The practice
The name on the door is a promise about how everything here gets made: where the chaga comes from, how little of it we take, and who each brew is really for.
wild craft·ing n. the practice of harvesting chaga by hand from wild birch, and crafting each brew for the wild of one person’s life.
Cultivated chaga never touches the birch, which means it never builds betulin, the compound the fungus spends a decade drawing from the tree. So everything here is harvested from living birch in wild northern stands, by hand and in season.
In practice: no cultivated chaga, no imported powder, no fillers. Ever.
A batch is as much brew as one kettle and one pair of eyes can stand behind: small enough to date, number, and taste at every stage. When it’s gone, the ledger turns a page; nothing is ever run twice to meet demand.
In practice: every batch numbered, dated, and capped at a couple dozen bottles.
There is no house recipe hiding behind the word “custom.” Strength, extraction time, and any supporting botanicals are decided after a conversation about your days, and revisited two weeks into your first batch.
In practice: your formula lives on file, and it changes when your life does.
The calendar
Wild crafting runs on the forest’s clock, not a production schedule. Four seasons, four jobs.
Before the snow, he walks the stands: marking mature conks, logging young ones to leave, noting which birches carried well. The year’s harvest is decided here, on foot.
Sap down, cold deep: the traditional taking season. Only marked, mature conks come off the birch, and part of each stays behind to regrow. The satchel fills slowly on purpose.
The take is split, dried low and slow, and graded piece by piece. Rushed drying wrecks good chaga; his cure takes weeks and smells like the woods coming into the workshop.
Formula season. Conversations happen, recipes get written, and the kettle runs its small batches: each one hours of gentle extraction, never a hard boil.
The ledger
A harvest you don’t log is a harvest you can’t answer for. Each trip into the birch goes into the ledger: the stand, the take, and just as deliberately, what was left standing.
Harvest log: recent entries
| Date | Stand | Take | Left to regrow |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 12 | B-3 “Two Rivers” | 4.2 lb | 2 conks, 1 marked young |
| Jan 28 | D-1 “Long Ridge” | 2.8 lb | 3 conks |
| Feb 9 | A-7 “The Old Burn” | 3.5 lb | 2 conks, 2 marked young |
| Feb 21 | B-3 “Two Rivers” | rest year | everything |
Stand names are his own. The woods keep their addresses private.
Taste what a patient harvest and a personal formula actually make.