alzymologist

joined 10 months ago
[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 7 points 4 days ago (4 children)

It's naturally local, neighbors will see and gossip. No need to do anything other than sign. Also walk up to them and share something and tell. Putting stuff on the internet will not be nearly as effective.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 2 points 5 days ago

some of the compounds we like best in hops are not water soluble and depend on the alcohol to pull them out of the dry hopping. I wonder if this product changes that calculus

Even if they are extracted into this fluid (for example, with polyalcohols, maybe just sugars), they still might crash on "fermentation" of nonalcoholic beer, whatever process is used. Maybe if these are strictly nonfermentable polyalcohols and at the same time highly soluble in various conditions (maybe even at 0C fermentation, as one of possible production ways), this might work indeed.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Looks like totally industrial process oriented stuff. Extracting all the relevant components from hops in an adequate ratio is no simple task, and end user loses the ability to alter this step. Not that many of us take super careful attention to it, but then does the manufacturer of this fluid?

I can see from your experience that manufacturers claim about easy solubility is either exaggerated or misleading. Footprint considerations are also somewhat weird, there is a huge plastic tank compared to thin vacuum wrap for typical products, and waste on technologically adequate extraction is usually enormous.

And my biggest question is - what is the carrier material? Surely pure alpha acid would have to be admitted with a pipet, even if it was shippable like that. So what is that solvent? Looks like malt extract.

I guess storage time should be lower than with pellets or frozen cones. I don't see anyone brewing less than a few cubic meters a month using it realistically. But it's awesome to know someone is trying to walk this path. I'm curious how it will end, please post the result!

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 4 points 6 days ago

Oh, are they allowing raw milk then?

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 2 points 6 days ago

It's something similar to smell of tarragon infused water, but more complex and powerful. But without tasting I can't really comprehend it.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I dropped some artemisia into meed and after a year oh the smell is otherworldly. I'm waiting for bottling day eagerly.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Direct buy grain from farmers. They often dump and compost the stuff, seriously, while children in Africa, you know, but shipping is often more expensive and processers have minimum amounts, farming is no charity (it really is, at prices we pay for food). You can get super easy and ethical deals. And they'll tell you what they did, if you are friendly enough, I guess. They also might even malt it themselves, lots of folks do it anyway for various reasons (moonshine).

Hops are hard though. Like all spice, they are either premium quality, or useless. And demand is higher than supply globally. But I'm pretty sure there are local substitutes everywhere, it might deviate from what we call beer, but what the heck why not?

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 week ago

Absolutely, it is very hard to miss. And it is easier than infusion the way people do it usually, just takes way more (passive) time. Equipment-wise, having nothing is default too, which is nice.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Oh, I looked up what we did last year and...

It's triple decoction lager actually!

2.5 kg Pale Ale (Simpsons) 2.0 kg Munich Malt (Ireks) 0.5 kg Crystal Oak (Ireks)

Then the sequence:

30 L kettle, no external heating for whole volume. Mash-in 35C water. After 20 min, take 1/3 portion, heat in 10 L kettle to 65 C on induction hotplate, wait for a negative iodine-test. Boil 45 min, mostly without mixing.

Return to mixture, wait 20 min. Take 1/3 portions, heat in 10 L kettle to 65 C on induction hotplate, wait for a negative iodine-test. Boil 45 min, mostly without mixing.

Return to mixture, wait 20 min. Take liquid, boil 45 min, return.

Then sparging.

Boil for 1h, Perle hops (6 AA%), 29 g at start, Tettnanger hops (2.4 AA%), 24 g at -15 min

LAG101 yeast (German lager strain, captured in expedition to Bayern), fermented at 10+-2 C (non-heated building part with a tiny 200W heater) for about 3 weeks, then diacetyl rest at RT for about a week (feeling lazy), then bottled with light sugar priming, and into a fridge.

OG 1069 FG 1012

Profile is what we could expect from an Oktoberfest, malty body, mildly bitter with pronounced hops aroma.

I must say, it was totally worth it (and done with simplest kitchen tools and a bottle of some veterinarian drug containing iodine). With lager profile as blank canvas, this process is pretty much a show-off of what people should be really doing to make them lagers interesting.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 week ago

It gets better! That's why they call it lager.

Ales get better with years passing too though.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 week ago

That's why I was calling it Märzenfest half year ago. Apparently, or at least the books say so, they were brewing this all winter, for same reasons I do this. But sure, the later brews were probably the ones that mostly survived the thrist period.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 week ago

GUI is just a mess. I think bevy is to-go though, it could be tuned a lot to turn down memory demand. Otherwise, use system level stuff, like web-based ui or Qt wrap.

At least that's what I ended up thinking after struggling with same question.

 

Does anyone know if any quality meltblown tissue is made here and if so where can I buy a roll?

 

This time of year one thing happens that has absolutely no relation to holidays: late berries (cranberries, lingonberries, rowan) spent enough time in frozen state to develop flavor worth of melomels. A gift for self in several years, something to be safely forgotten until bottling and then again.

Of course, I've kept those in freezer, as I don't want to fight all the birds for rowans (note: they still had plenty, I'm not greedy) and I'm not that good at digging frozen forest floor for the rest.

 

I've been doing homebrewing together with my wife for quite some time, and at some point we started collecting a yeast library. There was a point in my life where we had an opportunity to start a company that does something we enjoy; we've tried starting an analytic lab for microbreweries (as we are both actually doctors in chemistry), but it didn't take off at all due to lack of demand (and COVID breakout), we had to switch to doing whatever brings cash (of course IT stuff it was, mostly, I feel ashamed).

But yeast library kept growing. We've decided to give it another try, got permissions from the Big Brother, and rolled out a small production!

We've deployed a webshop at https://store.zymologia.fi/ , there is other stuff that's kind of a byproducts of whatever other things we've had to do to get along (some of it was and is fun after all). The idea is that I don't think it makes sense to scale it up any further, we just have proper but minimalist equipment to do sterile pure culture cultivation, not large tanks, only glass that could be properly washed and autoclaved, and full-grain growth media because I hate smell of extract (and proper preparation of wort is about as difficult as getting extract clear enough for yeast making). Anyway, it's an actual commercial operation, I'm curious to see how far we can go with such attitude and whether it would become profitable or just another "make the world a bit happier place".

Most of yeast on sale is listed as "not available" which means we'll just have to wake them up, feed them up to speed, and package, which takes up to 2 weeks, which is less than beer recipe planning and preparation phase, at least for me. I don't think keeping an inventory with live yeast is a good idea anyway - many times I've had sad starved liquid yeast fished out of fridges in stores only to see lags on 30+ hours. That's also why I'm reluctant to go to resalers, though I might try it.

What I really think should be happening is yeast exchange. I don't want to keep things any more commercial than the general Finnish anti-soviet spirit tells me, so let me propose this idea: yeast growth takes time and effort, but sharing is caring - I'd be happy to share a swab of yeast culture with anyone who comes to our place (just tell me when, of course most of the time there is only yeast in the lab) with their own sterile slant carrier - I won't be shipping these, for I'm absolutely certain delivery services will mess it up, and also I (or whoever would be hanging around at that time) won't get to have a chat with you. (Please do this if you know what you are doing though, storing culture and scaling it to a starter is a bit more complicated than just making a starter, mistakes multiply badly with exponential growth and it's not very feasible to propagate without going through single-cell plating or something similar. If you don't know what that means, learn it first, or it's worth just buying a ready liquid yeast, the great purpose of sharing culture material is to let other people have it in their library, which would require you to go through single-cell propagation at least a few times a year).

We also have an opensource (all we do is opensource, I believe in the idea) piece of software to keep yeast lineage in check here: https://github.com/Alzymologist/yeast It's a bit underdocumented at the moment to say the least, but it uses Bayesian inference to analyze yeast parameters and catch mutations, and it was able to detect deviations before we've tasted the outliers blindly, I think it's quite cool too. I don't think anybody did this before.

Sorry for self-advertisement, I've asked moders if this sort of thing is OK here before posting. I hope this is interesting enough to be worth being here.

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