REPLAY: Stirring the Pot

20.11.21 Stirring the Pot Hour.mp3

SM: Sarah McConnell
AS: Audio Sample
LF: Lilia Fuquen
DC: Danille Christensen
HS: Hunter Smith
LD: Levi Duncan
FC: Frank Clark
SK: Susan Kern
PP: Paula Pando
JM: Jesse Miller

[00:00:00]

AS Preservation of food has been a problem for man from the very beginning. Because few foods could be preserved and primitive methods caused important vitamins to be lost, no one ever had a balanced diet. Three squares a day, the year around.

SM From Virginia Humanities, this is With Good Reason. I'm Sarah McConnell. Luckily, humans now have all sorts of ways to keep food for the lean days. We're rarely in the same situation as our ancient ancestors.

AS If food was plentiful, they ate. If not, if the fruits or vegetables were out of season or the hunting bad, they did without.

SM But today, few of us know how to preserve our own food. So this week we're taking a deep dive into the world of DIY food preservation. We'll visit with some home canners who preserve everything from salty venison to sweet peaches. And we'll hear from an expert who learned canning from elders in her own family and now studies how canning has become its own art form. But first, Virginia Humanities director of food and community Lilia Fuquen takes us into a community cannery filled with commercial canning equipment so families can preserve their food in enormous batches, saving hours and days of time working in a steamy kitchen. Inside the cannery, the high-pressure steam vans and heavy equipment make it hard to have cozy conversations. But Lilia managed to get some good-hearted canners to yell into her microphone with their stories.

LF It used to be that every county in Virginia had its own community cannery. Today there are 10. One of them sits in Prince Edward County. And I stopped in for a visit. The cannery is bustling with activity. And I follow the intoxicating aroma of cinnamon and apples to find a family making apple butter.

AS We've been coming to the canneries for about 40 years at least.

LF This is Lannet. She's here with her husband, JH, and their son, Justin. Theyíre like a well-oiled machine, carefully measuring ingredients and stirring in these giant kettles.

AS Yeah, we started with his grandmother and we've been coming ever since. Now our children are coming. They have children themselves, so they're finding out the importance of doing their own canning and providing things for the family.

LF Not only is this a multigenerational family tradition, but like many of the cannery's customers, when they come here, they'll can hundreds of quarts of food. And they come in here pretty often.

AS All through the summer. String beans, cabbage, tomatoes, two batches stew, black eyed peas, squash, salsa, spaghetti sauce, we do that.

LF This family grows and processes much of the food they eat. And they're able to do it in large part because of this community cannery. A farmer and canner in her 20s, Michelle McKenzie, takes a break from canning her greens to explain how this all works.

AS The home canning season is about to end for the season, it ends around Christmas, but itíll pick up again next year in June. There is a one dollar per day fee to utilize the cannery for canning, and then you pay for the cost of your cans. So it's an incredibly affordable service.

LF Everyone in the cannery seems so happy. Patty Gulik, the home canning manager on site, has a theory.

AS Everyone's always happy, they're making a product that makes them happy. Who isn't happy around food? It's a happy place, so it's the best job in the world. Absolutely.

LF Next stop, a private home two hours north in Albemarle County.

AS Got some apple jelly. I'm not much of a jelly jam, but, you know, people come over and you have breakfast and stuff and here's some raspberry peach that I made.

LF This is Dr. Lenny Sorenson. And we're in the kitchen at her homestead in the mountains. The now retired African American research historian for Monticello teaches home provisioning when she's not working her small farm. Her pantry is glorious, with rows upon rows of shiny glass mason jars filled with everything from canned peaches to pork.

AS Oh, my goodness.

AS So this is the big dog, as they say.

LF You just opened up these giant covered doors. And it's just beautiful in here.

AS My wonderful husband built all of these cabinets. They are his work.

LF Godness.

AS So I have a lot peach jam. We have 19 quarts of venison and 14 pints of canned venison. And then there's lard and chicken fat and then venison stock, canned pork, again, great for enchiladas and tacos and stew. There's some beef, again, for, you know, like cottage pie or tacos or you can tell - we love tacos. I mean, that's a wonderful way to put food together.

LF With new materials and new technologies, the world of canning is evolving, and this is a good thing, Sorenson says.

AS People havenít been canning that long. So we are still making tradition. We're going to be working on a food tradition instead of just kind of well, ìthat's how they did it 80 years agoî.

LF But one thing remains the same. And that's the feeling folks get when they're putting up their own food.

AS When I grow it, raise it, butcher it. It feels - and this is totally subjective - it feels like free food. I know that I had to buy the seeds. I know I had to buy the hog feed, I know I had to buy the equipment, and the cans, and the jars, and all the stuff. I know that. But it feels like free food and that, because I was really poor as a kid and went through some periods of being very, very hungry - is still agas to me, it still feels like free food.

[00:06:45]

SM Now we're getting out of the kitchen and into the archive. Danille Christensen is a professor of religion and culture at Virginia Tech. Her expertise is folklore and she's been examining the history and culture of home canning.

SM Danille, you argue that home canning, even 100 years ago, was more than just trying to keep the family and food over the winter. People took pride in it, loved it, had artistry about it.

DC Yeah. I think, you know, canning is definitely - it's been a really important part of the economics of families over the years. But there's always been a component of a performance, display of beauty, in terms of taste and in terms of the visual presentation of jars - of really beautiful, bottled fruits and vegetables on shelves. People have for years, actually, sort of, taken people down into their basements to display these things to their friends and their neighbors. And so it's never just been about the food that you can eat when you don't have anything else.

SM Did you or your mother or grandmother have such a pantry?

DC So I grew up in central Ohio and in suburban central Ohio, but our family had a food storage room in the basement, sort of a closet that we would keep stocked with things like bottled applesauce and peaches and tomatoes. Some, you know, fruit leather that my - that we would make, and I would take the school and all my friends would think, that is crazy. What are you eating? Yeah. And we would also my - my father's mother, my grandma Christensen would, when they would come to visit us from Utah, they would bring a car full of different kinds of things that grandma and grandpa had canned - had grown in the garden and canned.

SM And by canning, we mean jars?

DC Usually, in the United States usually when people talk about canning or home canning in particular, they mean bottled foods. Although in the early parts of the 20th century, there were a lot of people who also canned foods at home using tabletop crimpers in tin cans. But glass has always been - it lends itself to the kind of display that people are interested in with canning. A lot of people - at times people will just create two or three jars that are specially made for the fair or, you know, for presenting as gifts.

SM It's so interesting you mentioned the fair. People would can and win prizes at the fair - entered to win, right?

DC Exactly. Yeah. All over the country in, you know, small town fairs, county fairs, state fairs. There were girls involved in canning clubs at the turn of the century in which they would be able to go to national conferences to - to show off their - their wares to earn money.

SM So I think if I saw a bunch of jars filled with canned foods, so to speak, I wouldn't know one from the other. But do you think your practiced eye would say, oh, that is great.

DC Yes.

SM Even - even visually.

DC So you - you can tell if people have packed them at the correct ripeness. Right. If they're falling apart, sort of fuzzy along the edges, they're probably too ripe when they are packed, or they were overcooked. You can tell sometimes people will layer things if they're doing sort of a mixed, soup mix. Right. You can - you can layer different fruits or vegetables. There have been combinations that people have used like peas and carrots, or tomatoes and corn have been canned together a lot, not only because they're beautiful, but because the acid from the tomatoes has helped to preserve the corn. So in a lot of things, you can see a pattern where there's both a functional purpose, but also an esthetic one.

SM What's the most exquisite example of this you ever saw?

DC I - you know what, I - I still think the most beautiful thing to see is a quart jar of Alberta peaches that are just glowing in the light. I'm biased because my own family has produced peaches in the past, because I've done a lot of them myself so I'm sort of familiar with that. And because I know how different they taste than the peaches that you might buy in a can in a store.

SM Why did your family do so much canning in suburban Ohio? Did you have a big garden?

DC We did have a big garden. We grew everything from strawberries to grapes to swiss chard, which none of the kids liked, but we grew it anyway. We had string beans, we had carrots, potatoes, we had several pear trees, several peach trees, several apple trees and an apricot tree that every year the squirrels would strip of the apricots right before they got ripe. But my parents grew up in the West. And so apricots for them were sort of the taste of summer. And so we tried to grow one in Ohio.

SM Isn't it funny that we've gone from a culture where we loved and depended on this kind of canned food to people that just don't get it?

DC You know, I think that there's actually in the last 10 years or so, there's been a huge upsurge in that people who are interested in learning how to can. And so when people talk about canning as a dying art, I just have to say that it's not true. Right. Practices change over the years, but - but they haven't died. There's been a lot of workshops that have been created to teach people how to can who maybe didn't learn in their own families. A lot of that is coming out of people with an interest in sort of knowing where their food comes from, having control over what they are feeding their families. The increase in community supported agriculture, so CSA subscriptions and also farmers markets that give people access to fresh produce, has really gotten people thinking about, well, now that I have all this delicious food, what do I do with it? Being more aware of seasonality and having access in the season and wanting to preserve that for other times has gotten people thinking more about processes like canning and freezing.

SM I'm charmed by a woman you write about named Addie Mae Dodson. Tell me about Addie, where and when she lived, what her life was like and her canning prowess.

DC So Addie Mae Dotson and her husband Lewis lived on a small landholding in Lorman, Mississippi. And in the late 1960s, early 1970s, some fieldworkers from the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, Tennessee, visited the Dotson's. Mr. Dotson played guitar. He - he played the bottle and they met at Addie Mae Dotson as she was coming up the road from a shopping trip in 1973.

AS What did you buy today?

AS I bought a pound, about a pound and a half of meat and some sugar and a five pounds of meal. And some jar tops, that's what I got today.

AS Jar tops?

AS Peaches, canned peaches.

DC She bought a little bit of meat, feed for her hogs, meal for the chickens and then some sugar and also lids for her jars. Addie Mae Dotson grew up on a plantation in Mississippi. She didn't have a lot of resources in her own family. She had had to drop out of school so her siblings could go to school. And you can hear from this clip how proud she is of being able to - to live productively outside the cash economy. So she only has to buy meal and feed that will keep her animals alive, right. A little bit of meat for the family. But then the other thing that she buys are sugar and canning lids so that she can sort of parlay those things into food for her family, based on the things that she's grown. And so she had a garden. She was also able to trade things with her neighbors and was really proud of the ability to turn all of those seasonally available things into foods that her family and her friends could enjoy. And you might think that, you know, that she only canned because she had to, right. But she also is very clear that she loves to can, that she loves the process. I want to play you a clip of her speaking about this.

AS Well I loves to can, thatís all I want to do. To find some, to can. I can stand in the kitchen from morning to night canning. If I can find someín to can and have the jars and a tops - good tops and lids, I loves to can.

AS What do you can?

AS I have canned some peaches. Canned some black beans. Two jars ñ three jars of butter beans, and four jars of snap beans, and put up some jelly. Thatís quite all.

AS How often do you can things?

AS Well, whenever the season comes. Now like you got peaches, they start getting ripe and I can them. And when black beans season was, okay I picked them, I came here few as any. And like butter beans, nice few ñ they give me a few, canned me a few of them. And I got a little corn patch back at the house, so Iíll go and can me some of them.

SM I love this. I mean, she loves to can. She lives for it.

DC She loves to can. And one of the reasons that she loved it so much, is because she was - she had a very developed ethic about how she should treat her family and her community and her neighbors. And so it was really important to her that she have an excess food to - to share. She wants to be able to have enough in her larder, that when people come, they'll feel not only satisfied physically, but that theyíll have the pleasure of eating those things that are lovely and tasty and that have her own care and work put into them.

SM Was she unusual? Did you come across many people in your research and your activities who loved canning the way she does?

SK Definitely. And people would always be clear that canning involves a lot of work. Right. That it was very important to the ways of their household ran. That they had to rely on a lot of support from other people to produce the food and the labor to sort of make that possible. But so many of them were just pleased with that sense of security that - come what may, they had the skills and the resources that would allow them to deal with those circumstances in a way that brought joy into their lives.

SM When did canning begin?

DC That is a complicated question. Canning as we know it really took off in the United States after the Civil War. And so a lot of it has to do with, you know, was the - the equipment in the jars available. Right. But people have been preserving fruits and vegetables in sugar and in vinegar for a long time, you know, as far as you can go back in the 14th and 15th century, right. And indigenous peoples here were preserving fruits and berries with honey.

SM Why is sugar a preservative?

DC Sugar and vinegar both helped to inhibit the growth of microorganisms.

SM I have to bring up how dangerous is it to do canning improperly? Have there been periods where people have died or contracted botulism, that kind of thing.

DC So botulism is a real threat in canning. But I think it's an overexaggerated threat. I think that people - if you are, you know, following accepted procedures, you're using the right equipment, then it's not something to be afraid of.

SM But how do you know who has and who hasn't?

DC Well, I think if you are giving home canned products as gifts, there's a lot of trust involved in accepting those gifts. Usually things like jam, singes and preserves and pickles are acidic or sugary enough that that inhibits the organism that causes botulism, which is a bacterium called Clostridium botulinum. So there - there is definitely specific knowledge that's important if you're going to be canning. But, you know, there's the Center for National Home Food Preservation at the University of Georgia has all the up to date information that can set canners on the right path.

SM When you started looking into this seriously, you found so many wonderful recipes and surprising recipes. Tell me about, for instance, all the recipes for Mango Canning.

DC So if you might think if you see a recipe for mango pickles that people are pickling the kinds of mangoes that are, you know, yellow and delicious that you might get imported from Mexico. In fact, recipes for mango pickles go all the way back, at least until the late 1600s. They grow out of British imperialism and experience in India. And - but people who are trying to - to replicate these mango pickles that often had - that were stuffed with - with peppers and other kinds of spices and then put in vinegar right, there trying to replicate these and use all kinds of - of other kinds of fruits, melons, green tomatoes, green peppers, peaches. And what you do is you take out a part of the fruits, so you are able to scoop up the inside. Then you stuff it with spices like ginger and cayenne and turmeric and mustard and also maybe some chopped peach or some chopped melon, right. You stuff it in there and before that, you've sort of brined the melon or the - the peach for a while. You stuff it with these spices and then sometimes they would actually sew the piece back in, or you could sort of take twine and wrap it up like it was a present. Right. And then you pickle it in a spicy vinegar and then eat them with meat. So that kind of things. And you can find these all throughout 18th and 19th century cookbooks in the United States and elsewhere. And in fact, when I was going to graduate school in Indiana, people of a certain generation would refer to bell peppers as mangos. Right. Even when they weren't sort of pickled. So you can see the reverberations of this this recipe, of British intervention in India rippling out through the British Isles and the United States.

SM You also came across canned sausages. That fascinates me.

DC I did. And that used to be a really, really common recipe throughout the United States. And it grows out of home hog production and killing. So when hogs were butchered, people would spend all day in the kitchen and part of that work would be grinding up the meat, seasoning it, and then they would form it into balls or into patties and fry it up partway, probably three quarters of the way done, and then pack it into jars and pour the hot lard over the jars. You can see in the 1920s a number of handy manuals, United States include this recipe in the manual. So when you took the sausage out of these jars, you would fry it up again. And they said it tasted so much fresher than sausage that had been cured. But something that shows up in these interviews is that you can't do it this way anymore because the weather has gotten too unpredictable. The winters aren't cold enough or that - that winters are so variable. You can't count on the weather, and these are particularly in an Appalachian interviews that I've been looking at, but you can't count on winters to be cold enough to preserve this food without it going rancid.

SM What's another recipe that delights you?

DC A recipe for my own family that people think is a little bit strange is carrot pudding. And this is something that my grandmother used to make. It's a steamed pudding. That's especially a cake. So more in the tradition of plum pudding. Her grandparents were English, and she created this - this, well she didn't create this recipe, but it was one that was actually circulating the 1930s as sort of a thrift recipe as well. Itís got shredded carrots, shredded potatoes, it's got raisins and then spices; cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg. Right. It's steamed in the jar. Then it's pressure canned because it is a low acid food. And then if you can get out of the jar afterwards, you put sort of a citrus cream sauce on it. And actually, when my grandmother went into a care home in about the year 2000, we found a number of jars of carrot pudding that were still on her shelves, canned in 1982. And my dad actually had us try some. And it was it was a little bit dry, but as a testament to her canning skills, it was still good. And - and that was really meaningful to him, because when they lived in northern Montana and the growing season was really short, that was something that they would enjoy at Christmas time, based on the foods they grew in their garden.

SM It is an emotional thing isnít it? The - the associations we have with the food, our loved ones prepare, and love and that we have eaten and shared.

DC I still actually have one of those cans of carrot pudding from 1982 on my - my shelf. I'm not planning to open it anytime soon, but it reminds me of the care that she and my grandpa put not only into gardening but also into preserving these and sharing them then with their - their family and friends

SM Are people nowadays, young people, canning gifts for the holidays?

DC Oh, for sure. Yeah. You know, I've received delicious chutneys and I have made a blueberry lemon marmalade, or I foraged last summer and put together elderberries and blackberries and Muscadine grape juice in a really delicious jelly. And so there - there are tons of great cookbooks out there that will teach people not only how to can, but the sort of logic behind canning.

SM You love seeing the resurgence in interest now?

DC I am just fascinated by the way things stay the same. You know, one thing that's really been striking as I've looked into archival documents and old manuals and old diaries is that the continuities are often more apparent than the differences. And so I think we often think of the past as a place where people were much different than we were. Right, that they - they only preserve things because they had to. And, you know, they are living these terrible lives of drudgery. And it is hard work, it is still hard work to produce food and people and communities, right. And I think that a lot of the concerns that people have now, people have been struggling with for generations. And so looking at the ways people have approached canning helps me think about what have we learned how to deal with, learned how to solve and what are the challenges that we're still sort of wrestling with.

SM Well, Danille Christensen, thank you for sharing this with me today on With Good Reason.

DC It's been a pleasure.

SM Danille Christensen is a professor of religion and culture at Virginia Tech. This is With Good Reason. We'll be right back.

[00:27:50]

SM Welcome back to With Good Reason from Virginia Humanities. Craft beer has been on the rise with local pubs popping up coast to coast. It's certainly been happening in our local community of Charlottesville, Virginia. I spoke recently with Hunter Smith and Levi Duncan of Champion Brewing Company, which has become a popular downtown destination. Hunter and Levi met on a craft brewing course at Piedmont, Virginia Community College, where they both now teach.

SM Hunter, how did you become interested in beer in the first place?

HS By - by virtue of drinking it, to put it to put it succinctly. One of my best friends, we would come home summers between colleges and his dad was really into craft beer, and this was, you know, I guess ten years ago ñ it wasn't what it is now. And every now and then, one would slide towards us and we went, oh my God, this is not what we're drinking. We saw the light.

SM Levi, you?

HS I came into craft beer by the same way as everybody else. I was a young man drinking yellow beer and then I found my gateway, which was kind of like dark beers, stouts, porters, things like that. And then it kind of grew from there

SM Before you decided to join forces and create your own brewery, had you tried any on your own in the closet?

LD Oh, I homebrewed, and Hunter did also, so I homebrewed for about a decade.

SM And what did that entail? A big plastic bucket?

LD In the beginning, yes. Yes, certainly did. After a while, it became stainless steel vessels and, you know, a far more intricate set up. I had temperature-controlled fermentations by rigging refrigerators with temperature controllers. The homebrew hobby can be as much or as little as you want it to be.

HS And I never got that far. I did it for three or four years, but mostly out of Gatorade coolers. And it wasn't until I made something that I thought was close to commercially acceptable that I thought, hey, this might be for real.

SM Describe your first batch.

HS Terrible. No, actually it was all right, but it was - I did it in a pot on the stove. It was a brown ale out of a dried malt extract kit. Actually, it was liquid extract. You open it like a can of juicy juice or whatever. It was a brown ale. It - probably if I had it now, I would know a million things that were wrong with it, but my friends said it was good and man, isn't that the - the story with homebrewing? Like, basically you have a bunch of cheerleaders going, it's great!

SM So your first one, Levi, you made what?

LD My first one I tried was a stout, which was mildly successful in that I did drink at least half of it before I gave up on drinking it. I mean, it was pretty bad. I always tell homebrewers if they're going to do this for the first time, brew a Stout because the flavors are so big. If you make a bunch of mistakes, typically you can at least still drink it.

HS That's I'm like, man - I wonder what my perspective now would be.

LS Yeah, like how bad was it really?

HS I guess if I'm judgmental of commercial beers, how bad is that thing I made on the stove and fermented under a Danzig T-shirt?

LD How about when you blow up a fermenter and momma's closet?

HS I had a cider blow off. I was fermenting it in an - not even an AC room. It was - at the time it was our laundry room, so Danielle had clean shirts hanging up to dry and the airlock blew off all over our clean laundry. So I was in the doghouse for a minute.

LD We all had that - or the uneasy smell when you walk down your basement and you're like, oh, I smell beer.

HS Yeah, no.

LD Oh, no.

SM So do you craft brewing aficionados always denigrate commercial beers.

HS No, I think I think a lot of us have a lot of respect for him and their consistency and their execution.

SM Name a commercial beer you don't denigrate .

HS Schlitz.

SM Really?

HS Yeah, I like drinking Schlitz.

SM How about Papps?

HS Yeah, Papps. Miller High Life. That's one of my ñ one ñ well one of the ones I drink a lot.

LD I like Coors, I mean.

HS Yeah, like a Coors banquet beer, I mean a good banquet beer, yeah, I like that.

LD Yeah. That's a good one.

HS Yeah. I think it's like - nobody's like really denigrating the macros per say. It's like you respect them for what they do, for what the are, and the fact that that is the beer sometimes people want. Like sometimes in some situations that's just what someone wants.

LD And I think that wave is kind of come and gone. I know when I first came on it was all about, oh, boo, big beer. And when it comes to the beer itself, I think that's kind of dipped and come back. We're like, hey, look, you want a Coors while you're mowing the grass, you know, drink what you want to drink. And. And I think a lot of us are now more. If you want to drink a beer, drink a beer.

HS Yeah. Please just drink beer.

LD Just drink beer.

SM You - you've actually said you wanted to start the Beer Nerds Brewery. What does that mean?

HS So at the time when we got started in the marketplace, it didn't really feel like anybody was really going after the more esoteric and nuanced beers that - that kind of geek oriented places were selling. And so that's where we thought - I thought we could fit in. At the time, it was things like sour beer beers that were made with fruit or herbs or spices, or a triple IPA that was, you know, off the charts.

LD Something that wasn't an amber ale, a stout, you know, like a crazy porter or whatever. Just - what was on the market at that time was plain, as far as I'm concerned. Your plain lager, plain IPA, whatever. And that's what people are buying. And I get it. That's how the business runs. I mean, to this day, those things still sell well. Sure. But if you're new and trying to get in - get a niche in a market, are you going to go up against these other guys with their IPAs and lagers? Or youíre going to go, where do I fit? I think that's what where Hunter made Champion fit in a really cool way. It's small. It's beers that those guys don't make. And in the beginning, what's even cooler is you have to make your way here to the pub because we don't offer anything in a can yet.

HS I guess nobody was making locally, the beers that I was buying. And in my mind, at - however pedestrian it was, I thought, well, if nobody's making the beer that I'm buying, if I made it, then I'd be like, be buying it, man ñ like - and so would other people, right? So hairbrained at the time. But it turned out to work.

SM You're known for making beers that aren't the ordinary IPA since stouts, as you were saying. What are some of the weirder recipes, weirder beers that you've created?

LD We've done a lot of yeah. You know, I mean, a lot of stuff with fruit, especially like that radler last year.

HS Yeah. That was that was wild. I mean, we, you know, commercial radler is basically a vat of soda blended in with a vat of lager beer. You know, we bought wholesale boxes and boxes of grapefruits and lemons and zested them and juice them and used a friend's restaurant to cook down the simple sirup and made soda and beer all at the same time. And it sold to profess.

LD Gangbusters.

HS Yeah, that was crazy.

SM I bet women loved it.

HS I think so. I think everybody,

LD Yeah, everybody loved it. It's just like grapefruit juice but alcoholic.

HS So that's something that comes up a lot like, like well girls like this or girls like that. I see beers that you would think would be maybe not everybody's forte, I see everybody drink them.

LD I don't think there's such thing as a man's beer.

HS That's it, thatís what I mean. Itís like, all right, well, this is a really big, thick, heavy beer and that's typically not stereotypically the woman's beer. But they come right up and drink it, too. Everybody does.

SM So some of the other crazy ingredients you've used, even clams?

LD We did. We've made we made clambake, which was we have a great relationship with Rappahannock River Oysters and they have amazing super salty, old salt clams. So I had the idea to make a Gose, which is a traditional German beer that's made with salt. My thought was to actually have the salt constituent made by the liquor, the seawater that's still in the clams. I mean, a lot of people are taken aback by the description. Then you have it like, oh, it's just an awesome wheat beer. Yeah, try it out.

SM There's another one with sea salt, paprika and ham bones.

HS Yeah. That was when we made in collaboration with M·s Tapas, which is a Spanish tapas joint here in town. So we actually boiled the - the bones of a JamÛn Iberico ham along with the two seasonings the restaurant's known for, which is a smoked grey sea salt and a smoked paprika, the pimenton. And it was wild. It tasted kind of like a pork chop as - as a beer on its own. But then when you had the beer with the food that was intended to be paired with, it actually became a really easy drinking, almost like a white ale.

SM Are craft beers more alcoholic than commercial beers as a rule?

HS Not as a rule, but typically it's more often than not.

LD Yeah, by - by volume. If IPA is the number one style, it's anywhere from at least six percent to as high as eight. So, yeah, you - you know, compared to your three and a half percent light beer that's in the market. Sure, absolutely.

SM And why is that? Why aren't the market beers more alcoholic? Don't people prefer that?

HS No, that's the lowest common denominator was the approach - was, how can we make sure everybody drinks this? Everybody expects the same thing. And then the light beer thing came out of the diet fad of the 80s, where everything had to be diet this, diet that. And so without calling it diet Miller, it became Miller Lite.

LD Absolutely.

HS So unfortunately for folks like Levi and myself, the higher got the higher alcohol beers are your higher calorie beers.

LD Gonna have to cut my calories elsewhere.

HS Yeah.

LD Time for shower beer.

SM Shower as in, take a bath?

HS Yeah. Yeah - beer you have in the shower. Shower beer is a popular euphemism for a beer you take in the shower because at least for me, I know for Levi - we both have young kids and either you have time for a shower, or you have time for a beer. So you have time for a shower beer.

LD That's for sure. A lot of times, like if you're gonna go out tonight, right, and you come home, are you going to get cleaned up and ready or whatever, you grab a beer on the way in from the, you know, in the kitchen and get your shower and drink a beer while you're doing - getting ready, you know?

SM When you were getting into brewing, what did you notice about the culture of beer and breweries in other parts of the country?

LD That itís super popular on the West Coast. The proliferation of breweries is all over the place there. You know, down the street there's one and here's another one in there. They've got this this awesome culture that we're just now starting to scratch, just breweries on every block with the, you know, rotating food truck or D.J., every weekend and I was just blown away by trips to particularly to San Francisco and Denver where it's just happened and it's part of the inherent culture. And here we're - we're just getting onboard with it.

SM All movements start in California, right?

LD Not all. No, certainly not.

HS Some do.

LD Some of them, you know, a lot of them ended there. But I think. But the idea of, man, this guy makes a beer down the street and I see him and his wife walking the dog in the neighborhood. Yeah, it's the same way you buy bread from a local baker. You know, you bank locally, you eat locally. And so it was - that was a huge part of it is, you know, this Guinness has been on a freight container or this was brewed two weeks ago. You know, tough call.

HS There's a nationalism aspect to it, too. I mean, you want - you want beer that's brewed in America.

LD I do, yeah

HS And so a lot of - a lot of, you know, commercial beers are, but I know a lot of people that were on the fringe, who were drinking import beers because they really like the taste or whatever it is, it's the nuance of drinking imported beers. Maybe they're more flavorful or cooler or they have a more interesting story. It's - it's a step.

SM Hunter Smith and Levi Duncan teach Craft Brewing at Piedmont Virginia Community College, and they brew beers of all kinds, at Champion Brewing Company. Up next, brewing beer, 18th century style.

[00:39:30]

SM These days, students at William and Mary go off campus to drink. But in the colonial era, the College Brew Pub took care of their beer needs. With Good Reason producer Lilia Fuquen reports.

[fiddle, tavern commotion]

LF This is Channing's Tavern, an authentic 18th century ale house just a half mile down the road from the College of William and Mary, a college that in those days preferred that the students drink beer on campus.

FC Students there actually are not supposed to be going to taverns like this one.

LF That's Frank Clark, the master of historic foodways at Colonial Williamsburg. And he says that colleges had to have their own brew houses.

FC One of the reasons why they build brew houses in schools like William and Mary is that we don't want the kids out in town and taverns with everybody else. Bad influence on these young scholars.

LF Students who drank in town were likely to get too drunk, says Susan Kern, the executive director of the historic campus at William and Mary.

SK So and there are - there are college accounts of the boys getting out of hand, you know, and there are - there are accounts of boys being brought before the schoolmaster's because they are drunk in town after curfew.

LF Students went to town taverns because there, they could drink hard liquor. Back at the campus dining hall, the booze was pretty weak.

SK The school rules say that they may serve beer, cider and spirits mixed with water, but they can't have hard liquor at the table so they canít have brandy or rum, but they're getting beer.

LF The school needed to be able to serve a beer, that was what they considered healthy.

SK It's part of the regular ration. It's more important than water and a replacement for water when water's unsafe.

LF So Clark explains, they built their own brewhouse.

FC So you have a little more control over. You know exactly how strong it's going to be and therefore you can make it weaker if you want to, which might be important for that. A lot of the beers that are imported over are intentionally strengthened, in order to survive the sea journey. They'll put more hops in the beer, they'll put more alcohol in the beer, and they'll try and build it up.

LF Three hundred years ago, schools were making their own custom home brews and a pint back then probably had a much more complex flavor than your average beer today.

FC The 18th century beers were somewhat sour because they don't have the ability to sterilize things and put them in stainless steel like we do. So they didn't have single strains of yeast yet in the period. So I think that a lot of their beers were a little or on the funkier side. Now that sour beers have become more popular in the brewing world, we'd like to do a line that that involves some of the strange and interesting beers of the 18th centuries, some of the sour beers and things like that.

LF So next time you're in Colonial Williamsburg, you might be able to taste one of those funkier beers. For With Good Reason, I'm Lilia Fuquen.

[fiddle fades]

[00:42:25]

SM Now we turn from beer at an old college to food at a new college. The kitchens at Reynolds is a new initiative by J. Sergeant Reynolds Community College. They're bringing cutting edge culinary arts training to an underserved neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia. Paula Pando is president of Reynolds Community College. She joins us along with Chef Jesse Miller, who is an instructor in the new kitchen. Tell me something about the neighborhood and the challenges people face, where Kitchen at Rennolds is going?

PP This particular area in the city of Richmond has a life expectancy rate of 20 years less than just one mile away. Concentrated poverty, generational poverty. And so there is a great deal of work to do in helping to provide greater access to a higher education and to social and economic mobility. The other interesting thing is, Richmond is really happening, happening hot food scene, culinary scene, and the Kitchens at Reynolds will really help power that industry even more by helping train mid-level chefs, people who want to open a catering business, people who want to work in the hospitality industry.

SM A lot of times we think of these suburban low-income areas as food deserts where people don't have all the options they need for simple, healthy produce and meals. Do you think that your new endeavor Kitchens at Reynolds will help that situation at all in this area?

PP Well, we do have a brand new marketplace that is part of the solution for that. So we have a health hub that we're partnering with, so that our communities feel comfortable coming in and getting something of value, even if they're not a student. So, for example, having a chef in our demonstration kitchen, beautiful demonstration kitchen that we have 72 seat stadium-style, to be able to show folks how to cook food that's delicious. And maybe using a little less salt, maybe using alternate ingredients, so that we're part of the conversation, but we can't be the answer to all of it. So, we expect to see students from all walks of life that love to cook and want to turn the thing that they love to do into possibly a profession.

SM I read that you're even going to be holding an Iron Chef competition for the young people.

JM Yeah. That's very popular. And they don't recognize that those chefs on TV are one percent, of one percent, of one percent. And so we're trying to teach them how to sustain their careers with growing them, but that there's a lot of staple practices that we can teach and help assist them to start making those dreams come true.

SM Do you partner with the restaurant industry to sort of create a job market that serves the food habits and tastes of this younger crowd?

PP I'm not sure if it's the, you know, which comes first - did this new young crowd arrive and kind of the demand for occured? Or, this culinary scene emerged and young people decided they wanted to move to Richmond or the region?

JM You know, when I came in 2009 to Richmond, you didn't really talk about the food. There was a few select restaurants that were really good, and then there was a bunch that were good. And then there's everybody else, like every other city or town. We started attracting more chefs and these chefs were younger, more creative - ëI'm going to try this and we're going to see if it works outí kind of attitude as opposed to ëwell, I know this rocks and this rolls, so we're - this is what we're gonna stick withí. And then the millennials aged into money. They don't really buy houses and cars as early and get married as soon and kids. So they have expendable income, where they are enjoying time with their life, with their friends, their families. Why do you have to leave Richmond to go find a really nice high-quality restaurant or steak or, you know, some Southern fusion sushi dish with, you know, frog?

PP You know, Richmond is a big, big college town with Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Richmond and Reynold's Community College, Virginia Union University and Virginia State. I mean, it is a college region that brings people from all over the country, really. And so that tastes - when I moved here from New Jersey, I thought that I would have to say goodbye to my favorite cuisine, which is Indian. It's my favorite food, always has been. And to find this vibrant Indian community here in Richmond and that community is reflected in the restaurant scene. It's just a really amazing place where people from all over the country have decided that Richmond is the place to be.

SM You're teaching culinary skills to a generation that is a generation or two away from the farmers that once grew and processed all this.

JM We actually talked about that in class, being two generations plus now removed from when growing food was the only way that you had food and trading and bartering. And students don't understand that, so we have to explain to them how that worked. And then when we can, we bring in whole plants or whole products as opposed to the leaves of something, so that they can see how it actually grows.

PP One of that one of the great things about the design of the kitchens is that you can see everything that's going on from the outside. So pedestrian traffic, people driving by, they'll be able to see through clear glass our students at work. There's no mystery about who's in there, what's going on - they'll be able to see people who look like them, people who might be from their neighborhood, people in chef coats preparing and doing what they love. I mean, weíre this big modern building coming out of the ground in an area that's very kind of historic. The homes are quite historic looking. So - so it is important that we have clear glass so everyone can see what's going on in there and hopefully be encouraged or inspired to at least take a step inside and see if there might be something of interest there for you. When I first came on board at the college, I shared how wonderful it is that through the kitchens at Reynolds weíll be able to help power this thriving economy that is the food economy of Richmond. But my bigger interest was that the people who power this industry will also be able to afford to eat out every once in a while. I recall, I mean, he's a celebrity, but more than celebrity-celebrated chef Eric Ripert, who has Le Bernardin, in New York - a very high-end, famous French restaurant - and he doesn't care where you came from. You might have your Masterís degree from Johnson and Wales, but you worked the entire line. You must work the line. Those who are prepared get through that line far more quickly than someone who's never had any formal instruction. So we expect that students will have to learn all aspects of the business before getting up to those higher posts, but by preparing them well, they'll be able to move up far more quickly than someone who's had no formal education.

SM Have Richmond restaurant owners and managers been salivating over the kinds of kids you're going to be turning out each year?

JM Yes, we are producing more, faster. A lot of our students today don't have any industry experience, so we're able to get them into places sooner. And the businesses are looking for entry-level, not just mid-level associates, people that are ready to learn how to do Prep and mison plas, which is to get everything in its place - to make sure you can be as successful as and as efficient as you can in a dish. We have lots of businesses calling, they want to come on campus, they're hiring our students. We have projects that require that students go out into the industry and break the ice, even though it's uncomfortable because the chefs like, I'm not just going to let you sit there and observe. You're going to get involved and see if that's really what you want to do. And that's what we want to do.
And for me, it doesn't matter if you graduate culinary.

JM My goal is to get you in whatever program is supposed to be in ñ if culinary was a gateway to get you to school, fine. We're gonna get you where you want to go so you can improve your life, which is why you came to school in the first place.

SM Jesse Miller is a professor of culinary arts and hospitality at Reynold's Community College. Paula Pando is president of the college. Their new program to bring culinary arts to the east end of Richmond is called The Kitchens at Reynolds. Major support for With Good Reason is provided by the law firm of McGuire Woods and by the University of Virginia Health System. Pioneering treatments to save lives and preserve brain function for stroke patients. UVAhealth.com. With Good Reason is produced in Charlottesville by Virginia Humanities, which acknowledges the Monacan nation, the original people of the land and waters of our home in Charlottesville. Our production team is Allison Quantz, Matt Darroch, Lauren Francis, Jamal Millner and Aiden Carroll. For the podcast, go to withgoodreasonradio.org. Iím Sarah McConnell, thanks for listening.