How to: Homemade Vinegar

Making homemade apple cider vinegar is as easy as…well, pie. Sure, it takes a little longer, but it also lasts a lot longer than that pie would have anyhow, and it doesn’t go to your hips. ;)


A jug if apple wine vinegar in process. The only difference between this and apple cider vinegar is the yeast that I used to initially ferment the apple juice into alcohol.

Although this process is easy-peasy, there is a term that you’ll see here that you might not be familiar with - “the mother” (or scoby, mushroom). This refers to the jellyfish-looking blob that resides in a “live” vinegar. It is in fact a cluster of cellulose and acetobacter bacteria, which love to eat the alcohol in your hard cider, and in return, produce acetic acid which gives vinegar its signature tang. The mother is your friend, and if you give her what she needs, you can keep a mother culture going indefinitely.
The quick and easy method for making your own Apple Cider Vinegar (ACV)-

You will need-
1 clean quart jar
3 cups hard apple cider
1 bottle of store-bought organic ACV with the “mother” (Bragg is the brand I use)
1 rubber band
8x8 piece of cheesecloth or muslin (folded in half and half again to be 4x4)
Patience

Clean and rinse your quart jar very thoroughly. Remember we’re setting up an environment for bacterial organisms to thrive in, but only the ones we want, so be sure to wash any lurking bad guys out of there first.

Pour your hard cider into the jar. Next, add ½ cup of the store bought ACV, including as much of the mother as possible.

Place your cheesecloth across the top of the jar and rubber band it into place, then store it in a dark, warm place. (Mine is in the back of the cupboard above my stove.)
Forget about it for at least 6 weeks.

I fish mine out of the cupboard and start “sniff” testing it after 6-8 weeks. The longer you let it go, the better, so long as your vinegar-in-progress doesn’t show any signs of being invaded by contaminants. If, upon checking in, you see no signs of the mother, re-inoculate your cider with still more of the store bought ACV and give it some more time. Usually, once the mother is well established, it is pretty easy to keep “her” happy with fresh infusions of alcohol. (On this method of placating mom, the mother and I are in hearty agreement.)

A taste test will let you know without a doubt whether or not your vinegar is done. For the seriously scientific, you can also purchase an acid testing kit (sold at wine & homebrew stores) to verify acidity. Most commercial food vinegars are diluted to about 5% acidity. My vinegar was closer to 6% and while still being totally safe to use, oh, what an eye-watering difference that 1% makes!

When your vinegar is done to your liking, strain the finished product (no more that ¾ of the jar’s worth) into yet another clean jar or bottle with a firm sealing lid. This is your finished product. Now, go back to your mother jar, and fill ‘er up again with your alcoholic spirit of choice, put the cheesecloth covering on and send her back to her dark and cozy hiding place for another couple of months. The rate of conversion from alcohol to vinegar is directly proportionate to the surface area of the mother, so age your cider-come-vinegar in the largest diameter vessel you can reasonably manage for a faster turnaround time.



A view of the mother in my rhubarb wine vinegar.

The taste of your homemade vinegar depends a lot on the taste and quality of the cider/wine/beer that you start with, so if you want to guarantee a great vinegar, splurge a little on a bottle of your favorite cider or wine. Or, if waste not, want not is more your speed, use the collected dregs from various bottles of wine or cider and give them a go with the mother. Why not?

We make our own wine, cider & beer here on our little farm, so we always have a ready supply for my vinegar experiments. I have made ACV and rhubarb wine vinegar with our homemade wine & cider. I’m looking forward to “vinegarizing” some dandelion and rosehip wines soon, and want also give malt vinegar a try with my husband’s home brewed stout, if I can ever manage to sneak a little away.

Additional tips –

*Use a glass or lead-free ceramic vessel for aging and storing your vinegar. Plastics can etch and harbor bacteria or leach funky flavors into your vinegar.

*I use a plastic screw-top lid on my finished vinegar, so as not to have corroded metal-flavored vinegar.

*A clean, folded kitchen towel or paper towel can be used in place of the muslin/cheesecloth, as long as air is able to pass back and forth through the cloth while your vinegar is converting. Mother needs to breathe!

Booze News, Winter 2011

As with many things, the passing of time since my last wine/beer post had escaped my notice, until today. I'd like to catch everybody up on what's brewing in the Hollow, so here is the rundown of what we've got working right now -

*2 Gallons of Rhubarb Wine (everyone's favorite) started on 10/31/10 -


Egads! The flash really highlights the lees. Time to rack these puppies!

*1 Gallon of Rose Hip Wine, started 2/13/10 -


I think we'll do one more racking, then bottle this, as it it nearing it's first birthday. ;)

*3 Gallons of Fuji Apple cider, started on 11/21/10 -


We had to juice something like 70 pounds of apples to get 3 gallons of juice. I'm not even kidding. We're calling this batch "my" batch, because I asserted dominion over it when I decided to use organic maple syrup for the sugar instead of regular ol' sugar. We've had small samples now and again, and I feel like this is turning out to be our best batch of cider so far.

*1 Gallon of Spiced Gala Apple cider, started on 11/21/10 -



This too was part of apple-a-thon twenty-ten. 20-25lbs of apples were required to make this gallon of cider. The apples were grown by my husband's friend, and were so beautiful that it was almost a shame to juice them! Bill added a few tablespoons of Trader Joe's mulling spices to this batch, just to try it. We haven't tasted this one yet, but it smells good!

*5 Gallons of Pilsner, dubbed "The Billsner", started on 10/30/10
No pictures for you! Actually, this has already been bottled and is now carbonating, so there's really not much to see.

*5 Gallons of "Bill's Best Bitter" (beer), started on 11/27/10 -
Again, no pictures. You didn't really expect beer to just hang around here, waiting for it's picture to be taken, did you? Actually Bill has bottled this Bitter and very generously gifted much of it to his friends and set the rest of it aside to finish carbonating.

The dandelion wine has been "sampled" here and there, and is probably our best wine yet in terms of body, flavor, the whole nine yards. Our grape wine is getting better with age too. It's not yet anything to write home about, but it's definitely a drinkable rosé for the unfussy palate.

For those of you interested in the recipes used to make these wines and beers - I intend to post them. I only hesitate because it takes a good year (sometimes more) from the time I start one of these batches until I can taste them properly and report on their quality. I don't want to pass on a bum recipe, and I'm always tweaking, so when I finally write the recipe up here, I'll include all of my hacks and suggestions and an honest review of whether or not any given brew is worth the trouble.

In the mean time, we'll continue juicing, brewing and bottling like fiends. Tipsy, cheerful fiends. Sláinte!

It's the Water - Keepin' it Real, Oly-style

Even if you've never been to, never heard of my home town of Olympia, odds are you've still heard of our beer.



Olympia Beer has always been considered a working-man's type of beer. A simple, refreshing lager, who's biggest selling point, as well as it's slogan was "the water". The brewery was located right next to the Deschutes river, and essentially right on top of one of our city's many artesian springs, thus providing multiple sources of naturally ultra-pure water for brewing. Leopold Schmidt, the founder of the Olympia brewery, recognized that starting with pure, crystal-clear artesian water was the key to making a superior beer. Around here, it seems that people agreed. Olympia beer was once carried by nearly every tavern and pub in the Pacific Northwest and was the preferred beer for my Grandpa's generation. Alas, long story short, the Schmidt family sold the brewery, which eventually ended up being owned by Miller (who was at that time partly owned by the evil Philip Morris Company), who rather quickly after purchasing the plant, decided that it wasn't profitable enough and summarily shuttered the brewery for good, choosing instead to brew Olympia beer out of it's Irwindale, California plant.

If you're still with me after this seemingly random crash course in the ups and downs of our local beer, hang in there, I'm getting to my point. ;)

The basis, the inspiration and the slogan for Olympia beer has always been "It's the Water", and once upon a time it was. Now the artesian wells that used to supply and endless flow of naturally perfect water sit unused, their precious water re-routed to storm drains and sewage pipes, an utter waste. Meanwhile, Miller is making our city's beer with God knows what kind of municipal, probably chlorinated, fluoridated water that they simply filter the bejeezus out of. It's not the same.

And so after paragraphs of rambling and bitching, I finally arrive at my point. I will not go gently into that good night. I am an Olympia girl, born and raised and a tree-hugging granola to boot. There still exist just a handful of the once abundant artesian spring wells around town, the best known of which is in a downtown parking lot, of all places, flowing quite unglamourously out of crooked pipe, burbling 24/7 for anyone who wants a cool drink. And many do! People bring empty milk jugs and giant Culligan water bottles down to the Diamond Lot to fill with the one-of-a-kind water. Local restaurants boast about serving the artesian water. It's reputation is such that it is a selling point for them.

So, when Bill and I held our mini brew-fest this past weekend, it was a no-brainer that we would use the artesian water as the basis for our wine and beer. It may not be fancy, but the difference in taste - especially when compared with our well water - is obvious. The result is a better, purer-tasting brew, with the fringe benefit of stickin' it to the man. Awww yeahhh....

And so it is with my stubborn, hippy chick, fight-the-power attitude that a new, finnicky generation of home brewers like us insist on sticking by the old ways for the sake of (barring any brewing mishaps) a superior brew. I think you'll agree that not only is it the water that makes all the difference, but the passion for the craft.

If you ever find yourself in our soggy little neck of the woods, stop by and have a pint of Bill's Pilsner (tentatively named "The Billsner") or a glass of my rhubarb wine and tell me if you can taste the difference. ;)

You win some, You lose some

That statement is particularly true of home brewing and wine making. Our homegrown cider seems to be fermenting well.


Note it's promising "krausen" as Billy, the beer snob would doubtless have me point out. ;)

Let's just hope that it keeps on keeping on and doesn't go funky. We unfortunately lost an entire 5-gallon batch of cider last year to some sort of mystery contaminant and had to compost the whole thing. Talk about heartbreak! I feel pretty confident that we will not face that same problem with this batch though, since we not only washed and dried our apples well, but also used a steam juicer rather than a fruit press to juice them, effectively pasteurizing the juice and hopefully, hopefully killing all the bad guys before adding our little yeasty friends.

So, we have 2 1/2 gallons of apple cider, 3 gallons of dandelion wine, 24 bottles of grape wine, 1 gallon of rose hip wine and 1/2 gallon of apricot schnapps to the good. Alas, we lost the blackberry wine this week.

It, like the others, had been somewhat neglected during our move. Somewhere along the way, something funky snuck in and messed it up. My first clue was a bit of white mold in the airlock. Though most of the home brewing websites that I googled said that a little mold in the airlock was no big deal, I'm not really one to gamble with food poisoning and/or going blind. So of course, I had Billy smell it. Our eventual conclusion was that it had probably turned to vinegar, which would have been fine if I could have been sure that it was safe to use. I wasn't, so it too ended up on the compost pile.

Drink up, little wormies!

Wine Time is Nigh

In spite of utter neglect on our part, our wines seem to have been doing just fine during their extended aging. The dandelion is good, very good according to Bill, who has both a sensitive palate and an iron stomach, and is therefore usually the first one to try anything home brewed.

At almost 5 months old, the dandelion was only just sampled and racked to age for another few months before being bottled. Oh the anticipation!

The grape wine (variety unknown) finally reached it's first birthday, and was therefore bottled and laid aside to age further.



Annnd in goes the cork!



The grape is one of my favorites so far, but Bill finds it kind of hum-drum. It is a dark rosé color and reminds me of a lower-shelf white merlot. It's nothing to write home about, but most grape wines aren't until they're at least 2 years old, according to what I've read. I can wait... I think.



Or not. Cheers!

Wine with a side of Whine

I'm still in the grip of real estate insanity, and have been seeking out small diversions here and there - napping, unnecessary trips to Starbucks, reading and re-reading my only remaining unpacked Diana Gabaldon novel, etc. And even though this is a much less than ideal time to start a new batch of wine, I'm hung up on the idea of making a batch of Hawthorne Blossom Mead.

According to my hasty research, hawthorn flowers & berries are thought to be one of the first fruits ever used to make wine. Archaeologists believe that some of the first wine ever made in China, over 9000 years ago, may have been made with hawthorn berries, rather than or possibly in addition to wild grapes. In addition to that fascinating little historical tidbit, I happen to live just a block away from a meadow where TONS of hawthorn bushes grow wild. Surely this is fate?

Now, if only we could have one nice, dry day or - God forbid - two dry days in a row, my homegirl and personal wine guru, Kristin, and I could walk on down there and shake those trees for all their worth and score us a load of petals. But Mr. Weatherman, he has no good news for me today. Rain, rain and more rain this week with ten glorious minutes of sun between downpours and drizzles. Uhg.

But just because I might not get a chance to make this wine this year, doesn't mean that you shouldn't give it a try. Here is the recipe that I plan on using, if and when the weather and other universal forces, good and bad, come together to allow me the time and space to make some mead. This recipe and other very unique and ancient wine recipes can be found at Celtnet Recipes.

So go forth and make wine, my good people! And bring me some, because good gravy, do I need it. Oh, and if you happen to stumble into a Godiva chocolatier on your way... ;)

Sunshine Wine

The dandelion wine is in progress, at last, at last! Bill and I moved it from the primary into a 3-gallon carboy last night. I normally taste the wine at this stage, but since I'm in the middle of the head cold from hell and can't smell or taste anything, I didn't bother. Bill, on the other hand, did, and said that it tastes similar to the rose hip wine - light, floral, sweet and a bit fruity. It is still fermenting like crazy, so the sweetness should lessen substantially over the next few weeks. Hopefully my cold will do the same so that I can finally taste this much-anticipated brew.


The "must" on day 5, just before racking.


And into the jug it goes. :)

Once I've sorted this wine out and can vouch for the recipe, I'll write it up here for anyone who might be interested in giving it a go. By the way - if you think you'll be making this wine, get your flowers now while the getting is good. You can always freeze (or probably even dehydrate) the petals for later use. The next wine up for us will be either be rhubarb or hawthorn blossom, depending on which of the two I can lay my hands on sufficient quantities of first.

By the way - does anyone know of a way to send wine through the mail? I'd love to offer some in a giveaway one of these days.

Recipe: Rose Hip Wine

Has it really only been 6 weeks since I started this wine? It has gone through a lot in that time, and is nearing the drinkable, if still rough stage. As promised, the recipe follows-

Rose Hip Wine - Makes 1 Gallon

-1 1/2 lbs rose hips, well washed, cut in half & crushed*
-2 1/4 lbs sugar
-1/2 pkg Montrachet yeast
-1 tsp yeast nutrient
-2/3 cup fresh squeezed orange juice (minus the pulp, if possible)
-1 tsp citric acid
-1 tsp pectic enzyme

Put the crushed hips and sugar into your primary fermenter (I use a food-grade bucket) and cover with 2 quarts of water. Allow to sit for 24 hours.

Mix wine yeast, yeast nutrient and orange juice in a small container with a tight-fitting lid (a jar or plastic glad-ware type container work well.) Shake well to combine. Let stand at room temperature for a few hours until the mixture begins to look bubbly. Add this mixture (your "yeast starter") to the must (the mash that is currently in your primary fermenter.)



Add the remaining ingredients and give it a good stir. Allow it to ferment for a week. At the end of the week, strain out the solids and pour the liquid into your secondary fermenting vessel (I use a glass gallon jug.) Top up the jug with water if necessary to make one full gallon. Top your jug with an airlock to continue to let the wine ferment and bubble away without blowing the bottle to smithereens. Re-rack (siphon wine into a new, sterilized vessel) every 3 months or so until the wine is clear and the vast majority of the yeast sediment has settled out and been discarded.**


After a week in the secondary fermenter, quite a bit of the yeast has died off and the wine is ready to be racked.

Age the wine for as long as you can bear not to drink it. In our house, it doesn't usually have a chance to reach it's first birthday, though we're trying to exercise a little more self-control in that department. ;)

If you have any questions about the recipe or about wine making in general, drop me a line and I'll help if I can. Though I bought all of my equipment locally, for wine making supplies online, you can check out grapestompers. They seem to have a pretty good selection, and their prices are comparable to what I've paid.

*I actually used 1lb, 4oz of rose hips and 4oz of diced Golden Delicious apple to make up for the shortage of hips. ;)

**I totally encourage you to compost your dregs and must solids once you are done with them. The yeast will do wonders for your compost heap.

Enter the Lion

We've had an odd mix of weather here in Western Washington these past few weeks. Torrential downpours interspersed with gorgeous sunshine and freezing overnight temperatures. Mother Nature's seasonal schizophrenia has tricked many a plant into popping up early, only to be zapped by frost. Of the nettles, daffodils, fiddleheads and dandelions, believe it or not, the one that I am most excited about this year is the much-maligned dandelion.

The dandelion, or Taraxacum Officinale, is so named because once upon a time, the raggedly-toothed leaves reminded someone of a lion's tooth or dent de lion. Like pretty much everyone else on the planet, I've hated them with the fire of a thousand suns for as long as I can remember. But if there's one way to change my tune about a plant, it's to tell me that it is not only edible but can be made into wine. Viola - instant dandelion fan!

Having been long-since sold on the sheer delightfulness of dandelion wine (described by many as "sunshine in a bottle"), I've been keeping a sharp eye out for the appearance of the first yellow menace. I found my first few just today. So far, they are only growing on the south side of the house which tells me that I caught them nice and early in the season - woohoo! And so, I pluck a few dozen flowers and sit down to the larger task of separating the petals from the greenery. This takes forever and a day, of course, and yields an amount so paltry that it won't even register on the scale. Hooboy I've got a lot of dandy-pickin' in my near future. I've already enlisted the kids to help me with the next batch of blooms. Wrangling my kids into helping me make wine - I've got the Mother of the Year award practically sewn up!



Fortunately for me, the recipe that I am using calls for a volume of petals (6 cups!), rather than a weight or I'd need to be picking weeds 'round the clock. As it is, I'm kind of eyeballing my neighbor's yards for dandelions. If I play my cards right, in addition to Mother of the Year, I can also be that-weird-lady-who-steals-weeds.

Right now I only have about a cup of petals, so it'll be at least a week before I can start my wine, but when I do, I'll be sure to post details & pics of the process.

Roses and Wine

Actually, it was roses in wine on this particular Valentines Day. We strained and racked the rose hip wine today. Here it is going into the bottle, in which it will continue to ferment and clear over the next three months -



The color was pretty surprising since I was expecting a pinkish-orange brew, rather than the o.j. color that we ended up with. It just goes to show you never know with chemistry...



But the thing that you're probably most interested to hear about is the taste, and I'm pleased to say that both the wine's taste and smell (or should I say bouquet?) are quite good, even at this very early stage. It has a light, sweet apple/pear flavor that reminds me of a very light version of a hard cider, but with - at this stage- a very yeasty kick. I'm always impatient when it comes to drinking my finished wine, but this one has me counting the days 'til we can pour a glass. :)

Rose Hip Wine - Day 3

"Ferm, baby, ferm! Vino inferno! Ferm, baby, ferm - makin' al-kee-hall..."



I know it looks a little scary, but we're just 2 days away from straining out all of the chunkage and moving this yumminess into a jug to continue fermenting. This is my first non-fruit wine, so I am both excited and nervous to taste this. Provided that the first sip doesn't kill me, I'll keep you posted on it's progress.

Hippy Wine

After much dawdling, I finally got around to starting my first gallon of rose hip wine today. I've actually had these rose hips in the freezer for a while, being that I was 4 ounces shy of the amount required for the recipe that I wanted to use. Not able to ever lay my hands on more, I decided to make up the 4 ounce difference with the rose hip's botanical cousin, an apple.



I sliced, crushed, sugared and added water to these lovely hips (and half a yellow delicious apple) and set them to steep in the primary fermenter for 24 hours. Tomorrow I'll pitch the yeast and in a few days we'll see what we see. If this batch works out, I'll post the recipe here along with my fudges and observations.

On a related note, the hubby is starting another batch of beer today as well - a Czech/German Pilsner, he tells me, as if I'd have any idea at all what that meant. I figure that between our parallel booze brewing efforts, we will have a few lovely intoxicants to imbibe in the months and years to come.

Welcome Home (Yeastitarium)

Just back from our all too brief, and nearly fruitless expedition to the coast to dig clams, the hubby and I find ourselves scrambling to catch up on all of those little projects and chores which have fallen by the wayside during the holidays. Always first on Billy's list, his beer.

Here we have a montage of Bill's brewing efforts to date, minus the ill-fated brown ale.

L to R - 5 gallons "Amber Honey Lager", 1 gallon "Imperial Stout", 1 gallon "Blueberry Honey Ale"

Bill is bottling all 5 gallons of the Amber Honey Lager tonight. Good thing we've been saving our beer bottles and mooching would-be recycled glass vessels from our friends too, because this batch will yield approximately 4 cases of beer, aka 48 bottles of bubbly happiness.

Besides the beerfest, we've also got a few wines still going. The 5 gallons of grape wine (we're not sure of the variety, but are assuming it's something in the vein of "Concord") made from our own homegrown grapes, is about 3 months old now. Taste-wise, it is still in the "hooch" phase, as in, technically alcoholic, but not exactly pleasant to drink. From what I've read about concord grape wine, it takes at least a year to be decent, and is actually quite respectable by two years old. We'll see...

We've also got one gallon of blackberry wine working and whoa nelly is that stuff strong! Like strip the paint off your walls strong. I'm not sure if that one is going to ever be potable or if it's headed toward vinegar or maybe cooking wine.

We bottled the rhubarb and cherry wines a few months back and have been drinking them and sharing them with friends. They are pretty darn good, in my biased and inexpert opinion, especially the rhubarb, which is essentially a dessert wine. We'll be sure to make more of that next year, since we have a HUGE rhubarb plant that provides us with more fruit than we've ever known what to do with.

Besides all of the alcohol, we have the ever-present Amish bread starter on the counter, fermenting away. I popped the lid off this afternoon to give it a stir and accidentally inhaled a bit of the escaping gasses. My head swam! And I feed this stuff to my kids?

The end result of this ferment-a-thon (besides the smell of hops, malt & yeast snaking their way through the main floor of our house) is tasty organic wines & beers that cost just pennies per serving and come in wild and crazy flavors that you probably couldn't find anywhere else. We have really enjoyed this home brewing experiment and look forward to spring and summer, and turning all of the fruits & flowers that we can lay our hands on into still more tasty beverages. We're thinking of attempting to add mead or melomel to our repertoire next. YUM.

The God & Goddess of Wine

We have had a very productive year on our little ¼ acre piece of the planet, with tomatoes being our biggest producer, followed very closely by grapes.

I have been letting the kids pick and eat (or feed the chickens) grapes a few handsful or bucketsful at a time for about a month now, harvested 11 pounds for our neighborhood harvest party, and just today picked the remaining lot – over 40 pounds worth – which puts us at over 50 pounds of grapes for the year, all from a single, productive vine.

This fantastic abundance will allow us to make 5 gallons of grape wine, with plenty of leftover grapes to spare for snacking and sharing with friends. I am so grateful that this wonderful fruit bounty occurred in the very season that I learned to make wine.

With any luck, and barring any giant yeasty mishaps, this time next year we’ll be having a wine tasting. Rhubarb, cherry, blackberry and now grape are all in the works and should be at least drinkable, if not downright delightful, by fall of ’10.

So, in the ancient way of giving thanks for a plentiful harvest, I hereby give a shout out to Dionysus, God of wine and agriculture – Thanks dude! Your timing is awesome! As well as an equally hearty thanks to my friend, Kristin, for her winemaking tutelage and patience with my panicked, emails and phone calls about wines behaving badly – you’re my wine lifeline, lady!

With the end of season in sight, I’m glad to have one more fruit off of the vine and into the kitchen. Now if only the tomatoes would wrap up so that I could plant some Swiss chard in their place…

Wine, wine everywhere...

...nor any drop to drink. I currently have two very promising batches of wine in the making, one rhubarb and one dark cherry. With a lot of help from my darling husband, we re-racked both wines last night - not without complications, of course.

I believe that Billy may have inhaled/huffed/swallowed a moderate amount of the cherry wine in his efforts to get the siphon hose working. Gravity has never been my friend and it certainly wasn't on our team last night either. In our clumsy efforts to decant the wine from the old container to the new, we accidentally stirred up the sediment in the bottom, thereby setting our wine back a little in the "clearing" process. :(

The job was not without its rewards though. The smell of the cherry wine in particular was heavenly! It is agonizing waiting for these wines to be finished and ready to drink, but such is the lot of a first year winemaker. As long as I make at least 2 or 3 batches per year, I should, in theory, never run out of tasty homemade wines.

Which brings me to the point of all this rambling. I will shortly be in possession of a few pounds of blackberries. I am on the fence about whether or not I should then turn said berries into yet more jam (the cupboard already holds upwards of 3 dozen jars of assorted jams) or try my hand at some blackberry wine. There is a poll at the bottom of this page where you can vote on what becomes of my gorgeous blackberries. Keep in mind, those of you who are in the area will probably at some point receive as a gift and/or partake-of the end result in some fashion, so - speak your piece!