alzymologist

joined 4 months ago
[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 hours ago

Going after light color quickly ends up a challenge. Extract mfgrs do not invest much effort into conforming to color, it's tricky and would quickly kick the costs up, while few users will go full length of making sure the rest operations keep color light. Pretty much anything that is not fermentable sugar will darken beer on every heating stage. Fermentable sugar would darken too, but a bit slower. So going pale requires good ingredients and experience, you'll get there eventually if you want.

I personally do not enjoy chasing light colors, though. Not worth the trouble imo. Still play with it occasionally. It is indeed much easier with fullgrain, which is all I do.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 hours ago

As far as I know, birds milk is a soviet recipe, comfort food for former ussr sufferers, and the only way to get it to taste really good is DIY which is super simple and fast. Industrial fab just calls for instant enshittification of this treat. Still nice to see the concept alive.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 days ago

I just bought discount auctioned server from Hetzner, but it was a massive overkill, just happened to be that way; their cheap VMs are totally enough.

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

Sorry, the last thing was a joke. I just don't like remote calls, no matter what app or protocol.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 4 points 2 days ago (5 children)

I host mine, do server update few times a year, running 1-2 commands depending on whether postgres upgraded or not. This is also main communication method in my company. We do video calls sometimes, but what good are they if you can't drink together?

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 4 points 2 days ago (10 children)

Why not Matrix?

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 16 points 2 days ago

It is worth installing GNU/Linux.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 week ago

Yeah, and then a bear comes and gorges on it. Every year, same bear, same tree, same woodpecker.

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

Large amount of any chemical pufiried, concentrated, and spilled in one place is a disaster

Improper utilization of any energy storage media - wood, electricity, even gyro-storage - is dangerous and produces hazardous waste

It's all about being technological and playing fair. There is nothing that switch from one energy storage to another would accomplish in terms of environmental safety.

I love NH3 idea, it's IMO 3rd best solution. Second best is alcohol. First best is making your energy locally with whatever you have and not wasting it for stupid things.

But all this will be easily messed up by reckless greedy maniacs that have most of the power in the world right now.

Here is something my dear friend wrote I just read yesterday: https://alexshvartsman.com/2024/12/03/the-rattler-by-leonid-kaganov/

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 0 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)
[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 1 points 3 weeks ago

I've read kiwis are forest floor bullies, isn't that true?

 

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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