alzymologist

I used to buy directly from beekeepers (never from stores, that junk is just spoiled in most cases). Only from people you get to know personally, beekeepers are the most hardcore underground people around for some reason. They usually sell honey in meadmaking quantities much below retail. Just talk to people around, it's abundant all over the world. And the result is totally worth it.

I've been doing this for over 10 years now I think; had to move out of USA at some point and lose about 300L of product (it has to age, nothing you can do - and shipping alcohol is very complicated issue) - gave it away to friends, this was quite a challenge. Then started all over and over, the oldest bottles I have now are from 2019. The best time to make mead is 10 years ago, second best is now!

Then, recently I became a beekeeper myself. Oh, this is addictive stuff. My beehives are smart homes now, I can listen to the sounds of bees and check their environment from home and I'm going to start selling the system to other beekeepers within weeks. And something like this happens to anyone who gets into beekeeping, it drives you crazy. I won't be selling honey myself for some time though, as I've only started recently and all I get goes into mead I can produce myself until the families grow enough, who knows how long it will take?

At least I've learned the ins and outs of the trade, why exactly honey from somebody you trust is completely different from retail anonymous "local honey" jar in store (or much worse, imported ones). There are quite objective shortcuts that should not be done but are economically attractive.

Refractometers are quite useful for pale wort and clear distillation products - or anything where you calibrate close to target phase subspace (honey, must, well-known beer recipe, etc.). I use mine to determine when fermentation rate slows down to determine termination in yeast tests - their relative readings are OK, if they aren't changing, it's worth considering density is stable.

Regarding U-tube, that's fun enough little project if done right. I had even more daring idea to build contactless (read through glass) density scanner, I even have the already soldered and flashed board and transceivers somewhere around the place. The prospect of quick reading density and inner fluid temperature without exposure seems attractive enough, but it's a lot of research work to tune this tool concept, and then to turn it into comfortable product, and I'm kind of short of time-money invariant resource now.

Refractometers are no good at all, especially with THIS much colored stuff. Could get over 2x error, which is nonsense.

After all, you don't have to lose that stuff, if you had a tall and narrow plastic cylinder, that would fill that glass on the photo when you are done.

I was thinking to design and build a U-tube density meter for regular people who can't realistically spend a few thousands on proper tool, I can see those in slightly above decent refractometer price range (and that would indeed take small amount of sample, not as small as refractometer, but still). I wonder if I'd be able to sell enough to cover the expences (and myself I do have a ridiculously expensive and unnecessarily fancy MettlerToledo U tool in addition to all floaters and refractomters, remaining from good old times I was hoping to do paid analytics for microbreweries and thus needed something certified).

I don't think this means anything, there are indeed many other benefits, including direct payments. This is small and probably some legacy, but still not a reason to stop counting money. Well, 50 Eur is not 0 Eur. There are plenty of small credits for taxes and they keep adding up, fortunately, all is well automated and done without lifting your bottom from PC effortlessly (I've filled US tax papers for 7 years and even went to IRS to complain, thank you very much). Typically people end up with 800 Eur or so without even doing anything special.

That said, Vero just forgave me a few cents yesterday, they seem to drop taxes on certain transactions if they end up below 10 Eur or so - not worth the hassle, I guess, even electronically.

EU authentic produce guidelines

Would you share a link to this?

some Greek root for bottom, used, for example, in "abyss", sounds totally chtonic.

Did spurce basic pilsener ale experiment this summer! Of course, seeing them for what they are, I've stayed away from all pumps and filters, decanted the boil with tips and threw some tips for "dry... tipping?" Then some needles sneaked into the bottles. I've used fresh tips so they are just crunchy snack when you drink it. Weirdest thing, but I'm pretty sure it tastes like legendary Sahti beer. Well, the recipe is technically quite close, I suppose? Still have a few bottles (appropriately stored in sauna lol), I'm curious how it would age over a year or so. Totally doing it again next year.

We've caught something that looks, tastes, smells and behaves like brettanomyces from last field trip. They are really different and it seems their growth and fermentation profile does depend on conditions even more than usually! Never kept this culture before. Waiting for proper tasting procedure (could be something horrendous really, I'm pretty sure those will need some tuning in standard recepies). Then off to the library and store it goes.

Otherwise, there is full freezer of frozen forest berries waiting for the secondary in mead buckets and an infamous BAG I've bought to try the suffering others speak of here. Well, once I'm not the only healthy person in household, we'll have lots of fun stuff to do, sigh.

That's mixing greek and latin.

Geonauts? Buthonauts?

Are those hops good? Would you share a bit of rhizome for me to clone?

I can't stop thinking that Finnish hops grown in chill weather might be a hidden treasure, once we figure out how to tune the recipes.

But how bad is the washing?

Oh come on, someone must have cloned it, it's relatively simple to do even after it's broken - plant stem cells are quite hardy. It's totally hobbyist-level technology. That way we could've filled the island with hundreds of these palms over a couple of years, they would've been clones, sure, but then cross-polinating a palm forest would've been a much simpler task, not mentioning that at least all the critters wouldn't have to be homeless.