. Refrigerators top out at around 45F. Enterprising brewers will install an electrical cut-off attached to a thermometer that turns off the power to the fridge if they go below 55, but that generally makes the refrigerator useless for anything else (and very few of us have the luxury of a dedicated lagering fridge, much less a proper German lagering cave). After several years of bottles that were overcarbonated, or outright exploded, because I tried to lager them in the fridge and they were under-fermented when they went into the bottle (and therefore overfermented in the bottle), I decided just to rely on San Francisco's naturally cool temperatures to do my lagering, and let the yeast deal with it. So far, the results have been pretty good.

Malt:
5.5 lbs German Vienna
3 lbs German Munich
1 lb caramunich
0.5 lb carapils
0.5 lb wheat malt
0.5 lb English brown malt

Hops:
2 oz. Perle @ 7.1% AA 60 min
1 oz. Hallertauer Hersbrucker @ 4.0% AA 20 min
1 oz. Hallertauer Hersbrucker @ 4.0% AA 5 min

Yeast: White Labs German Bock Yeast WLP 833

Allow 4 weeks in secondary.

  
Old Titan
Old Titan spiced honey porter was my second holiday beer and the twelfth batch overall. The malt bill changes very little over the years, but I'm still trying to find just that right mix of spices for the infusion. 

The name "Old Titan" comes from a story that I used to tell to amuse and confuse my Latin students, back when I taught high school Latin, as follows. (Most of it is true; see if you can determine where it veers off the rails...)

In Roman mythology, Saturn was the king of the Titans, powerful giants who werethe parents of the gods. The Saturnalia, which began on 17 December andlasted for a nine-day Roman week until the winter solstice on 25 December, wasthe forerunner of the modern Christmas. The Romans celebrated Saturnaliaby feasting, exchanging gifts, and decorating their homes with lights andevergreen boughs. And Saturn himself, depicted as an old man with a long whitebeard, dressed in robes and pilus (the peaked freedman’s cap), andcarrying a cornucopia filled with the gifts of the earth, is the sourceof our modern “Santa Claus” (whose name comes from Saturnuculus, meaning“Little Saturn” or “Uncle Saturn”).

Malt:
9 lbs British 2-row
1 lb 80L British crystal
0.5 lb Special B
0.5 lb English brown
0.5 lb carafa

Other fermentables: 2 lbs honey during boil.
Hops:
1 oz East Kent Goldings @ 5.6% AA 60 min
0.5 oz East Kent Goldings @ 5.6% AA 20 min
0.5 oz East Kent Goldings@ 5.6% AA 5 min

Yeast: White Labs Dry English Ale WLP 007

Infusion: To 4 oz house vodka, add 1 cinnamon stick, 6 cloves and 6 allspice berries (rushed), 1/4 tsp fresh nutmeg, 1/2 tsp fresh-grated ginger. Steep 1 week, then add to secondary.

Pink Nightmare

Fruit beers are always tricky, because the fruit will have some residual wild yeast in it, and you never know how that will behave. It's also hard to get rid of. If you try to freeze it, it will just go to sleep. Boil it, and the pectin in your fruit will set and you'll get jelly instead of beer. The second time that I made this (and the first year it was called "Pink Nightmare;" the original batch was "Solstice Celebration," the name that would ultimately go to my barleywine), it literally exploded out of the fermenter, spewing fist-sized globs of what looked like strawberry moose 4 feet up the walls of the "beer closet." Nowadays, I usually puree the cranberries, microwave them for about 5 minutes, pour partially chilled wort (~120F) over them, and then hope for the best (which usually means replacing the airlock with a blow-off tube and cleaning up a moderate-sized mess.

(The name comes from the movie A Christmas Story, when Ralphie's father, seeing him in the bunny jammies his aunt sent him, pronounced that he looked like "a pink nightmare.")

Malt:
5 lbs Weyerman pils
4.5 lbs white wheat malt
0.75 lb oats
0.5 lb carapils
0.25 lb  honey (asidulated) malt
0.5 lb rice hulls

Hops:
1 oz Styrian Goldings  @ 5.0% AA 60 min
0.5 oz Spaltz @ 3.2% AA 20 min
0.5 oz. Spaltz @ 3.2% AA 5 min

Yeast: Belgian Wit WLP 400

Fruit: 1.5 lbs fresh cranberries, blended 6 oz at a time with 1/3 cup of water each until pureed. Microwave 5 min. Add to 120F wort, let stand 10 min before topping fermenter with water and pitching yeast. Recommend using a blow-off tube.

Infusion: In 4 oz house vodka, soak 1/4 oz curcao orange peel, 1/2 tsp ground corriander, 8 cloves crushed, for 1 week, then add to secondary.

Beer review - Super deluxe and super fresh

October holds a special place in the brewing calendar, and not (just) because of Oktoberfest. October is also the time when brewers release their "fresh hop" or "wet hop" beers, something that's become increasingly popular the last few years.

Normally, hop flowers are dried to preserve them, and in the process lose some of their more volatile aromatic essences. Typically, brewers would capture as much of these as they could by dry-hopping their beer, which is basically adding hops to the fermented beer, to flavor it while it ages (as opposed to adding them to the boiling wort before the beer has been fermented, which is how hops are used for bittering).

Wet-hopping beer is the same as dry-hopping, but using freshly-picked hops that have even more of their volatile aromatics intact than dried hops do. The beer can pick up all sorts of interesting flavors this way, but of course you're limited in doing it to when hops can be picked fresh, typically September in the Northern Hemisphere.

 

Chasin' Freshies, Deschutes Brewing

All of this is by way of introducing our next review, Chasin' Freshies from Deschutes Brewery in Bend, OR. Deschutes has been the powerhouse of brewing in Oregon, starting up in 1988, and is currently the 5th-largest craft brewery, and 11th-largest brewery overall, in the US, probably most known for their Black Butte porter and Mirror Pond pale ale.

Fresh-hop ales are typically brewed as West Coast pale ales or IPAs, since these styles showcase the hops, and Chasin' Freshies is no exception. It's fairly light-bodied and colored, however, using pilsner malt and oats, which prevent it from overpowering the delicate floral notes of the wet hops, in this case Cascades, which have a citrusy-to-piney character. It's a nicely balanced beer, light and refreshing, with just a hint of alcohol strength, and not too much bitterness to turn off those who don't like bitter beer.

Chasin' Freshies: 7.4% ABV, 60 IBUs of yum!

Fruet, The Bruery

A few years ago, when I was down in the OC visiting family, I naturally thought to see if there was any good local craft beer available. I had my doubts, SoCal being the land of chains, strip-malls, and homogenized culture. But a Google search uncovered The Bruery, a craft brewery in Placentia, a small suburban town in inland OC known for, well, not much of anything really, but it happened to be on my way to visit my dad, so I decided I'd stop by. Turned out that it was in the back of an industrial park just off the 57 freeway, with a storefront virtually indistinguishable from the nearby storage unit, air conditioning repair, and autobody places.

Going inside, however, I was in for a shock. Their space was filled floor to ceiling with racks of barrels. Yes, almost everything they brew is barrel aged, mostly Belgian styles, and plenty of sours. They had a small bar with about 20 of their beers on tap, with a couple of empty barrels to serve as tables with a few stools. Their beers ranged from awesome to amazing.

The Fruet was their fourth anniversary beer, an English style Old Ale fermented with their house strain of Belgian yeast and aged in bourbon barrels. It's BIG, robust, dark, fruity, caramelly, toffeeey, oakey, bourboneyyyyy. Given that it's a limited release, good luck finding it, but Bruery beers are pretty widely distributed across the US, and I can't recommend them enough.

Fruet: 14.5% ABV, 45 IBUs.

Seduction, Brewery Ommegang 

Last summer, while we were visiting Dr. P's family, in central New York, we made a very special pilgrimage, to Cooperstown. Not, of course for that museum about that game with the sticks and the gloves and the leather ball. Instead, we visited one of the wonders of the craft brewing world, Brewery Ommegang.

Ommegang was purpose built in 1997 to make Belgian ales, beginning with their flagship abbey ale, and indeed they've probably done more than any other American craft brewery to popularize Belgian beers of all styles, including their Hennepin, the first American-brewed saison. 

Dr. P. spotted Ommegang's Seduction on a trip to City Beer Store (who'll be getting their own review soon, I promise!). It's a dark Belgian ale brewed with Callebaut chocolate, and with a touch of Liefmans kriek, sour beer aged on tart cherries and berries. Seduction is like drinking the world's most decadent candy, dark, silky, smooth, chewy. Much like coffee, chocolate is a difficult ingredient to work with in beer, due to its high oil and fat content (I haven't even attempted it). But this is just masterful. It's a Valentine in a beer bottle.

Seduction: 6.8% ABV, IBUs very low, want some candy little girl?

Meadowlark IPA, Pretty Things

Eric the cicerone at The Jug Shop (who'll be getting his own review soon, I promise!) first turned me on to the beers from the Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project in Cambridge, MA, at a tasting that featured not one, not two, but eight of their beers, as well as five from Jester King in Austin, TX. Needless to say, these are great events, but given the state I'm in when I stagger home afterwards... let's just say it's not conducive to writing a cogent review.

Pretty Things are a husband-and wife team gypsy brewers, he a dreamer and she a scientist (sound familiar?), who met at a beer festival, moved to Yorkshire (where she's from) then moved back to New England (where he's from). Their flagship Jack D'Or is a saison, and their beers tend to be a mix of Belgian, English, and, what might be best termed eclectic (such as the Lovely St. Winefride Brown Lager).

Meadowlark IPA, then, is an anomaly for them, an American style IPA. It's a good beer, gold-amber in color, well-balanced in hoppiness, with a little more to the bitter side than the floral. It's a very tasty beer, and I have to say that of the nine Pretty Things beers I've tried, I found four (Once Upon a Time X Ale, Lovely St. Winefride, Our Finest Regards barleywine, and Babayaga Sylvan Stout) were all exceptionally good, so I recommend them if you can find them. 

Meadowlark IPA: 7.0% ABV, 85 IBUs.

Beer review - Norway to NorCal, via Switzerland

I don't normally think of either Norway or Switzerland as being among the world's great brewing cultures, but today we have excellent sour beers from each, as well as a very, very native beer from Northern California, which most definitely is. 

HaandBryggeriet Sur Megge

Romantic that I am, I still imagine Norwegians as mead-swilling Vikings. The only Scandinavian beer most folks know of is Danish Carlsberg, which is your basic generic pilsner.

So, I was surprised to learn that, besides their own crap pilsners, Norwegians in the past decade have started a couple of excellent craft brewers: Nøgne Ø and HaandBryggeriet ("Hand Brewery"), the latter of which is 4 guys in a 200 year-old farmhouse, many of them fermented with wild yeast and barrel aged.

I got my hands on their Sur Megge (Sour Bitch) at The Jug Shop, which is a marvelous barrel-aged  sour ale, coming in at 8% ABV. Great notes of summer fruit, orange-gold color, and delightfully tart. I'll definitely have to keep an eye out for their other beers!

Brasserie de Franches-Montagnes Abbaye de Saint Bon-Chien 

The next beer comes from the region of Switzerland bordering France, again two countries I don't think of when I think beer. France of course being (thanks to the Romans) a wine country, and Switzerland absinthe. So I was very surprised when the proprietor at Little Vine told me he had a sour beer from Switzerland, and naturally I had to try it.

The Brasserie de Franches-Montagnes (BFM, "Brewery of the French Mountains") has actually been around for about 15 years, making very small batches of a wide variety of traditional beer styles, most of them with a twist. I was lucky enough to get a bottle of their Abbaye de Saint Bon-Chien (named, apparently, in honor of the much-beloved brewery cat), which is a bière de garde, a Belgian-style ale with copper to brown color, maltiness, and moderate strength (6-8% ABV).

The Bon-Chien, however, is quite a bit strong, clocking in around 11% ABV. Not only that, it's barrel aged, the exact barrel depending on the vintage - Merlot, whisky, and grappa have been used. This gives is a delicious sourness, as well as character from whatever was aged in the barrel previously.

The Bon-Chien was a truly outstanding sour beer, very strong yet well balanced between strength, sweet, and sour, with outstanding sour cherry, red wine, and vinegar flavors. A real treat if you can find it, just be sure to drink it sitting down!

Almanac Extra Pale 

Last but certainly not least, Almanac brewing is a couple of San Francisco homebrewers who made the jump to commercial brewing two years ago. Their initial focus was on brewing seasonal beers that showcased local Northern California produce (as well as hops and even some malts), including blackberries, plums, oranges, fennel, and honey, usually paired with lighter-bodied Belgian style ales.

Beginning this summer, however, they've also begun producing two year-round brews (which they call "table" beers, although at around $3 a bottle, they're not exactly everyday beers), their Extra Pale (6% ABV) and Honey Saison (4.8% ABV). The former is brewed with local Mandarin oranges and generously dry-hopped, to produce a really excellent West Coast pale ale, slightly tart and with a pronounced citrus flavor from both the hops and the oranges. It's quite excellent, and I can't wait to review the saison!

Beer review - Mikkeller madness!

Spontankoppi, Coffee IPA, and Spontankriek.

Frequent readers of the BCBB will know that I've got quite a thing going on for the beers of Danish gypsy brewers Mikkeller. On a recent trip to The Jug Shop I picked up some more of their beers. Two of them interested me because they went with a "wild" yeast fermentation, and two because they had coffee in them. I love coffee.

Now, most brewers are very cautious about the yeast they let into their beer, and with good reason. While the behavior and flavor profile of good ol' S. cerevisiae is predictable, there are around 1,500 known species of yeast. They're all over the map, and a lot of them will spoil beer (and food), and a few are down right dangerous.

Probably the tamest "wild" yeasts are the Brettanomyces (affectionately known as "Brett" among brewers), which are what make sour beers sour. But even Brett is a tricky beast. It produces flavors that can be described as "metallic," "leather," or "barnyard," which can easily overpower a beer. It also has a much slower metabolism than S. cerevisiae, so beers with Brett typically require longer aging. And, they can metabolize sugars that S. cerevisiae can't, meaning that Brett fermentations will go on long after the S. cerevisiae are done - which can mean they take much longer to be finished, or, if you bottle them too early, they can build up too much CO2 in the bottle. And, finally, they can be damned difficult to kill off, so if they get into your brewery, and you don't want them there, you may be out of luck. You'll either have to switch to brewing sours, or get a new set of equipment. Consequently, very few homebrewers ever make sour beers, and they have to be very cautious when they do.

It's possible to buy commercial strains of Brett and pitch them into your beer. The more traditional method is to go with a "spontaneous" fermentation, where you let your beer into contact with the natural yeast in the environment. (This is also how traditional sourdough starter is made.) One way to do this is to ferment your beer in used wine barrels. Wine is usually fermented naturally using the yeast that's already accumulated in the fruit themselves, and a certain amount of that will be Brett, which builds up over time in the barrels. Another traditional method, used to make Belgian lambics, is to open the rafters of the brewery to the winds, and allow airborn yeast to accumulate in the spiderwebs and cobwebs, which then fall into the fermentation tanks...

Coffee, meanwhile, is an interesting and challenging ingredient for brewers to work with. A number of styles of beer, particularly porters and stouts, would seem to lend themselves to the addition of coffee, since they share similar flavors. But coffee (and similarly, cocoa) contain oils, most notably caffeol (which is primarily responsible for coffee's aroma and flavor), the oxidation of which can cause them to go rancid. (I've haven't myself used coffee in beer, but it's something I'd like to try, if I can find a good method.)

Spontankriek

Kriek is lambic with cherries added. The beer itself is usually a Belgian lambic, which is a fairly light-colored and flavored beer. In some cases, kriek is made by adding a cherry syrup to a lambic, which can be a bit cloying. The more traditional method is to add cherries, with their attendant load of wild yeast, to the fermenter.

Spontankriek is clearly the latter sort. It's puckery tart, the sour cherry flavor mixing seemlessly with the sour beer. If you like sour cherries or sour beer, you're going to love this. 7.7% ABV.

Spontankoppi

Having thoroughly enjoyed the Spontankriek I was really looking forward to the Spontankoppi. But I have to say, I think the first word out of my mouth was... "ouch." I don't know how they got the coffee into the beer, but it was extremely strong and bitter, like the strongest cup of black coffee you've ever had, and then some. (Admittedly, I like my coffee strong, like barely fit for human consumption, but with lots of milk and sugar.) The sour beer was reduced to almost a footnote. If you get off on really strong black coffee, you might enjoy this, but I didn't. 5.3% ABV.

Coffee IPA

After the Spontankoppi, I had some trepidation about the Coffee IPA. Particularly since it came in a wine sized 750 ml bottle, so good or bad, I was going to be drinking a lot of it (Dr. P doesn't care for hoppy beers).

Fortunately, it was everything that I'd hoped the Spontankoppi would be, and more. The IPA base wasn't agressively hoppy, focusing on the citrusy and fruity notes, with a good malt backbone. The hand of the coffee was much lighter, not bitter, with toffee notes that matched the malt, and fruity notes that matched the hops, with just a hint of coffee bitterness on the finish. This was definitely the hop-head's coffee beer. 6.9% ABV.

Recipes #224 and #225 - still mead and spiced gravenstein cyser

As I mentioned early on, you can ferment pretty much anything with sugar in it (or starch that you can convert into sugar). One of the earliest sources of sugar available to humans was honey, and yet, one of the oldest fermented beverages is also one of the least familiar in modern times: mead.

Mead is simply fermented honey. To ferment honey, you have to dilute it with water, since the high sugar content in honey actually turns water molecules it comes into contact with into hydrogen peroxide, and draws the water out of cells, both of which have the effect of killing microorganisms like yeast and bacteria.

In addition, since honey is almost completely composed of fructose and glucose, it's lacking most of the nutrients that yeast need to grow, prosper, and metabolize it into alcohol. Consequently, making mead requires either adding these nutrients (usually in the form of diammonium sulphate and/or the powdered yeast remnants).

You can also add other fermentables to the must (the water with dissolved honey), such as fruit juice or grain, which will both provide these nutrients and change the character of the finished beverage. Mead made with fruit juices is called melomel, and with grape juice specifically, pyment. Mead can also be flavored with herbs and spices; spiced pyment is called hippocras, allegedly after the father of Greek medicine, Hippocrates; in fact, the Celtic word for spiced mead is metheglin, from which derives the English word "medicine," because as we all know, a spoonful of sugar...

Mead is typically still, but can be made sparkling like beer or wine by adding sugar at bottling to feed the living yeast in the bottle. Like beer, mead can be strong or weak, sweet or dry, depending on how much honey you use and how alcohol tolerant your yeast strain is. The main thing required to make mead is patience, because it's much more like wine in the time it takes to mature.

Mead made with apple juice is called cyser, and that leads us to today's two recipes.

Still mead (3 gallons)

A lot of mead recipes call for you to boil or at least pasteurize the honey, but it doesn't seem like that's really necessary, since the honey itself is pretty close to sterile, and you'll boil off any volatile flavor or aroma compounds in the honey, which is usually pretty subtle to start with. In general, the better honey you use, the better your mead will be, but also, the more expensive!

1. Add 6 quarts warm water, 1.5 tsp diammonium phosphate, and 1.5 tsp yeast nutrient (dried yeast remnants) to sanitized fermenter.
2. Add 10 lbs honey to fermenter, mix as much as possible by swirling fermenter.
3. Add warm water to fill each honey container about halfway, seal and shake vigorously. This will help get all the honey out, and aerate the mixture, since the must will be low in oxygen. Pour into the fermenter.
4. Add warm water to bring the fermenter to 5 gallons, then pitch yeast and seal. You can use liquid mead yeast, or a dry mead or wine yeast like grand cuvee.
5. Rack after 4 weeks. During primary fermentation, you may want to gently agitate the fermenter a couple of times, as the must will tend to accumulate dissolved CO2, which can cause issues when you rack.
6. Rack after 3 additional months.
7. Bottle after 3 additional months.

Spiced cyser (3 gallons)

I like to make cyser - apple mead - with Gravenstein apple juice. Gravensteins are a variety local to Sonoma, north of San Francisco. It's typically only available in the fall after the harvest. They've got a good balance between sweet dessert apples, and tart savory apples. Sadly, as demand for California wine has increased over the last couple of decades, many Gravenstein orchards have been torn out and replaced by vinyards. This stuff makes a delicious holiday treat (or gift), like Christmas in a bottle.

1. In a large pot, combine: 6 quarts Gravenstein juice; 8 lbs honey; 2 sticks cinnamon, cracked; 8 cloves, crushed; 8 allspice berries, crushed; 1 tsp fresh-ground nutmeg; 1/2 dried curacao (bitter) orange peel.
2. Bring to a low simmer, heat for 20 minutes, cover and let stand until the pot is cool to the touch, then pour into a sanitized fermenter.
3. Warm 2 more quarts Gravenstein juice, fill each honey container about halfway, seal and shake vigorously. This will help get all the honey out, and aerate the mixture, since the must will be low in oxygen. Pour into the fermenter.
4. Pitch yeast and seal. You can use liquid cider or mead yeast, or a dry mead or cider yeast, or wine yeast like grand cuvee.
5. Rack after 4 weeks, then bottle after 3 additional months.