alzymologist

joined 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I was just thinking of caramelizing very small fraction of honey for flavor this year out of curiosity, but with my small production it will have to be good honey probably, I'm not at scale where waste appears yet. Although there is a risk to suddenly inhetit an empire from my neighbor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Could be, the world is wide, though, and I'll wait till we have more knowledge about it to place a name. Which does not stop me from culinary experimentation!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

There is nothing subjective here, it's knowledge of biochemistry and manufacturers use of good practices. Of cousre, this is impossible on large scale production, yet you could be sure that your local milk providers milk will just become something else upon curdling, and your local butchery vacuum sealed bags are as clean from pathogens as their line and are good far beyond expiration date, but will change. And that things were stored correctly and are not blooming with thermophiles inside. I do not mean nutritional content, I only address industrial labeling and its purpose. And things that could not possibly be regulated, and have to rely on community (in many forms, from "lets love each other" to "I will break your face if you burn me, pal"). Eating expired stuff is an act of trust, whether it is trust to chance and supernatural, or trust of community that builds cultural value, is a whole different question.

Then you can always inoculate food yourself before expiration, but then it counts as cooking I guess.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

There is no "expired", only "improperly fermented". Sure, it could be very bad, but then you should've paid attention to it in advance, respect the nutrient and all living things who brought it about.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Do you know you can actually buy predatory mites and nematodes to enjoy your aphids? This is what worked in my situation somewhat, although it does not help if the plant is already heavily afflicted. These guys sure will not fly away.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (2 children)

long low narrow planter along the front

had this balcony setup just on the sea coast in Finland, not much benefit. In the end, terrace shelves against the wall and planters on the floor are different only in aesthetics. Just had a lot of plants and birds - make sure you have some attractors to those (scatter some food, leave nest building material, place a cat behind the window to be mocked) - still lost plants quite often to elements and larvae.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (2 children)

A fellow beekeeper!

Bochet

TIL proper name for that thing when someone new to the art is being told to "boil your honey really well or mead will spoil"!

How are things done there on the other side of the world? Do you move your bees to fields with these flowers, or is it just arbitrary seasonal labeling that does not really mean you are really collecting that flower dominantly?

Would you want to try my bee sensors that listen to the bees every hour?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (3 children)

We've got tired of just fermenting standard wort with different yeast strains for comparison, and we are starting full-sized batches of proper styled beer split and inoculated with very similar yet distinct yeast from the same class. The first in line are Belgian wits. Weather permitting it'll be outdoor brews! Hopefully this would be fun experience, will try to post inspirational results here.

And spruce tips are coming soon as well, but not yet. There is ground elder everywhere, but I'm reluctant to give it a try in brewing, need to learn to ferment it with lactic first and see if it is any good to my taste.

Yesterday we've tasted small batches of... some weird yeast caught in some local beer in UK bar, it certainly looks right under microscope, counts to proper population with more or less typical dynamics... and then fails to change the gravity, yet produces quite distinct flavor. 1040 OG beer starters end up too sweet and disgusting, of course, so we've tried instead kombucha-style mix of pale wort and tea, to 1010 OG, sterile, of course. The gravity did not change again, but the flavor! It was not quite like kombucha, but along the lines, and definitely the tea flavor was more distinct that in reference non-inoculated sample, that tasted disgustingly sweet and stale. And somehow this "monoculture combucha" hits in the head. What a weird mutant. Something to research now. Maybe we have a 0% beer magic in our hands?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Just old farts being naturally (not without covid help though) replaced with people with demand for future, I wish brexit voting was delayed.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago

Awesome! I've taught chemistry this way!

Solubility basics: acidic substances dissolve better at higher pH and vice versa. Example: tea pigmentation, slightly acidic. Compare: normal tea steeping, steeping tea in water with lemon (hint: add lemon AFTER steeping next time!), steeping tea in water with a hint of cheap baking soda added (notice slight taste modification, does that feel familiar? Somebody might save pennies by using less tea to get the color and nothing else in the only drink available). Discuss.

Result: students leave outraged with their canteen, school admin, the government that made this happen.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Влада народжує паразитів. Хай живе Анархія!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Cheap difraction gratings though, indispensable

 

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.

view more: next ›