1. On May 26 I spent an hour or two outside with a gallon bag, filling it with dandelions. For the dandelion wine I was preparing to make only the flowers themselves are useful, not the stems, so before putting them into the bag I carefully removed the entire stem. Sitting outside on a cool day in late spring - a touch late for dandelion-picking, really, as many of the blossoms have already gone to seed - doing something as repetitive as this is a good way to make your mind wander, almost like meditating, and notice little things in your environment. As I moved methodically through the yard gathering blossoms (and more than once almost kneeling in dog feces courtesy of our downstairs neighbor) there was little in the area that escaped my notice.

There was under a tree among some of the flowers a black bird of some sort that had died and fallen to the ground, still looking as healthy as anything that ever perched on a branch. The way the light shone off the dark indigo feathers of its wingtips, and the pitch black color of the rest of its body, were beautiful enough to draw my attention for quite a while as I picked the flowers that grew around it, before moving on to the rest of the front yard.


2. I never had dandelion wine as a kid, but the taste still makes me nostalgic for my childhood. I gather that for some people it's one of those essential rituals of summer, like popsicles and going to camp and running to chase the ice-cream truck when you hear its bell two blocks away - but growing up in the suburbs it's one we always did without, and never knew we were missing anything. Besides, I think even in the country the tradition of making dandelion wine is dying out, becoming more curiosity than custom. But I've known it existed for a long time, and thought of it as a quintessentially summer concoction. You can thank Ray Bradbury for that one; I was going into eighth grade when I first read his novel Dandelion Wine. Putting 1928 in a bottle seemed as farfetched as anything else Bradbury had written, but childhood in Green Town and childhood in suburban Durham seven decades later didn't seem as different as one might expect.

To the extent that the experience of summer can be put into words, Bradbury did it - and it's no accident that his book uses dandelion wine as a way of expressing that image.


3. It was only two years ago that I tasted the drink for the first time. The fruity floral smell, the light effervescence, and the sweetness of the drink all combine just right to be everything the book had led me to imagine - it really is like translating into the realm of flavor those experiences which define summertime. Bradbury never once describes the flavor in his book, but when I tried it it wasn't even remotely surprising; he had prepared me well.

I think of myself as having gotten somewhat better than average at describing flavors, thanks in part to being a foodie and in part to being an amateur meadmaker, but the experience of that first glass of dandelion wine was just far enough outside of how I'm used to things tasting that I can only approximate a description. A little bit like lemonade, a little bit like Sprite, a little bit like white wine, a little bit like herbal tea... none of them really fits. But if you remember being a kid, you already know a better answer than any of those anyhow.

This year I knew I had to taste that again, because everything I miss about being young enough to have summers off is expressed in the taste of well-made dandelion wine. And so for the first time in my life I picked the yard clean of those beautiful yellow wildflowers, processed them according to a recipe from 1915 so as to yield a liquid whose taste is the same as that of summer.


4. Everything is different when summer arrives. Our whole experience of the world changes subtly, in ways reflected more noticeably in how we choose to respond to it. As a child, summer is the time when your parents are apt to occasionally make hamburgers on the grill instead of the pan-fried turkey burgers they make a couple times each winter, when dessert is more likely to be a popsicle than a brownie. As Calvin once put it, it's not summer if your tongue isn't purple. But most importantly it's also the time when the break from school you get every weekend stretches to three months.











5. If there is one thing in my life that becoming a brewer has changed, it's the smell of bleach. Bleach is part of one of the core superstitions of the brewer's craft, the cult of cleanliness of which I am a firm devotee.

When I first started brewing mead I knew nothing but what seemed self-evident, and had nobody more experienced to teach me. I sterilized the stainless-steel gallon buckets in which I did my brewing by filling them with water and bringing it to a boil on the stove, poured them out and added honey, water, bread yeast, and sometimes other ingredients, then to keep the harmful bacteria in the air out I floated a layer of canola oil on the surface; later, when I estimated that the fermentation was probably done, I siphoned the mead out from under the oil and drank it. I didn't ever make anything top-notch that way, of course - but even though there's no way this should have been adequate sanitation, according to all the brewing knowledge man has assembled over the years, I never once lost a batch doing it like that.

Eventually I learned to brew "properly", which involves religiously sanitizing everything that will come in contact with your product using copious amounts of a moderately strong bleach solution and rinsing until it's no longer going to kill any microbes it touches. Ingredients are added, yeast is pitched in, and the air is kept out by means of a clever little gizmo invented by Louis Pasteur.

The strong chlorine smell that you get when you use a large amount of bleach calls into my mind the hours I've spent sitting in bathrooms filling up six-gallon fermenters with bleach and hot water, then dumping it all down the drain and adding more water until everything is cleaned of any microbes that might once have called it home, and of all the bleach that got rid of them. But it's the same smell you get from swimming-pool chlorine, and once upon a time it meant going to the neighborhood pool, playing in the water for the fifty minutes per hour that weren't designated as "adult swim", eventually working up the nerve to go off the high dive, going underwater to collect pennies we had thrown into the pool off the bottom, and eating fried chicken with my family at a poolside table.

It's not that the aroma is any different, of course - but my perception of it isn't the same anymore, because the circumstances I find it in have changed.

I mention this both because that smell was once a quintessential part of my summer experience, and because it was entirely uninvolved in my dandelion wine. I brewed it in a large mixing bowl, sterilized only by the act of pouring boiling water in on top of the flowers. And instead of the airlock I covered it all with a pair of kitchen towels and hoped for the best - as would likely have been the norm for people in the country when brewing dandelion wine a century ago. This process had more in common with those first few batches in a steel bucket than the meads and beers I've made more recently.


6. There was a severe thunderstorm around here a while back - the sort of storm that's part of how you know when spring has finally given way to summer. Like any proper summertime thunderstorm, it was violent enough that you couldn't ignore its presence, and it disappeared as soon as it had announced its presence. This one hit some of the western metro area hard enough to produce tornadoes, and as it moved east across the region a couple of my friends and I were sitting by the river enjoying the lovely weather. We left as the storm clouds on the far bank started to look particularly vicious, and got in the car just before the rain started to fall. Then we drove back to my apartment; as we made our way along University Avenue we saw clouds up ahead that were so low to the ground they seemed like the thunderhead was reaching down to try to grab some of the taller buildings. We hadn't been inside for more than twenty minutes before it was gone, and the perfect weather with which the day had begun returned.

Summertime thunderstorms like that one, for me, are one of the things that define the season, and they call up memories of some of the more beautiful ones I've ever been in. I remember the first house I lived in that I was old enough to have any memory of at all, and how on more than one dark summer night my dad and my brother and I would sit on its screened porch listening to the thunder and watching as the lightning illuminated parts of the scenery. And I remember sitting on the shores of a lake in Minnesota when I was in this state for a month at Chinese-language summer camp during high school, sitting around a large campfire on the last night of the session, looking across the lake at a distant glow on the horizon (I believe it was from a small forest fire) and how that eerie orange light threw the blue-white flashes of lightning from a storm on the far side of the lake into even harsher contrast with the night than normal. And then there's my absolute favorite, looking west across a valley in the Appalachian mountains as a summer storm west of us shot streaks of bright light through the paler colors of a perfect summer sunset.


7. It takes a day for the dandelions to steep, a week to ferment before bottling, and then a day at room temperature before the wine is fizzy enough to refrigerate and serve. Monday to Wednesday for the whole process - quite fast, really. The result is sweet, sparkling, cold, and aromatic.

If you've tasted anything like it, you know why it is so lovely. If not, then I can't really describe the flavor any better than by saying it tastes like thunderstorms, and swimming, and sunrises, and hiking through the mountains, and sitting at home with your tongue purple, reading Ray Bradbury.

At least, that's how it's supposed to be. And how it was, the time I had some made by somebody else.

If I were a person of faith, I might sometimes put my trust in a patron of brewing, be he Aegir or Saint Amand or something else. And if such a figure exists, he seems to reward those who do what they believe to be ideal, rather than what has worked for others. It is curious how fickle the brewer's craft can be sometimes in that regard.

For example, I used to be able to make drinkable mead in a steel bucket, as I mentioned above. And it worked every time. But if I did that today, with the knowledge I've gained since then, it would mean I had thrown caution to the wind - as I did by following a fairly similar procedure in my dandelion wine. And so the spirits of the brewery punished me for my failures.

By Sunday evening it was clear the wine had been contaminated by something. Oddly, this wasn't any of the normal brewing contaminants - not cider sickness, nor brettanomyces, or even acetobacter, all of which experienced brewers tend to know by reputation if not by firsthand experience. A musty smell, not entirely unlike old books, was emanating from the must, and on inspection there was a small amount of visible mold growing on top. Pulling back the dishrags to see it also made the smell come out much more, fill the air with an unpleasant smell that tends to imply that while nothing has rotten, it has been left to itself for far too long.

The smell of failure is not one I'm entirely unfamiliar with, but it has never taken this particular form before and I do not know how to explain this specific moldy aroma. I could always try again, and do it right this time. But the flowers have nearly all gone to seed by now, so it will have to wait until next year.

For the first time in my life this year I don't meaningfully get a summer break. And when I tried to bottle up the joys of summer, they slipped away. C'est la vie, I suppose.