Freestone Festival Celebrates Fermentation

What do beer, pickles and sauerkraut have in common? Or, from another point of view, kombucha, miso and foot baths?

The answer, of course, is fermentation. From baseball games to spiritual retreats, fermentation is a key process in a wide range of lifestyles. It’s one of those underpinnings of our diet that we overlook, if we’re aware of it at all.

“It’s a fundamental impulse in biology,” said Michael Stusser, founder of Osmosis Day Spa, which uses a fermented enzyme bath in its popular soaks. “It’s the key to so much of our past, and also our future.”

Yoghurt, cheese, bread and wine are just a couple of the everyday goods that undergo fermentation before they reach your table – or glass.

So much of what makes the West County lifestyle what it is – enzyme baths, wine, cheese, bakeries, and health food and vegetarian diets – rely to a greater or lesser extent on the process of fermentation.  If you’re one of those West County folk, you’re probably already dialed in to the Sonoma County Freestone Fermentation Festival, taking place this Saturday at the Salmon Creek School, two miles north of Freestone on the Occidental Highway.

Although the Saturday one-day festival offers plenty of opportunities for adding to your own ferment of knowledge, a Friday symposium and feast is also on the schedule, to be held at Shone Farm near Forestville. A panel of fermentation experts will discuss the health and social benefits of the process, including Stusser as well as fermentation revivalist and author Sandor Katz,  brewmaster Dr. Charles Bamforth of UC Davis, and nutritionist Jenny McGruther.

Following Friday’s symposium at Shone Farm, chef John Ash and others serve up a feast complete with wine and six fermented courses, from hors d’oeuvres to desserts.

The Freestone Fermentation Festival, now in its third year, began with very modest goals. Strusser was among a small group of Freestoners who realized, as he put it, “We had three businesses in town who all had the same employees – the little critters that make bread, wine and cedar enzyme baths.”

What started as an effort to bring the local community together in 2009 grew to the 800 people who showed up at the first Fermentation Festival that year. Over a thousand are expected to show up for this year’s event, including many from out of state and “a busload coming up from San Diego,” chartered by the Quality Ale and Fermentation Fraternity, otherwise known as QUAFF.

Booths by many local and regional producers of fermented foods will offer samples and even hands-on immersion in the fermentation. Lou Preston, from Healdsburg’s Preston of Dry Creek, will be doing a “cabbage stomp,” turning wine and cabbage into sauerkraut.

New at the Fermentation Festival this year is the Kombucha Contest, where visitors can sample a number of the fermented teas, whose richness in yeast, bacteria, enzymes and other microbial miracles are thought to be beneficial to digestive health.

Once the visitors’ votes are in, a panel of judges, including Chris Mann of Guyaki Teas and author and true-food guru Michael Pollan, will weigh in to decide the winner. 

Even if you can’t make the Friday events – tickets are $100 for the feast only, $120 including the symposium -- Saturday’s Fermentation Festival in Freestone is a bit more affordable: $12 adults, $7 children 4 to 13, three and under free. Details are at www.freestonefermentationfestival.com