Raising a Puppy and Finishing a Book

Raising a Puppy and Finishing a Book

In October I traveled to Stockholm with my wife to pick up a Scottish deerhound puppy. A week later I found out that I need to do the final edit to my book on sahti. Training a puppy and finishing a book at the same time isn’t exactly my idea of fun, but now the deerhound named Helga is almost house-trained and the book is very close to a completion.

Now that I have time to pause and think, I realize that in the past few months have been very eventful when it comes to farmouse ales. In August we did an amazing eight-day tour in the sahti districts with a team of Norwegian, Canadian and Finnish beer geeks. We started from the national sahti competition, and then visited 13 home breweries and five commericial ones on all major sahti districts. We saw three sahti brewing sessions, a craft malt house, and a farmhouse museum. We enjoyed sauna, traditional Finnish foods and the lakeside nature.

It took few weeks to process all the data I gathered: around 700 photos (after deleting bad ones), plenty of stories, and three detailed recipes from sahti masters. One recipe is reserved for an article appearing in English in winter 2019 (more about that later) and the other two will appear in Brewing Nordic.

While recovering from the book project, new quests haves started to spring to my mind. Brewing with pre-industrial farmhouse gear and techniques will certainly be one of those quests and I have already started to acquire wooden vats suitable for medieval and Viking Age brewing demonstrations.

Old wooden vats for historical brewing
Buying old wooden brewing gear is surprisingly easy in Finland. The difficulty is that most vats are built for brewing 100-200 L of ale for big feasts, and not easily transported to brewing demonstrations. I found these vats suitable for mashing and fermenting from a local junk shop. When I find a kuurna (lauter tun) I’m ready to fire up brewing stones.

 

Helga, Scottish deerhound
This sneaky little devil, a four-month-old Scottish deerhound named Helga, is keeping me busy. Photo by Ari Lehtiö.

2 thoughts on “Raising a Puppy and Finishing a Book

  • December 8, 2018 at 4:35 am
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    Congratulations on all counts! And Helga is quite lovely. I’ve always wanted an Irish Wolfhound, but I love how sleek she is. I look forward to your sahti book!

    Reply
    • December 8, 2018 at 6:30 am
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      Thank you! We have also an adult Scottish deerhound Freya and several people have asked is that an Irish Wolfhound. The book will be published on June 4, 2019.

      Reply

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