Grow a six-pack garden

A winter musing: How much space would be needed to grow a six-pack of beer this summer? The first plant you'd need is a grain. The Incas grew corn for brewing, the old Germanic tribes grew wheat, but barley was discovered long ago to be excellent for brewing.

You can't plant soup barley from the supermarket. Look for barley for planting at a feed store or a health food store, or from a specialty seed company. One reason that barley has been grown for so many thousands of years, everywhere from Mesopotamia to England to New York, is because it's so adaptable and easy to grow. It requires neither a long growing season nor rich soil.

Ingredients for brewing

You'll also need to plant some hops, as a "bitter." Other bitters have also been used, each reflecting what local brewers had on hand: oak tannin in Scandinavia, costmary in England, and sassafras in colonial America.

Like barley, hops are easy to grow. The twining, herbaceous vines are either male or female, but only the female flowers have that wonderful resiny aroma for flavoring beer. Hop vines are also quite ornamental, ideal for clothing arbors or trellises.

Begin the brewing process at summer's end, right after harvest. For the most exacting beer, the ripe hop flowers first need curing for a half day at about 130 degrees. Then the barley needs to be sprouted to activate enzymes that covert starch into sugar. From there, precision beer-making does not get easier: The barley has to be heated to stop the sprouting, then crushed and mixed with water for "mashing"; "sparging" leaches the sugars, which are boiled with hops, then fermented.

For centuries, though, beer was a rather primitive drink whose production was a household art, along with the making of bread.

The most primitive barley beers were made by merely crumbling partially baked, coarsely ground barley bread into water, then letting wild yeasts do their work for a few days..

Try "growing" beer and in the end you'll get an education in beer-making and an interesting drink.