*attempts to fathom terrors* *suddenly gets urge to put on a maid outfit and dust the place* You’re not wrong…

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?

that link returns a 404 error for me

taking this opportunity to not double post and comment on your post as well

don’t remember where I heard this from, was a long time ago (perhaps during some sort of botany class or another) but hop compounds should exhibit some surface tension action (like what soap does to water), so that might be the explanation for the foam

christmas-y cider sounds awesome.

edit - ninja’d on 404 comment - ignore that part

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.

No Man’s Sky. Pretty sweet deal, I think.

I’d just start mining random stuff to put together to make better mining gear to mine better and more stuff.

Then just get on my dinghy and explore the 'verse while looking out for a better dinghy. Maybe plop down a few bases on nice planets, rinse and repeat.

In addition to everything else suggested here already, I would say maybe cloves or tonka beans, if they suit your palate. Careful though, they might be overpowering. Maybe a vanilla pod or two, depending on the quantity.

Planning on trying my very first raw ale. So far, was thinking of doing a 3ish hour mash, finishing for about 30 minutes at 80 C, and adding something like 60g Simcoe (14.4%) to the mash. For laziness reasons I’d like to avoid doing a hop tea. Has anyone tried this before?

Sweet. Are you planning on using any spices or just the apple juice?

legend goes that Greta made the guy mad on xitter and he posted a response that also included a picture of himself with a pizza box, and cops knew where to find him because of the brand on the box, but not sure if it was proven true or not

I’d say we could probably remove the sticky from the intro posts around this time, to clear up the landing when coming here from ‘subscribed’.

I would also be pro a periodic general discussion like what have you brewed / tasted / whatever related to homebrewing.

slightly off-topic - sorry to hear the job’s bumming your lust for brewing. have you considered doing funky stuff like raw ales or using weird ingredients at home?

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.

Yes, please. We need more Mazda MX-5s, less SUVs on the road and in terms of offers from car manufacturers. I know, technically not a track car, but you can still have lots of fun with it on the track without spending several peoples’ kidneys worth.

Condensation shouldn’t be an issue as long as you’re not cooling below the current dew point.

However, after experiencing one of these underfloor cooling systems once, I can say that the biggest issue is that cold air tends to be heavier and thus stay down. So in order to cool the entire room, not just the layer of air right above the floor, you need something to move the air, which is probably why they’re providing fans. Either that or you can just lie on the floor all the time…

Floor heating works because warm air rises. I never understood why ‘floor’ cooling wasn’t piped through the ceiling, instead. There are probably some engineering or heat transfer issues there, though.

Nah. I’m sure they’ll go straight for the 8-day work week. Gotta think outside the box here taps head

picked up No Man’s Sky the other week at 50% off and really enjoying it

mmm, this seems painfully accurate

still, I wonder how many spouses of homebrewers actually participate in the activity but are not identified within the survey

heh, I can also hear myself blink sometimes in a quiet room. my thyroid tests are inconclusive though.