{"id":17114,"date":"2022-10-12T06:47:46","date_gmt":"2022-10-12T12:47:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/?p=17114"},"modified":"2022-10-12T06:47:46","modified_gmt":"2022-10-12T12:47:46","slug":"real-natural-authentic-and-local","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/real-natural-authentic-and-local\/","title":{"rendered":"Real, natural, authentic, and local"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Atlantic has a story about pawpaws, the \u201cquintessentially American fruit,\u201d<\/a> and why they are so hard to buy.<\/p>\n

This is not news to brewers. <\/p>\n

\u201cBrewing Local\u201d <\/a>includes a recipe from Fullsteam Brewery in North Carolina for making a beer with pawpaws and a story about why Piney River Brewing in Missouri has made a beer called Paw Paw French Saison. Here\u2019s a bit of the Piney River story:<\/p>\n

Brian Durham was listening to National Public Radio on his drive to work one morning when he heard a report about preserving Pawpaw French, a disappearing dialect in the Ozarks. \u201cI thought, \u2018That\u2019s it. We\u2019re getting some pawpaws, we\u2019re buying some French (saison) yeast,\u2019\u201d he said. Piney River Brewing was going to brew Paw Paw French Saison.<\/p>\n

Piney River is located on a farm five winding miles outside of Bucyrus, Missouri, because Brian and Joleen Durham live on the farm. They bought their house in 1997 and the rest of the 80 acres they live on five years later. They raise beef cattle on the property, but were too busy with the brewery in 2015 to get around to selling any. They feed spent grain to the cattle and a sign on the long gravel driveway leading to the brewery warns, \u201cCaution, cows may be drunk on mash.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pawpaws (do not) not scale. \u201cYou find it all around here in the river bottoms. Good luck getting them before the critters,\u201d he said. They buy their pawpaws from a farm in Ohio.<\/p>\n

Pawpaw French is far rarer than the Cajun French that is essential to the culture Bayou Teche is intent on preserving. It is considered a linguistic bridge that melds a Canadian French accent with a Louisiana French vocabulary. The French originally settled Old Mines, Missouri, around 1723, back when the area was part of Upper Louisiana. \u201cMy father and mother spoke French very fluently, but they didn\u2019t want us to speak it because it (caused) such trouble in school,\u201d said Cyrilla Boyer, a lifetime resident who was interviewed for the NPR report. She said in the 1920s and 1930s teachers would smack students\u2019 knuckles for speaking any French in the classroom. Pawpaw French persisted in Old Mines primarily because the town is so remote.<\/p>\n

Historian and musician Dennis Stroughmatt is Pawpaw French\u2019s ambassador to the outside world. He first visited Old Mines back in the 1990s, and there were still hundreds of pawpaw speakers. \u201cIt\u2019s like eating candy when I speak Pawpaw French. That\u2019s the best way I can say. It\u2019s a sweet French to me,\u201d he said. He knows better than to expect the language to make a comeback, but hopes parts of it will survive, and that kids will learn some phrases, and will understand the area’s slogan: \u201cOn est toujours icitte,\u201d which translates to, \u201cWe are still here.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Atlantic reports on efforts to breed \u201ca better pawpaw.\u201d<\/p>\n

It might be best to pause and consider this: \u201cIt may not be the worst thing in the world for pawpaws to play hard to get. Even if it was possible to scale production and ship the fruit nationwide, doing so would be at odds with the urge for local, sustainable food that fueled the pawpaw boom in the first place. Planting huge pawpaw orchards might just add to the ecological toll of mass farming. Breeders could use genetic modification to improve the fruit, Brannan said, but \u2018that\u2019s 180 degrees from what people think of the pawpaw. The pawpaw is real, natural, authentic, and local.\u2019 For all the weird, frustrating aspects of pawpaws, they are a reminder of just how far food science has come in a century-plus.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Atlantic has a story about pawpaws, the \u201cquintessentially American fruit,\u201d and why they are so hard to buy. This is not news to brewers. \u201cBrewing Local\u201d includes a recipe from Fullsteam Brewery in North Carolina for making a beer with pawpaws and a story about why Piney River Brewing in Missouri has made a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[701],"tags":[725],"class_list":["post-17114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-indigenous","tag-pawpaw"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-4s2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17114"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17115,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17114\/revisions\/17115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}