This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Just bottled this year's first batch of homemade sake. I got a bigger umeshu jar this year so I was able to make about 5L of the stuff. Left a good amount of the rice particulate in so it has that nigorizake taste, though much less sweet. We have a lot of sake lees from this batch, so I'm thinking of marinating some pork and probably some cucumbers and carrots. Any other ideas? (Paging @George_E_Hale -- but keep it on the down low!)
I've also got several batches of umeshu in the work, though they won't be done until next summer. But I do have one experimental batch that will be ready next month -- "Christmas umeshu" with a cinnamon, cloves, vanilla, and nutmeg. I expect it will be overpowering and terrible by itself, but maybe okay in a mug of hot water. Looking forward to cracking it open in a few weeks.
Any amateur brewers, distillers, or infusers on The Motte?
I’ve made mead before, and beer. It’s not a regular thing.
Is beer worth it? IIRC I tried some homebrew in college and it was very okay. It seems like you'd need to invest in some nice equipment and fancy ingredients to make something that would actually be better than even mediocre craft beers, and it also seems easy to screw up and make something undrinkable.
I've heard nothing but bad things about mead. What was your experience with it?
My experience is that it's nearly impossible to make something worse than a mainstream (European) store-bought quality beer. Whether they measure up to a craft beer is a matter of taste, mine is arguably quite primitive, and I don't actually like most craft beers. Screwing up in my experience is far from easy, the only place where it can plausibly happen is when you deviate from a recipe, but if you just follow the instructions you'll be fine.
If you have a big pot at home (10+ litres, but the bigger the better) and just want to try out to see if this is for you, you won't need a lot of equipment - there are starter kits in the $50 range with all the ingredients and basic tools. If it turns out you enjoy it, you can start buying extra equipment as needed. For me the gear is less about the quality of the end product, and more about making the production easier - one downside of this hobby is that it's pretty time consuming, especially on the day of brewing.
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