alzymologist
@alzymologist@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on What are you brewing? 1 day ago:
Sure it is not, grain is not fruit after all. I think grain will turn into angry shoggoth if threated with metabisulfite. At least it would be a mess.
- Comment on What are you brewing? 2 days ago:
Well, it’s bad news, all those super-processed products almost always are treated with metabisulfite or something close enough, and only wine and a few other products require it to be listed on the label. It’s pretty much treated as part of detergent for washing fruits. Completely unjustified as product is sterilized later in turning it into extract, but it is simpler to keep buying this historically accepted mild bleach and treating all fruits with it anyway. Maybe increases their storage time in shipping pipeline. Something I do not wish to think about in great detail, for my first lab in Finland was in a rented fruit storage bunker and I washed it and dismantled control equipment myself. Could have been WW2 nazi camp facility for what it was worth.
- Comment on What are you brewing? 2 days ago:
In my childhood, we had these kinds of root vegetables sliced and caved in on one end, and a spoonful of honey was placed on top and in the cavity. Somehow this sped up conversion to overnight, and it was a treat. I guess, similar process could be used to convert them for brewing.
Although the whole idea sounds a bit like potato for vodka. Nothing wrong with that too, but the flavor might me less than interesting in the end. Worth trying I guess. I wish I had some of those now, not unripe ones from the store.
- Comment on What are you brewing? 2 days ago:
One of the biggest suspects in this cyser story is metabisulfite treatment that might have happened to apples. I do not know the exact mechanism, but lots of people complained about headache if that was used with apples (and many recipes call for its use, IMO totally unjustified) or in apple juice in factory. Same thing about grapes. Differential is quite clear.
- Comment on Mead - what type of bottles 2 days ago:
Steamings damage corks, especially sterilizing ones. Their number should be minimized. Now for bottling, I do not think it is important for corks to be sterile, as anything worth of corking will kill whatever might be living on cork surface. Sanitized is enough.
Now repackaging is another beast. Once packaged, corks are left for indefinite time, and if inoculated with something that might survive on bare cork (pretty much this means fungi), it might become a nice growth media. Then, steaming might kill it (and if it is not pressurized, that would not kill spores), but it will not clean it from the cork.
So, on small scale, it is not very important, some corks might get spoiled occasionally. But 6000 is no small scale lol.
- Comment on Mead - what type of bottles 5 days ago:
Only proper wine corks are good for proper mead. I mean, yeah, there is place in our life for fermented honey solution that is consumed fast, but proper mead should age like expensive wine. It’s more noble than wine, after all!
Bottling mead thus is always a challenge. I’ve tried all kinds of methods, or course beer caps - and especially swingtops - just start leaking at best in few years. Compouns corks too, and, being low grade stuff, they are often stinky themselves. The only exception are belge bottles and fat compound corks for braggots, if corked belge way, they occasionally leak some liquid at first, but then seal themselves for good.
Even higher grade corks tend to degrade over the years. Highest grade does not degrade. I’ve just negotiated a sample of fancy corks from Portugal, about 1eur/cork, highest grade. They look really good and will probably work, but min order is 6000 and they have to be repackaged sterile. Good thung I have sterile line, but 6000? It’s 10x more than all bottles I have now! I could place them in my webstore in small bags? Would someone be buying them?
I was looking into alternatives, but nothing so far looks promising. I’m thinking about turning other wood types on a lathe, but that will probably result in a disaster.
- Comment on Calculating or measuring grams of suger per bottle/can like how it's printed on the label 1 week ago:
Usually not worth it; you’ll need to gently distill (in proper glass, this is important) the beer like it is done for ABV measurement and measure density of leftovers. Or do quantitative chromatography. You’ve got to know hands-on chemistry real well for this. Let me know if you need the procedure.
- Comment on Lemon wine and orange wine 1 week ago:
Only once I’ve got yeast staggered by lemon juice addition, and that happened in secondary fermentation. If there is enough sugar (and, if I recall correctlt, there was added sugar in these ferments), they’ll keep going. Acidity that slows them down for real is much higher, like what acetobacteria do. Yeast still thrives in bread starters and combucha, and those are sour!
- Comment on What is it about pineapple juice that's so foamy? 1 week ago:
Was it pulpy? Particles tend to stabilize liquid interfaces.
- Comment on Something has gone awry 3 weeks ago:
Then it’s effectively braggot. Embrace the froth, you are cookin!
- Comment on Something has gone awry 4 weeks ago:
Yeast does this if they are in really sweet spot for sugar, nitrogen, microelements, temperature, and pH. Almost always happens in braggot (once shot into ceiling with lock, was quite a mess), also if you add yeast fertilizer. I think I saw this reported reproducively for slightly over 23C lager yeast. And, well, insufficient headspace might be a problem. Don’t worry, at least yet.
- Comment on Orange you glad to see me 4 weeks ago:
Are you boiling them? Why?
- Comment on New year new brew 4 weeks ago:
Then it’ll totally ferment like crazy, I did this with honey and quartered oranges.
- Comment on New year new brew 4 weeks ago:
So are you adding sugar this time or not?
- Comment on Why the sour face? 5 weeks ago:
Indeed, I had a stall once in a melomel with just a few lemons in secondary. Not a big deal since it was secondary, and residual sweetness counterbalanced the tartness nicely. Got really quickly really clean though.
I would say using just the skins for flavor is much more feasible. Also I quarter citrus, slicing them like this is just asking for lots of mush at cost of laborous slicing.
- Comment on How your Christmas specials turned out? 5 weeks ago:
Ciders and cysers are perfect drinks for Gravmas celebration! Although myself I’m planning citrus melomel for the evening, brings up childhood memories. Tried to share photos of 3x decoction weisen from the eve, but lost fight to foam miserably, for it was not the first bottle for the evening.
My wife said that Christmas specials should be made on Christmas for the next one. Sounds legit. I think that’d be my plan for now.
- Comment on Making sure I have some sahti this Christmas, because nobody sells it near me 1 month ago:
EU authentic produce guidelines
Would you share a link to this?
- Comment on What are you brewing? 2 months ago:
Did spurce basic pilsener ale experiment this summer! Of course, seeing them for what they are, I’ve stayed away from all pumps and filters, decanted the boil with tips and threw some tips for “dry… tipping?” Then some needles sneaked into the bottles. I’ve used fresh tips so they are just crunchy snack when you drink it. Weirdest thing, but I’m pretty sure it tastes like legendary Sahti beer. Well, the recipe is technically quite close, I suppose? Still have a few bottles (appropriately stored in sauna lol), I’m curious how it would age over a year or so. Totally doing it again next year.
- Comment on What are you brewing? 2 months ago:
We’ve caught something that looks, tastes, smells and behaves like brettanomyces from last field trip. They are really different and it seems their growth and fermentation profile does depend on conditions even more than usually! Never kept this culture before. Waiting for proper tasting procedure (could be something horrendous really, I’m pretty sure those will need some tuning in standard recepies). Then off to the library and store it goes.
Otherwise, there is full freezer of frozen forest berries waiting for the secondary in mead buckets and an infamous BAG I’ve bought to try the suffering others speak of here. Well, once I’m not the only healthy person in household, we’ll have lots of fun stuff to do, sigh.
- Comment on Astronauts of the underworld: The scientists venturing into the deep, dark Earth 2 months ago:
That’s mixing greek and latin.
Geonauts? Buthonauts?
- Comment on Immersion heaters rock! 2 months ago:
Are those hops good? Would you share a bit of rhizome for me to clone?
I can’t stop thinking that Finnish hops grown in chill weather might be a hidden treasure, once we figure out how to tune the recipes.
- Comment on Immersion heaters rock! 2 months ago:
But how bad is the washing?
- Comment on I've made a yeast lab in Finland 2 months ago:
That would be cool indeed! Would you suggest some particular brews we should chase?
One strategy to catch new strains is to give friends that go traveling a couple of plastic test tubes and ask them to save a drop of beer for us. We’ve got quite a lot of acetic and lactic bacteria this way, of course, but some yeasts too.
GMO yeast distribution has questionable legality here as far as I understand, but it doesn’t mean it’s illegal to make and study it. I’ve been looking for some projects to finally play with CRISPR and lyophilization chamber somebody at our lab was building for no particular purpose (we’ve bargained a sizeable set of used but surprisingly operational Edwards vacuum pumps at ebay, they itch to build something out of them).
Seriously, after seeing feedback here, I’m thinking about selling dry yeast as well, since it’s not too much of an upgrade and we can build a stock just for the sake of spreading strains around the globe…
- Comment on I've made a yeast lab in Finland 2 months ago:
I completely agree that keeping yeast supply lines as local as possible is a good idea, both in terms of distance, and in terms of time. That’s the concept here - if we can’t get fresh local yeast, then we should make them.
Getting yeast from breweries is good idea, but first, those should ideally come from in-brewery lab, not from propagation (unless it’s some kind of local native yeast, I suppose) - fresh lab-propagated yeast always behave much better according to my experience and to literature, also lines tend to mutate or degenerate otherwise without proper single-cell cleaning step occasionally.
Second, as far as I understand, most breweries keep very small selection of yeast. One of the reasons we’ve got into cultivation of pure varietal yeast is a realization of yeast’s impact on final product profile. This was quite a story.
At that point we were much younger and we’ve doubted that yeast could make lots of impact on fermentation profile, much less dominate it, as literature occasionally claims. Once we’ve decided to compare several different strains of yeast in mead; we’ve taken the most straightforward starting material - honey from Texas where we lived back then, that’s got all possible flowers blooming almost year round mixed together so that no single flavor could be distinguished - turned it into a must, then divided it into 8 batches and pitched them with different wine yeasts. Expecting subtle difference, we were surprised to find that some turned out like mead, but others were slightly honey-flavored Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sovignon, Riesling, etc. That was the day we’ve started thinking about building yeast library. Now we keep tasting (I mean, perform organoleptic analysis, it’s science!) plain pilsner 1040OG wort with no additions but yeast - and every new strain brings something new, while old strains become as familiar as friends. It’s a whole world.
- Comment on I've made a yeast lab in Finland 2 months ago:
They are certainly good for 20L, that’s the amount we use for typical homebrews ourselves.
- Submitted 2 months ago to homebrewing@sopuli.xyz | 14 comments
