alzymologist
@alzymologist@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on Orange you glad to see me 1 day ago:
Are you boiling them? Why?
- Comment on New year new brew 2 days ago:
Then it’ll totally ferment like crazy, I did this with honey and quartered oranges.
- Comment on New year new brew 3 days ago:
So are you adding sugar this time or not?
- Comment on Why the sour face? 6 days 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? 1 week 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 3 weeks ago:
EU authentic produce guidelines
Would you share a link to this?
- Comment on What are you brewing? 4 weeks 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? 4 weeks 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 5 weeks ago:
That’s mixing greek and latin.
Geonauts? Buthonauts?
- Comment on Immersion heaters rock! 1 month 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! 1 month ago:
But how bad is the washing?
- Comment on I've made a yeast lab in Finland 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month ago:
They are certainly good for 20L, that’s the amount we use for typical homebrews ourselves.
- Submitted 1 month ago to homebrewing@sopuli.xyz | 14 comments
