(music) Welcome to Prairie Fire.

I'm Sarah Edwards.

I'm standing here in the middle of the woods, about five miles from the Shawnee National Forest near the town of Ava, Illinois.

This place here is the home of the Scratch Brewing Company.

It's one of the most unique and remote micro-brewers in the state of Illinois.

It's also, by the way, one of the best places to get pizza, according to The New York Times in the entire nation.

So what on earth are they doing here that makes everything so good?

Well, the answer is all around us.

Our main goal with this brewery was to create something that had a sense of place, that when somebody drove into the parking lot here and got out of their car and came down the stairs, they were going to instantly be aware of the place that they were in, and that what they were drinking and eating came directly out of this place.

I was an English major in college.

I ended up in philosophy, and I had been working in publishing for a while in New York City.

I ended up here about 15 years ago, and I think I was kind of ready for a life change.

When I first moved here, there was virtually no craft beer anywhere.

And I guess I'm kind of...the kind of person that you know, just really likes to make things.

So my first thought was, well, I guess I just have to make it.

So I got some home brewing equipment and started brewing, and within one batch, I fell in love with making beer.

I really enjoyed it.

Aaron had just moved back here, and we all gathered on Monday nights at a now defunct, sadly, restaurant called Kindling that had a craft beer night on Mondays.

But I very much remember the first couple of beers that Aaron brought.

There was a persimmon beer and a sassafras beer, and one that he made with oak.

And I remember tasting those flavors for the first time and being just astounded by these wild ingredients.

I just instantly felt this synergy between how we were exploring beer and, you know, what we could make together.

And so we opened in 2013 then when we opened, a lot of people were really interested to come out and see what we were doing.

The brewery is on five acres of Aaron's family's land.

And they have, they have 80 acres altogether.

There's 75 acres that we can just wander through and, you know, pick from.

90% of the wild stuff that we harvest is from, just from the woods behind us.

This plant here, we use a fair bit.

It's a Virginia Mountain Mint.

It's like, kind of menthol, like, it's a really nice plant.

But if we were making 250 gallons of beer like this would be enough.

This here is a shag bark hickory, but there's a better one over here.

We just take chunks like this, throw them in the oven, toast it, and this smells really incredible.

We do gather a lot of plants from the forest and forage initially, and then to make it easier on ourselves, and also, just to have the ingredient readily available, we'll gather these plants.

I dug these in the woods as small plants, and then I've been growing them for eight or 10 years now here.

So we got 200 pounds of elderberry this year, and we didn't have to gather them, since the brewery is located in the forest, we garden on some of our friends land.

We grow corn.

We grow a bunch of different kinds of tomatoes, a lot of basil to make pesto for the pizzas, some okra, potatoes, sweet potatoes.

We have some burdock up here.

Here marigolds.

We use those in beer.

There's another plant called Roselle.

We use this in beer and sodas.

But Roselle is a type of hibiscus.

And typically there's like a bud starting to form here.

And in the south, warmer climates, that bud gets a lot bigger, but we'll use kind of the branch tips and then all the leaves, and you chop them up, and it gives you like a cranberry like flavor.

So all of our grain gets ground and put into these mash tons, and then we just do a single infusion of hot water with the grains in there, and it steeps for about an hour, and then we run the sugary solution into our kettle to boil.

We're one of maybe two breweries in the country that actually boils entirely over with fire.

This has been our primary boil kettle for about eight or eight or so years.

This together gets us about seven to eight barrels worth of beer at the end of the day.

So we sell most of the beer that we make here on site, probably roughly 75%.

The other 25% we keg and bottle and send out to other bars and restaurants around Illinois and the country.

We make a very small amount of beer.

We make roughly 250 barrels a year, which is very small.

We knew when we opened this place that we wanted to build a hearth oven, and that in the hearth oven we would be baking bread and making pizzas.

So there's a lot more mass in here than a typical pizza oven would have lots more insulation in here as well.

So this oven loses about 50 degrees a day.

We wanted to keep our menu very hyper focused on local we knew that with the pizzas we were gonna be sourcing stuff from our garden, from our farm and from the woods behind us.

It feels like a really rich kind of bread basket, which Southern Illinois sort of historically has been.

But in flyover country, I think that's awesome.

People will say you have to go to Italy to get a San Marzano tomato to put on a pizza for it to taste like the best pizza you've ever had, but I would argue that just a fresh heirloom variety of tomato from anybody's garden is going to make a pizza taste 1000 times better.

We've been just so lucky to be honored with three James Beard nominations, and we're honored by the New York Times as one of the top 22 places to get pizza in the United States, which has been incredible for a tiny little operation like us in the middle of the woods in Southern Illinois.

It's fun to give somebody who normally drinks Bud Light, a sour beer that is brewed with a bunch of wild ingredients, and then they discover they actually really like that beer, and then they want to take it to where they live.

It's fun to educate somebody who's from the exact opposite end of the country, who's in the Midwest, educate them in some of the plants that grow here and the amazing flavors that are right here in the middle of the country.

Aaron and I, we've just always been in absolute lockstep together on all of the decisions that we've made.

We always wanted it to be just the right size for us to be able to come in and brew the beer that we want to make, and always sort of keep it true to the original vision that we started with.

Whenever I'm gone for a few days in a really busy city, and I kind of pulled back into this driveway, I just, I literally breathe just a sigh of relief.

You know, this is where I want to be.

Now we're heading back north, about three hours to the town of Monticello, Illinois, right off the town square, there is the aptly named Prairie Fire Glass where the artist Jim Downey creates glass creations of every kind right in the back of his store.

So we're going to make a pumpkin this afternoon.

Jim downing Prairie Fire Glass, I'm the owner and glass artist here at Prairie Fire Glass.

I've been blowing glass for about 27 years.

Proud to be in Monticello and hope to be here for another 22 years.

To me, there's something about glass warning that requires it's almost meditative, in a sense, because particularly when you're first learning to do it, it requires this degree of focus.

You're dealing with 2000 degree stuff moving around on the end of the pipe, fire, all kinds of things.

It requires this degree of focus that requires the rest of the world go away.

I call that the Calgon Moment.

We're going to take a blow pipe, heat it up a little bit on the end stainless steel tube.

Inside the big insulated box is a ceramic crucible, and in the crucible is the liquid clear glass.

And now I'm going to use the little cherry wood block to cool it and smooth it into a nice, symmetrical shape.

With glass, it's all about the turning.

For me, the turning with glass is a metaphor for the universe.

Everything in the universe turns, turns, turns, and in glass, it's all about the turning the glass and the glass color all have personalities and temperaments.

They all react differently to different levels of heat.

I have a personality and temperament, so we're going to meet someplace in the middle.

Okay, I'm in the driver's seat.

When it comes to color, the glass isn't telling me what colors to use.

But if I'm thinking I want to make a bowl, and the glass is telling me, I think I want to be a vase, it's going to be a vase because I don't want to fight.

You know, this is a collaborative kind of thing, and like I said, the glass has a personality, and I kind of like to respect that personality.

So now I'm going to get a bubble started in there.

Watch the little blob blow into the pipe, really hard, thumb over the hole.

Viola.

So let's get another layer of clear glass so I dip it in, turn it around a couple times.

So now I go right into the color while it's really hot.

So what I use for color is called frit, essentially crushed glass.

Here, this is my Illini blend three or four different colors of orange, two or three different colors of blue, all kinds of skill.

I have a legal and moral obligation to make things in orange and blue in central I actually kind of think of myself more as a painter with glass so I can use that frit in color blends and different configurations, and just kind of play and manipulate the colors.

There is an endless variety of kind of manifestations of what you can do.

And for me, I've always kind of liked the idea of having it be unscripted.

So it's not that I don't have an idea, but it's more a general direction.

And what I found is, you know, sometimes you have that general direction, and the end result ended up being a trip to ugly town.

You know, sometimes it doesn't work out.

But the other thing I've learned is sometimes you gotta go through ugly town to get to coolville, that there's something I'm gonna learn from that piece.

There's gonna be one little piece that I say, I don't like the piece, but I like that part, and then I can build on that for the next piece, or the next piece of the next piece.

I'm just trying to get all that frit to melt in, and then I'm going to sit down find a block that's about the right size.

I think that one is so once I kind of smooth the shape, now I'm going to inflate it a little bit, not too much, because I still got to blow it out a little bit more when I get it into the mold to make the pumpkin.

Then I'm going to heat it up again, and I'm going to go back into the optic mold, and it comes out with ridges like a pumpkin.

Now we're going to inflate it, make it bigger.

There we go.

So I got the beginnings of a pumpkin here.

One of the toughest things is to say, Who am I as an artist.

I'm not just another version of this artist.

I'm not taking just a step further.

Who am I?

And I think the only way to find that is to do it.

Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it.

That's how you're going to find your voice.

You're not going to find your voice thinking about it.

You're not going to find your voice in a book looking at somebody else's work.

You're going to find your voice by doing the work, and that's it.

So if you notice now, it kind of looks brown.

Colors are always distorted by the heat.

The warm colors, yellows, reds and oranges almost always look brown when they're hot, and it won't come back to its original color until it's completely cool.

And then I'm going to use the file to score that neck a little bit more.

Glass has a random molecular structure, so if you give it a line to break along, normally, it's pretty happy to break along that line.

I got to cover it up because I don't want it to get too cold while it's sitting there.

I think this whole the whole glass blowing thing, just fit into my kind of life philosophy of stumbling gracefully down the stairs finding a medium that allows me to take that life philosophy and translate it into the artistic medium, and what I do for a living was just this, like kind of hand in glove thing, and that's how I know this is what I'm supposed to do.

So now we got to get the glass for the step you.

I get a big gather, or clear glass.

That's what they call it when you're getting glass out of the furnace, gathering the glass, and then I go into the dark blue trick.

It's actually a silver blue you'll see that right at the end.

Okay, now I gotta melt that in.

So we go into the optic mold, and I squish it down in there, and it comes out with ridges.

I heat it up again just a little bit, so we smoosh it on there.

That's a technical term, stretch it up, cut it off.

And then, before it either flops over, it gets too cold, grab the end, pull it up and around.

We're going to do the alchemy part.

That blue has silver oxides in a low oxygen environment, the silver migrates to the surface, so it'll turn that blue stem into a silver balloon.

There it is.

So now I got to put it in the kiln.

The annealing allows that cooling to happen outside, middle inside, all at the same rate.

So after about 12 hours, sometime late tomorrow morning, I'll be able to take that pumpkin out, and we'll be all ready to go.

I just want to keep doing this as long as I can do it.

You know, a lot of my friends are retiring, and to me, retirement was that thing there where I stopped doing the thing I was doing for money.

So I can do what I love to do.

I get to come to work every day and do something that I love to do.

So the whole idea of retirement is really a foreign thing to me.

I am incredibly blessed that the things I like to make people respond to that's not the case with every artist.

You know.

I mean, the things that bring me joy bring other people joy.

So it's that's, that's an incredible blessing.

I'm very grateful.

Taking the time to create something slowly and carefully is really an art unto itself, as we've seen, the culture and reverence of the Japanese Tea Ceremony is another wonderful example of this idea.

I think it's important for people to really learn about another culture, not just by seeing it online or reading about it, but actually having the opportunity to use their five senses, hearing, smell, even taste.

The custom and practice of Japanese tea started more than 500 years ago, and there are hundreds of different styles of serving tea.

Japan House, located on the campus of the University of Illinois, is a place that teaches Japanese arts and culture.

There they practice the Urasenke School of tea.

From the Illinois Arts Council, we received this year's ethnic and folk arts master and apprentice program award, and it was to teach and share Japanese tea ceremony as part of Illinois' cultural heritage.

And I think that's so important that you know, being in the United States, being immigrants, being Asian, it's the idea that we all come from very different walks of life.

But how can we come to that common human understanding?

And sometimes for us, we just say it begins with a bowl of tea.

On this day, Professor Kimiko Gunji, a tea instructor both in the U.S. and Japan, invited our crew to a tea room at Japan House for a traditional table style Tea Ceremony.

But it's not just serving a bowl of tea to satisfy your physical thirst...more like satisfy your whole spiritual thirst.

To see beautiful equipment, to hear, to smell, to touch, to taste.

So then you're sharpening your five senses.

To enjoy this moment much more clearly, so this process is not physical cleaning more like spiritual cleansing.

This moment comes only once in your lifetime, so why not make most out of it?

That's a very important philosophy behind tea The greatest tea master, Sen Rikyk codified four principle of ceremony.

Tea Ceremony, which is harmony, Respect, purity and tranquility.

We often tell people, in the next hour, when you're in the tea ceremony, don't think about anything else, just let go.

But it's to see the world with a fresh set of eyes.

We hope that that's what people take away and that sincerity and that kindness, I think people could just stop fighting, if they could just put aside their differences, see each other respectfully as humans, and then just have a bowl of tea.

And so we hope that people, when they have a bowl of tea here, they just go out into the world and they say, I feel refreshed, I feel relaxed, and I just want to be a better person and treat those with the kindness that I experienced today in the tea ceremony.

I think one thing that Professor Gunji always says, and it's actually the scroll right behind me right now.

It's the saying "Ichi-go ichi-e." We tell all of our students and visitors, if you forget everything about the tea ceremony, we hope you take this one statement away and it translates to "one lifetime, one opportunity."

We only have one life.

But it's the idea that tea ceremony just says, sometimes it's good to slow down, recenter yourself and really appreciate something as ordinary as serving and having a bowl of tea with those whom you care so much about and that you only have one life.

So don't take it for granted and appreciate even something as small as eating and drinking and sharing with someone around you.

Thanks for joining us on Prairie Fire.

For more information about the Scratch Brewing Company or any of our other stories, check out our website at will.illinois.edu/prairiefire.

We leave you with more of the flora and fauna from here at the Scratch Brewing Company.

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