• 10 Posts
  • 463 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2023

help-circle

  • I have a sony as well, and you can use it as dumb TV, by not agreeing to their privacy policy. If you want to connect it to wifi afterwards, it points you to the privacy policy again, so it seems like the TV follows that. But I’ve also purchased it 4 years ago, so not sure what the status is now.

    So far, I’ve seen no ads. I mostly use it mostly via HDMI and sometimes for watching freely available TV via antenna.


  • In retrospect, I should have saved it, but it was my second beer ever and went for an overly complex recipe also. Knowing what I know now, it would have probably aged nicely.

    I’ve discovered boiling is not fully necessary to get a good brew and that heather tips make it awesome. I’ve just added maybe 1-2 handfuls now to the mash. Next autumn I plan to go nuts on collecting the thing and will try to fit maybe half a kilo in there, see how it comes out.

    Honorable mention to red yeast rice, I have this notion of doing a rice mash for maybe a week with it and then plopping that into a raw ale mash to get enzymes and flavour of red yeast rice wine in a beer, as I’ve noticed that its enzymes also work up to 70ish Celsius.


  • Did a raw ale with heather tips foraged from the forest that turned out pretty good.

    And now fermenting a raw pumpkin ale. Added around 3 kg pumpkin mash to the mash. A bit difficult to work with and had an OG of around 1.055, bit on the low end there. Fingers crossed it’ll be drinkable. Assuming it’s going to come in at session strength.


  • Loving the goblin fermentation vibes you re giving off there. Never stop.

    Mostly beer brewer here, so dumb things I’ve done were mostly process related. Fermenting beer with unsanitized wood chips - turned sour. Adding too much rye or pumpkin - took me 12 hours to get the damn thing made - stuck mash.

    Fermentation wise, not brewing, messed around with some koji with varying degrees of success.

    If you’re doing things like spam alcohol, have you also considered miso as an ingredient?




  • Gout. Big toe on fire, throbbing with pain, joint swollen until there are no discernable features. Even a feather touching the area is enough to generate hot searing pain. The constant urge to ‘pop’ the big toe joint set against the impossibility to actually wriggle the toe without passing out.

    Should drink lots of water to flush out the uric acid, but every trip to the bathroom has to be carefully considered because walking there takes 2-3 minutes of grabbing on to nearby things/people while stepping awkwardly on the outside edge of the foot, instead of 20 seconds of normal walking.

    I’ve had severe tooth pain for a couple of weeks (a cyst - the pain killed the nerves in some of my teeth), and 3 days of gout until the meds worked well enough to walk less painfully were worse.









  • Why are you heating your strike water to 71C? is it enough when adding room temp grain to cool down to your target mash (I wonder if you’re not accidentally destroying some enzymes)? What about the age of the grain? Enzymatic activity drops the longer grain is stored. Maybe you got a very old batch?

    Using and AIO system, it should have the ability to control temp during the mash. I use one myself and a general all rounder mash program would be this: add the grain at around 45-54 C, then let it ramp up to 63. Hold for about an hour, ramp to 72, hold 10-30 minutes and then mash out at 78. Sparge at 78. I’d rather start too cold than too hot. Plus, there’s some other enzymes in there that work at low temps but get denatured at 63+ (like proteases and beta-glucanases).




  • In large cities, sure, but mostly out of necessity. Historically, the communist regimes there sort of forced industrialization on people. Workforce was needed so they moved people from the countryside into flats, close to the workplace. As the change was mostly sudden, it was a bit of a culture shock due to people suddenly moving from their own house with a yard into a wee matchbox and not really adjusting behaviour to the new circumstances. So the apartment building culture in such places is quite different from the western one (in terms, for instance, of being respectful of your neighbour - like not drilling on Sunday at 8 am because that’s when the quiet time - according to the law - ends).

    So the drive there is to get your own house away from hundreds of neighbours as soon as you have the means, even if it implies commuting in hellish traffic.

    Coincidentally, also why you might see some pushback from those places when people suggest walkable cities with apartment blocks. Because when suggesting that, everyone thinks Sweden or Denmark, not Eastern Europe.