A Memory of Flavor
By Lauren Shepard
Last month, Culture Beverage was to have hosted a food and performance event, called FEED: Culture, at our headquarters, pairing our drinks with local theater company The Catamounts’ performances. It was meant to explore “culture” in all its forms - from the fermentation of drinks to folk art. We considered cancelling the event entirely because, we thought, what is there to say about culture right now? When everything is shut down, and people are alone in their homes, is culture on hold worldwide? If culture is about connections in society, what will it look like when we emerge?
Serving cider at a past FEED event at Lone Hawk Farm in Longmont, CO (photo by Michael Ensminger)
My interest in food and performance started with Eats 101. My junior year of college as a theater major at UNC-Chapel Hill, I enrolled in this cult favorite seminar on food and culture, started by a passionate history professor, that explored the connection of, well, everything to food and drink. We had a weekly reading/discussion group, went on field trips to places like farmer’s markets and fine dining restaurants, and once a week we gathered in his huge kitchen to cook, eat, drink, and continue conversation. I learned that what we consume connects us to, and helps us make sense of, the world.
I moved to Chicago when I graduated, with a theatre degree and a bunch of ideas about food, drink, art, and connections. I got a part-time job at West Lakeview Liquors, where I thought I was going to learn more about wine while exploring my food and performance projects. But then I met Ron.
Ron tapping a gravity keg at West Lakeview Liquors in Chicago, IL
Ron and I hosting a Mikkeller tasting at West Lakeview Liquors, circa 2009
Ron Extract was one of the original “Shelton Brothers” and also worked part time at West Lakeview. He talked about beer, he talked about cider, and he introduced me to new parts of the world through the glasses of imported things he gave me to taste. I asked questions about the origins of hops, malts, and apples and the people and places that produced such diverse drinks. I liked how connected beer and cider were to traditions, to farmers, and to the land.
Most of all, I loved the history. A sip transported me! In theatre, that can take months of rehearsals and boatloads of people to achieve. Yet here, in a single sip of Achel Blond or Oliver’s Perry, I felt transported and connected to a faraway place. Even after Eats 101, I thought I was going to spend my days telling stories on stage, but my time at West Lakeview cemented how visceral and immediate beer and cider were, and when I left Chicago for Colorado, it was to join Shelton Brothers Importers.
After ten years of making friends all over the world with Shelton Brothers, we decided to launch a distributor in Colorado focused on this flavor history. Colorado is brimming with beers packed with flavor, but we have a relatively new culture, as far as cultures go, and the innovative beers being brewed here are inspired by beers of the past. What I love about the beers and ciders we work with at Culture is that they are simultaneously ancient and distant but present and accessible. They are being produced on the same equipment, from the same trees, in the same farmhouses, and by the same families that have produced them for generations. The interconnections of all these things in a single sip. They are hundreds of years of wild yeasts. And antiquated beer laws. And springs filled with apple blossoms and falls filled with harvests. They have the ability to transport and connect Coloradoans to each other and the world.
Toasting with Oliver’s Bottle-Conditioned Perry at our wedding at the Altona Grange Hall in Longmont, CO
Last night, while talking with The Catamounts about our performance event dilemma on a Zoom call, I remembered my first visit to Tom Oliver’s cidery. It was a chilly spring day - that time of anticipation right before the orchard wakes up. Tom walked my husband and I through the cold, dank, barrel rooms where his cider sleeps (sometimes for years) before bottling. It smelled like grass, brick, oak, apple skins, and wetness. It was so quiet, that we felt we had to whisper. Tom told us that it's the stillness that makes the cider. He presses the juice, puts it in barrels, and leaves it alone in darkness to become what it is meant to be.
In the stillness of the barrels at Oliver’s Cider & Perry in Herefordshire, UK
We realized that stillness doesn’t mean culture is on hold. When you cap or cork a bottle of beer that has sugars still left to ferment, it’s the confines of the bottle, along with what’s inside, that create the magic. The culture happens in the confines, until one day you open the bottle and it all comes tumbling out (hopefully gently and into a glass). Without boundaries, we wouldn’t have bottle-conditioned beer.
Maybe we are all just conditioning in the barrels and bottles of our homes, waiting for the cap to come off? What will happen when it does is anyone's guess. What we do know is that, in the stillness of our homes, we are reaching out for connection in new ways. So The Catamounts are producing a virtual version of the event, and delivering Culture’s beer and cider to people’s homes. We are Zooming, but we are also sipping.
In quarantine with the same harvest year of Oliver’s Bottle-Conditioned Perry in Boulder, CO
We are opening bottles of Oliver’s and Peckham’s, of Drie Fonteinen and Coniston, closing our eyes, and remembering. Earthy, musty, lemony aromas of Drie Fonteinen evokes a flash of a cellar filled with barrels. A slightly bitter, grassy, rich and fruity sip of Peckham’s cider lands us in a sunny field off the coast of New Zealand. We can also travel backward through time, with a sweet sip of Achel Blonde brewed in a monastery, and maybe forward in anticipation of next year’s apple harvest in Spain with Ribela in our glasses. We are grateful for these drinks that connect us in all directions so completely and so easily, through memory & taste, through stories & history. We are grateful for the people who make them.