When you take a sip of beer on a Friday afternoon at Taylor’s or Rennie’s, you’re probably not thinking about what it actually took to make it. You probably have no clue that what you’re drinking is a beverage that has been overtaken at one point by hundreds of millions of bacteria and yeast that convert what was once sweet, brothy nectar into a hellish bacterial war zone.
Such is the case with any sort of fermented food such as kombucha, kimchi, cheese, yogurt, tempeh, beer, wine or any sort of sour, smelly, bacterial amazingness. Eugeneans will be able to view this bacterial warfare live at the WOW Hall this Saturday at the Fun with Fermentation Festival.
The festival itself will consist of local food producers such as Andhi Reyna of Ferns’ Edge Dairy, who will be performing cheesemaking demos; Christina Sasser of Coconut Bliss Ice Cream; Jason Carriere, owner of the Valley Vintner and Brewer; and tons of other fermentation nerds ready to geek out over this amazing form of culinary art.
“Fermentation is a way of taking a raw plant product and kind of preparing it for animalistic consumption via biological intermediaries,” said Carriere, also a researcher in the biology department at the University and in the toxicology department at Oregon State University.
Some might recognize the name “Ninkasi” from hanging out in Eugene. The original use of the name referred to the Sumerian goddess of beer revered by the ancient inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent for her provision of one of the safest forms of food available at the time. When yeast is added to a concoction of sweet nutrient-rich wort (a brewers’ term for converted grain starches to sugars), the yeast begin to metabolize the sugars producing more of themselves in the process and allowing few to no other types of bacteria to exist in the environment. In unsanitary Sumerian culture, these other types of bacteria were probably the deadly kind.
Some people write off the beneficial properties of kombucha as “hippy jive” or jumping on the industrialized food bandwagon and hating on raw milk. But those types will have a difficult time when it comes time to measure up with science’s say. Kombucha, which is as easy to make as pouring a bottle of the stuff in a vat of sweetened tea, is essentially fermented tea. If you leave that vat of sweetened tea out with your added kombucha, within a week’s time a SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast) will have taken shape. This is the biological intermediary that converts the sweetened tea into a nutritious and revitalizing elixir.
“Basically the microflora that are responsible for the process of fermentation are creating nutrients as they go through their life cycle as they’re doing the fermentation work,” Sasser said. “So you’re actually creating new nutrients in the food. Specifically, it creates essential B vitamins; that is one of the best things that it does, especially for people who are vegan or vegetarian.”
Along with a multitude of B vitamins, organic acids such as acetic acid, lactic acid and glucuronic acid, which are all antioxidants, are developed. Probiotic content within a bottle of kombucha is amazing, with over 1 billion Lactobacillus and S. Boulardii bacteria each. Both are noted to aid in immune system vitality and as digestion aids.
“The microflora really protect our bodies and our guts especially from dangerous organisms and diseases that we come into contact with our environment,” Sasser said, “and they pretty much teach our immune system how to function better. So they carry beneficial bacteria into our digestive system and that also makes it easier for our bodies to digest other food.”
Another amazing thing that fermentation does is make some inedible foods consumable. Take soy, for instance. Soy has a plethora of flavonoids and estrogen mimickers that are known to cause cancer and a host of other problems in humans if over-consumed. However, when cultured into either tofu or tempeh, those negative properties are transformed in chemical structure and in some studies have been shown to have cancer-fighting agents.
“(Phytoestrogen) is definitely broken down to some degree. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s totally eliminated, but the levels of those flavonoids and estrogen compounds are drastically reduced by probably 70 to 80 percent compared to like the soy protein isolate that you’d get in a veggie burger or industrialized soy,” Carriere said.
Fermenting beer is pretty amazing too. If you’re interested in learning how to do this, Carriere and the other guys from the Valley Vintner will be on-hand brewing batches of beer outside in the snow, rain or shine. Five dollars and two cans of food gets you into the festival, where you’ll be able to try tons of beer, cheese, bread, kombucha, wine and tons of more amazing fermentables, not to mention access to some of Oregon’s most talented and well established fermenters. To boot, all of the proceeds collected will go to Food for Lane County.
[email protected]
