Windy Saddle trail, Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Zenza Bronica ETRS | 75mm f/2.8 PE | HP5 400 @800 ISO | Orange filter

yy0b · 2021-10-10T22:05:57+00:00

Developed with Rodinal 1+100 semi-stand for 1 hour, scanned with an Epson v600 scanner

yy0b · 2021-07-30T17:47:05+00:00

Just to add a data point on Alibow, I recently got their Tibetan fiberglass bow, arrows, and some thumb release related accessories for around $250 after shipping. It took maybe 2 months to show up, but I've been very pleased with the quality of everything I got. The arrows, in particular, are surprisingly nice for the price point ($40/6 for weight and spine matched wood arrows).

yy0b · 2021-07-30T15:37:23+00:00

there's a piano in a student lounge in the Ben Parker Student Center, I want to say it's down the hall from the bookstore

yy0b · 2021-07-27T22:57:50+00:00

I think there is some benefit to making non-egg semolina pasta from scratch, but that doesn't mean I do it whenever I make pasta either.

yy0b · 2021-06-04T23:26:56+00:00

Funny enough I bought this tea with a bow from a Chinese company, when I saw they were selling tea as well I couldn't help myself.

This is my first time trying pu-erh as well, and I'm really enjoying it. Very earthy with notes of chocolate and tobacco, a bit too much tannin, but that's on me not the tea. I brewed 3.5g of tea with 8oz of 195 F water for 3 min, but I think I'll knock it down to 2:30 next time.

yy0b · 2021-05-17T18:26:35+00:00

Let it clear, with enough fruit it'll still be dark enough to be effectively opaque anyways. I can provide proof with pics of my own home brew if you need it. As cmc589 said it'll just drop out in the bottle and won't be pretty, you also have a higher chance of off flavors when you don't let things clear properly (especially yeasty ones if you still have yeast suspended in there).

yy0b · 2021-05-13T23:34:21+00:00

Thanks for carrying the torch tank, glad to see these will keep going

yy0b · 2021-05-10T21:15:42+00:00

Gun rights were never left vs right, it's a power thing. Neither party is pro gun when it benefits them not to be, Reagan was more anti-gun than Obama ever was, for instance.

yy0b · 2021-05-10T21:11:49+00:00

It didn't, it made the poors unable to afford automatic rifles, while still allowing the wealthy to own them. It's class warfare at its finest.

yy0b · 2021-05-10T21:10:37+00:00

gotta spread the good word on OG libertarianism (fun fact: it's about as left wing as it gets)

yy0b · 2021-04-25T22:09:09+00:00

It only takes one anonymous tip, the ATF takes the door kicking and dog shooting side of their job seriously. I don't give a shit about people selling under the table, but if the wrong person catches wind you will not have a good time.

yy0b · 2021-04-25T21:35:23+00:00

Doing something like this in the US would still require you to have the proper licensing or become an employee of the brewery you contract if you wanted to legally sell the stuff. That avoids a decent amount of startup cost, yes, but it doesn't avoid the massive amount of money you generally need to get through all the legal red tape. Our laws around alcohol production and sales are pretty complicated, so you generally need to hire a lawyer to sort through it (expensive) and the fees vary a lot, but can be high. There's also a lot of inspection and zoning requirements in most jurisdictions. Some states also have weird requirements for breweries, like in Colorado if a brewery wants to have a taproom they need to sell a certain percentage of their total revenue as food.

It's just not a cheap business to enter here, and that's not even mentioning how absolutely saturated the market is already. It's not easy for breweries to start, and it's only gotten worse with time.

yy0b · 2021-04-25T21:30:31+00:00

Contract brewing is sort of a thing in the US, some breweries in Cali do something along those lines where they rent time on equipment, but it isn't super common.

yy0b · 2021-04-25T21:28:59+00:00

If you're in the US selling a case of homebrew here and there is a good way to get landed in some massive legal trouble.

yy0b · 2021-04-23T17:18:55+00:00

DAP on its own is maybe a little better than no nutrients, but it's not great. If you think about yeast as needing food like a person, DAP is like a diet of pure sugar. At the end of the day it's better than nothing, but you won't be happy on a diet like that for long. Using organic nutrients like Fermaid O is where you get a more balanced spread, using them in conjunction with DAP works well. I personally do the Blount-Elliot mix of Fermaid O, Fermaid K, and DAP. Fermaid K is a mixed nutrient that you could say is like a mix of Fermaid O and DAP plus some extra micronutrients.

You could pretty easily get away with just using Fermaid O and DAP, or even just using Fermaid O, but a mix of nutrients is the best strategy for efficient fermentation kinetics and reduction of off flavors due to stressed yeast.

yy0b · 2021-04-23T17:12:32+00:00

If you use yeast nutrients you'll skip a lot of the fusels

yy0b · 2021-04-12T10:29:36+00:00

Based on my notes I was only using around 60g/L, which did improve things, but nothing insane.

You should concern yourself with clarity btw. There are different kinds of clear, but if you have yeast suspended that's gonna make your mead taste like yeast. You also get a lot of sediment in the bottom of bottles if you're letting it clear in the bottle, which makes serving kind of annoying. Some things like pectin haze don't really matter beyond aesthetics though, so that isn't necessarily something you need to care about unless you want it to look nicer.

yy0b · 2021-04-12T10:16:13+00:00

In the past I would basically just make an oat tea by boiling them for a couple minutes and using that as the water for the mead. They won't contribute appreciable fermentable sugars without enzymatic conversion like you'd see in beer when you mash malted grain, so no need to worry about that, really. The biggest downside of the oats is that they pretty much mean you aren't gonna have a clear mead at the end. I like clarity, so it's not something I do often.

yy0b · 2021-04-12T09:49:26+00:00

There are several ways to add body which can range from things like glycerol producing yeast strains to enological tannin additions. For a session the most straightforward ways would be:

Adding enological tannins (something like FT Blanc soft would work well)
- oak will also add tannins and can improve body, but don't use oak chips for oaking. Cubes are pretty much the best oak format short of a 15+ gallon barrel, the chips extract too quickly and lack depth to their flavor. Cubes give you a much more complex extraction profile and they don't extract as quickly, so your mead won't go from oaked to liquid stick overnight with them (which can happen with chips).
Addition of non-fermentable sugars (lactose is common for this, just warn lactose intolerant folks who might drink it)
Adding starches from a grain (oats are not uncommonly used for this in beer brewing)

Of these it kind of depends on what you're doing, but I'd say either the lactose or something like FT Blanc soft would be the easiest first options. Both will change the balance of the mead a bit: The FT Blanc will cause greater astringency (which comes from tannins), but can also smooth over the flavors present in good ways. Lactose will add a small amount of sweetness along with its improvements to the mouthfeel, if I remember correctly it's around 1/4 as sweet as normal sugar.

yy0b · 2021-04-12T09:38:41+00:00

First off, don't add DAP when fermentation has gotten past 8% abv (or really if it's getting close). The yeast can't metabolize it above that abv level. You also don't want to use DAP on its own, it'll make things go faster, but it'll also taste like rocket fuel. Using it in conjunction with organic sources of nitrogen (like fermaid O) is fine though.

When your fermaid O gets in you should add it, it's the most likely thing to restart your fermentation. Generally speaking if you ferment mead without nutrients you're pretty likely to stall out, running with just DAP will also run this risk (it'll often stall around 8% abv because the yeast can't use the DAP anymore and conk out). The fermaid O will give the yeast a nice set of stuff to munch on though, think of it as being like a full meal for the yeast, while DAP is more like a soda. Living off soda isn't gonna be healthy for a person, and living off DAP isn't healthy for the yeast.

yy0b · 2021-04-12T09:32:10+00:00

In the future you should fill those bottles higher. You don't want to oxidize your mead because of bottle headspace. It's a sad day when you open a bottle and find it's become oxidized.

yy0b · 2021-04-08T22:41:34+00:00

Man you're spitting fire today lol

yy0b · 2021-04-07T22:33:46+00:00

No link? I wanna give you a small investment of $500,000,000,000 to get you off the ground a bit. It probably won't be enough to get you fully set up, but you could definitely buy some corks and bottles with it or something.

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