Gift Economy

It all started for me when I began brewing beer at home, in my kitchen, and threw a party with a few other brewers, and a pile of friends. I had brewed and bottled a wide variety of beer styles, the bottles all labeled with fun titles and cool photos, and I offered a half-dozen mixed six-packs of my homebrews, to the first half-dozen friends who brought an appetizer to the party. It worked like a charm. I brewed, they cooked, and we all went home happily after the party.

A friend of mine who is a professional coffee roaster, likes my bread and my beer, as much as I like his coffee. Another friend, my business partner and a master in the art of growing food in greenhouses, enjoys my bread as much as I enjoy his salad greens, another friend has a flock of laying hens whose eggs we love, and another has beehives, from which he harvests a hundred pounds of honey every year. All of them enjoy getting gifts of my beer, bread, jam, and occasionally my apricot sorbet, and my pantry is stocked with their gifts to me.

A local retired MD, Dr. Will Evans, asked me to be interviewed on his KDNK Radio talk show, "Shifting Gears", to be aired at 4:30 pm Mountain Time, on Thursday, May 7. You may catch the show on streaming audio at: http://www.kdnk.org/

It's like Christmas all year long around here! I need to buy more flour for my bread, more malted grains for my beer, and continue "printing edible curency" in my kitchen.