Belated Hello

[High Desert Botanicals]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to introduce myself before my "new member" period runs out. I'm a botanist and my husband Reese is a fixer (tech support) and we live in Nevada (the cold part, not Las Vegas.) In addition to our day jobs, we run High Desert Botanicals, which is why I haven't been very active in the forums yet.  It's our busy time of year. We make kits for folks to create their own cocktail bitters, tonic, mixers, and other goodies. So far we're still very small and we do all of the work ourselves.

 

Our varied interests include cocktails, home brewing, baking, gardening, and music. Reese has gotten into making pizza and wishes we had room for an outdoor pizza oven.  Our poor dog has learned to equate the smell of pizza and the sound of the smoke alarm so he hides in his kennel at the first whiff. I enjoy experimenting with herbs and spices to create bitters, tonics, shrubs, oxymels, syrups, and other tasty liquids. My desk is covered with stacks of mason jars full of various liquids. When the apple harvest is good, we typically brew and bottle 20 to 40 gallons of cider in the fall. This year we had a late spring frost that killed all of the fruit blossoms so it's a good thing we bottled plenty last year.

 

Researching bitters and spices has also sparked a keen interest in the history of the spice trade.  I've been collecting stories on my pinterest board (https://www.pinterest.com/hdb_nv/history-of-spices/) If you know of an interesting story about spices, send me a link.  I had never appreciated before how important spices were to world trade, exploration, and occasionally war and genocide.

 

I'm looking forward to swapping recipes and offering up our success and failures to the forums.

 

Thanks,

Janel

[Shelby]

Nice!!   Welcome to eG!