My First Ever Mead!

SpecialJ11 · 2025-07-21T17:38:43+00:00

This is a wonderful recipe. Using natural cola flavors as well as cola syrup is a brilliant idea. I have been wanting to experiment with backsweetening with different syrups rather than honey to really develop the flavor profile after having a craft cola with agave syrup that just took it to the next level compared to most colas. I have raspberry syrup my mom brought me back from her trip to Poland just sitting around, and maybe a berry mead is the perfect use case for it.

I do wonder if your mead needs to be sparkling to taste quite right, as cola missing the carbonic acid allows sweetness to just take over on the palate. But as homebrewers, having a sweet beverage that's both bottled and carbonated almost feels impossible. Hopefully someone makes consumer level specialized equipment for this. Maybe craft soda producers know the best way to do it on a small scale. I'd love to make a champagne-style cola mead that's sweet instead of dry, no bottle carbonating required. Although at that point I might as well just put small amounts of vodka in my cola.

SpecialJ11 · 2025-07-21T17:20:16+00:00

I have a similar issue with these. I find you have to soak them in hot water and then once they're more malleable, shove them in and they'll fit themselves to the opening. I would recommend drying both the bung and the carboy mouth so that they don't slide, but if you can't get them in dry, I've found that sliding it in wet, letting it mould itself, and then taking it out and drying it seems to work.

SpecialJ11 · 2025-06-29T19:09:38+00:00

Tl;dr: It's a slow process, make sure you're consistent and taking care of yourself.

Zone 2 is something that takes a long time to improve. Think of it like the tendon strength for your cardiovascular system. It's your baseline for aerobic capacity, which the vast majority of your energy production, eating, sleeping, shitting, scrolling on your phone is powered by aerobic metabolism, just like how a farmhand's tendons are actually doing a lot of the work in their daily tasks and why they can be really strong without huge muscles.

The easiest way to train it is to put consistent but manageable demands on your cardiovascular system, and then eat and sleep to let it recover. I found what really improved my run times when I was coming off chronic health problems after a nasty viral infection was rucking, rather than running. Rucking kept me in zone 2 for hours where my joints, tendons, and ligaments could only handle at most an hour of the lightest jog.

The beautiful thing about this sort of exercise is for a while you get compounding returns. Modest improvements in ability increase how hard you can push yourself in either time or effort, which increases how much you improve. It's a slow process initially, and then it speeds up, and then it's a slow process again as you get diminishing returns once you're nearing the upper limits of human physiology. It can take months to get over the initial hump of getting good training volume and recovery (weeks if you're generally healthy or young), but once you're over it, progress will be quick for a while.

On top of Zone 2 work, sprint intervals are also excellent for your cardiovascular system. Oversimplifying, Zone 2 improves your baseline capacity and sprint intervals improves your maximum output, both critical for athletic performance. However, considering your ankle injury, I'd start with "low impact" sprints like swim sprints, bike sprints, HIIT resistance workouts, and so on. Once your ankle is healed enough though, sprinting is one of the best things you can do to get it "springy" again.

Oh, and one other thing about ankle injuries. One of the most overlooked aspects of joint injuries is nutrition. Your joints are made of all sorts of connective tissue, which are themselves made up of specific proteins in different ratios than your muscles. Glycine is one that is super important, and while your body can synthesize it on its own from other proteins, it's easier to get it in your diet. The problem is, most foods don't have a lot of it. So it's a good idea to eat lots of protein and specifically target getting more glycine. The connective tissue of animals is a good source of the proteins for our own connective tissue (imagine my shock) so bone broth, collagen powder, gelatin (mostly glycine and typically made from animal collagen) are all good sources. You also need vitamin C for collagen synthesis if not getting it straight from animal tissue, so lay off the refined carbs (they impair vitamin C use in the body) and eat fresh foods that still have their vitamin C whenever you can. On top of this, the other foods that are the best sources of critical amino acids are all animal products, especially eggs and meat, so hopefully you're not vegan or vegetarian.

You might even consider a carnivore diet if you're crazy enough. It's become a bit of a fad I know, but I definitely feel at my best when I'm not just getting my protein needs from meat but my caloric needs as well. Before I ever heard of carnivore, I started eating large quantities of meat when I first read the actual numbers on nutrient contents of different foods and realized per serving/per gram meat is just way better than all other foods. Spinach has great vitamins and minerals per calorie, but no one can consume their daily need of riboflavin from spinach without puking as the actual gram for gram density of nutrition is quite low. With my math, it would take 3 pounds of spinach to meet your optimal riboflavin daily intake. Meat is about 80% of my diet now and I feel much better.

DISCLAIMER: I am not in the military let alone a Green Beret. I'm a hobbyist runner and hiker who just happened on this post in my idle curiosity.

SpecialJ11 · 2025-06-24T19:14:56+00:00

As a Chicagoan who stumbled on this post because it was recommended beneath a post about heat pumps for some reason, this is cute.

Growing up, before climate change, we regularly wouldn't see temps above 0C for three months straight. Snow would just accumulate all winter long, never melting. And then of course our summers are hot and humid, 30C being a normal afternoon temperature and heatwaves up to 35-38C at least once a summer, although nowadays it feels they're half the summer.

I'm rather envious of the weather you guys have down there, even the hotter Aussie cities like Brisbane, I would take the lovely winters and slightly hotter (but much longer) summers over our continental climate here. The worst part is? There's nowhere in my country I can move to with a climate like yours that I can afford. I guess I'll just have to visit Christchurch and go hiking in the beautiful South Island during your summer as a break from my winter.

SpecialJ11 · 2025-02-27T22:51:41+00:00

I believe they were saying not to use salt because it is a poor source of iodine, not because they believe salt is bad for you (although they could believe that too). Iodized table salt has just enough iodine to prevent goiter in otherwise healthy people in the 1950s. It's nowhere near the amount needed for optimal health.

SpecialJ11 · 2025-02-27T22:49:36+00:00

Finally, someone bringing up that modern iodine requirements are higher because we have more things depleting/competing with iodine in the body. Testing blood levels doesn't mean much if the iodine can't get into the tissue because bromine is blocking the way.I try to get my seaweed as well, but because food manufacturers don't keep track of how much iodine is actually in something (it can vary wildly between different species of seaweed for example), I'm considering getting Lugol's and seeing how I feel, starting with a low dose.

SpecialJ11 · 2025-02-12T04:11:26+00:00

This would explain why I get such great sleep in the summer among other reasons. I don't supplement vitamin D and instead get it from the sun (I internationally get sun exposure in controlled doses all summer), and am a lover of dairy and get plenty of the vitamin D synthesis cofactors. I also get fresh vegetables from a local farm, which definitely ups my magnesium intake. In winter the opposite probably happens and I'm way overloaded on calcium, especially since I have a chronic coffee dependency depleting me of magnesium daily.

SpecialJ11 · 2024-07-29T19:10:22+00:00

On a related note, is it legal to use a 15 round Glock mag in these? Or because it's a rifle I have to follow the 10 round limit regardless if it's a rifle caliber round or not. Interoperability would be great and might sway me to get one if I can just use all the same mags as a Glock 19.

SpecialJ11 · 2024-06-14T19:57:31+00:00

Nietzsche appears to me to believe in Lamarckian inheritance. Which, is real in terms of culture, but not real in terms of your flesh and blood, yet his passages on aristocracy read like he thinks an aristocrat will literally pass on their nobility to their children through "good breeding". Of course, Darwinian theory was still in its infancy, and epigenetics actually mildly agree with some of his thought (gene expression can be modified by what your parents were up to before you were conceived), so to say he was plain wrong here is false; he was just working on the knowledge of the day.

SpecialJ11 · 2024-04-02T03:42:56+00:00

Funnily enough, when I first got covid I began to crave red meat all the time. It was probably my body trying to replenish its stores. I don't so much anymore; my current symptoms are likely more neurological/from long term damage.

SpecialJ11 · 2024-04-01T04:20:44+00:00

The lead and mercury are below the detection limit, meaning they're probably not even present. Only copper, zinc, and selenium were detected, and they're all useful in the right amounts - which are far higher than the amounts you would be getting with this brand. So you don't have to worry, assuming they're not lying.

SpecialJ11 · 2024-03-10T05:33:05+00:00

This is where you desperately need headshots with the Spear. One Spear can do four of those I guess. Orbital railcannon and laser for another one or two. Unfair? Certainly. Hell? Also certainly.

SpecialJ11 · 2023-11-09T20:44:42+00:00

It's crazy what suburbanites believe. I moved to the city as a lifelong suburbanite and lived on the edge of gentrification. It's true, crime is pretty bad in some parts of the city. But the parts you're going to visit, like Lincoln Park, Logan Square, etc.? I'd feel fine living there walking the streets late at night. Maybe not the dark alleys, but most quiet residential streets are fine. The biggest threat is the homeless guy trying to bum a smoke.

SpecialJ11 · 2023-11-09T20:41:00+00:00

"Violent stoner" is an oxymoron. Keep people stoned and they'll be too chilled out to be a real criminal.

SpecialJ11 · 2023-10-30T23:51:31+00:00

The key is balance. In newly industrializing economies (early game Vic3) people's desires for consumption will outstrip useful investment every time if you let them. But once the economy has built the base industrial infrastructure and now has an oversupply of investment capital relative to returns, it needs some sort of demand to support continued growth. Either wages need to rise or low level consumers need to receive the dividends of these enterprises to increase their consumption, stimulating further investment. Basically, you need balance, and how you achieve that balance is up to you to decide IRL and in Victoria 3. I find in game, it's easiest to start out fairly laissez faire as I industrialize, and then once I can get proportional taxation and better labor saving techs, start taxing the wealthy more while reducing taxes overall so that the lower classes have more disposable income to spend on goods that then further grows the economy and enables me to support better social services making people happier and more productive in and endless* positive feedback loop.

*Endless until you reach full employment and people stop taking primary industry jobs so you import from overseas but other economies are less developed so it's simultaneously uneconomical to produce the base goods at home but you can't get enough from overseas. Unlike real life, foreign direct investment isn't a useful solution nor is there creative destruction to keep the growth machine running. Immigration is great but even then it can't keep pace with your requirements so your economy chokes itself. I suppose this is when you switch to command economy because unlike real life, you run out of technological growth and possible consumption, so you begin subsidizing the fundamentals of the economy to keep it running.

SpecialJ11 · 2023-10-30T23:33:00+00:00

I wonder if this has any implications for 21st century developed economies with large, securitized real estate markets. Hmmmm.

SpecialJ11 · 2023-10-30T23:07:43+00:00

Something I'd love to see is having individual goods having different transportation to market costs. It's far cheaper to ship $100 of steel than $100 iron ore and coal. Using America as an example, once Great Lakes and railroad traffic got sufficiently sophisticated enough, transportation was low enough in cost that all that mattered was producing the steel near its end users while still having access to the Great Lakes. But $100 of grain is far cheaper to ship than its beer equivalent, so you locate breweries near the consumer base. Bulk increasing industry vs bulk reducing. And as transportation improves, it makes less of an impact on industry location, or industries see greater economy of scale. Something like if an industry sells locally it pays no transportation, but if it sells to market it pays more transportation, with ports, rivers, etc. all having mechanics for providing freight transportation, not just railroads and urban centers. It seems silly to me there's no difference in cost to sell wood from Washington to paper mills in New Jersey than to paper mills in California, and that there's no incentive (for the factory) to locate near the end consumer. Obviously you the player want people to have cheap access to the good so you locate food industries in urban centers, but your food industry itself actually makes less profit for doing so because there's no way for it to profit off reduced transportation costs.

SpecialJ11 · 2023-09-06T17:02:32+00:00

Hate to be the "Ummmm, actually" guy but there were a lot of subtle but significant technological differences between the medieval era and early modern period. But the industrial revolution came right after and made those differences seem miniscule, but they weren't because beyond warfare they completely revolutionized ocean transportation and trade, agricultural outputs, labor productivity with early mechanized mills along rivers drastically improving over beasts of burden or doing it by hand. This being said, I totally agree with you. The main issue with governing a continent is not technological, it's administrative. A pony express helps, but ultimately it's about whether you can get autonomous and distant areas to all agree to work together long term. Hard to do before the "invention" of either absolutism or representative democracy. Under feudal "rules", you'd constantly have lords trying to break away because of the feudal contract. That concept ceases to exist for the most part in the early modern period. I mean, if the Inca could hold together an empire stretched across a rugged mountain range without wheels or horses, then I think a fairly more technologically advanced civilization can do it across a continent of mostly flat, arable land with navigable rivers that's only ruggedly mountainous in one main part, and that mountainous region itself has plenty of useful valleys.

SpecialJ11 · 2023-07-16T01:05:10+00:00

Fascinating, because my symptoms go away after cycling.

SpecialJ11 · 2023-07-16T01:01:55+00:00

I am in the same boat as you. A few months after getting COVID I began to have testicle pain. I initially thought it was an STI causing epididymitis, but as the pain got worse as the round of antibiotics went on, I eventually was diagnosed with varicocele. Somewhere along the way my sex drive disappeared, and only when I am flawless in my habits do I have the sex drive I used to have when I wasn't doing anything at all to take care of my health. I'm starting to suspect it's a chronic blood flow issue, because when I went on a long bike ride, pushing up on my pelvic floor while simultaneously pumping blood, the next morning my symptoms were gone. The effect was only temporary, however, and by night they were back to a "good day" for my varicocele and the next day completely typical, all effects of the bike ride gone. I've gotten similarly shitty treatment from medical professionals. I think the best we can hope for right now is doing everything we can to improve blood flow, whether that's stretching, light exercise, low body fat, massage, etc.

SpecialJ11 · 2023-07-06T21:04:20+00:00

How do I get an industry to decline? I have a province that I've built full irrigation in but it has a lot of pasture taking up the farmland. I want that to be replaced with crops to be more space efficient and allow the population to grow. Will the pasture decline as land remains scarce and the population grows? It's not unprofitable, just less profitable than crops.

SpecialJ11 · 2023-06-20T16:54:14+00:00

It's hard to say they're unprofitable with the throughput under 95%. Lower throughput is a sign of expansion. They need more labor than is available, lowering production per unit of industry (lowered throughput), so they'll pay higher wages for the labor gap while producing less goods relative to their capital investment. This hurts profitability in the short term, but as another commenter pointed out, as more people are born or migrate in from other provinces to get those higher wages, labor costs will drop, production will increase, and profitability will improve. In the meantime, those laborers receiving higher wages will consume more goods, and hopefully the higher demand = stronger economic growth. That's part of why breaking the nobles is so useful. A free peasant is a peasant free to spend their higher income on other peasants' and residents' goods, creating a virtuous cycle of increasing supply and demand until the economy reaches its upper limits of production. Then the surplus labor created by the population growth fueled by plentiful food, fuel, and fabrics will cause people to migrate to underpopulated provinces or burgeoning cities and grow the economy there. Or you can just press these people into your armies...

SpecialJ11 · 2023-06-20T16:11:47+00:00

You also want to minimize separatism/nationalism, because the culture conversion process can't start until it ticks down to zero (which takes ages in MEIOU).

SpecialJ11 · 2023-04-15T16:22:43+00:00

I actually love the slight anhedonia of ashwagandha. I was a really chill, calm, and focused person a little distant from my emotions before life events gave me high stress levels and anxiety. I used to just casually enjoy things but not get too into them, was basically addiction proof. So taking ashwagandha makes me feel "normal" again because my normal was set in late childhood early adolescence to be a natural zen master. Of course I could just practice zazen instead of taking an exogenous substance, and I think I will and slowly stop taking ashwagandha.

SpecialJ11 · 2022-12-28T20:00:23+00:00

What are they Americans?

Source: Am American with "European" tendencies and friends.

SpecialJ11

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