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Looking better. Honey is fully fermentable, so it won't leave a sweetness, as such. It will add a little bit of flavor, but it won't be a sweet flavor. If you're looking for a sweet honey-ish flavor, try a few ounces of honey malt in the grain bill. Honey malt has nothing to do with honey other than tasting like it... it is just another type of malt processed in such a way that it leaves a honeyed flavor behind once it's mashed and fermented. Additionally, you don't need the munich in the steep if you don't want it. It will darken the recipe a bit, and I like my wits to be blindingly bright blond rather than golden. Also, I'd drop the irish moss... you want the wit to be cloudy...

OK... I'll give my thoughts... honey as a method of priming should be OK... you never know exactly how dense the honey is, so you don't know how much sugar is in there... but so long as you're going for a middling level of carbonation, you should be alright. You're going to need a couple of pounds of enzyme bearing grains in that steep too, if you're going to use those non-barley grains. The magic enzymes that turn starch to sugar are pretty much a barley malt only thing, so you need to bring some to the party to get the starch in the oats and rice and wheat converted to sugar. Follow the 4 grain saison technique. And then drop the 1 lb of light dry extract. I'd think about adding the cascades at about 20, and probably not two ounces... I don't like a bitter wit. When I do wits I generally use 1 oz hallertauer at 60 and an ounce of saaz at about 15.

This blog is looking like fun. Chocolate, pork and ingenuity all over the course of a week sounds like an amusing recipe. I've only been through State College briefly, but "culinary wasteland" and "middle of nowhere" don't seem too far off given my brief but unsuccessful attempts to find someplace interesting to eat there... I hope somebody who lives there can spill the secrets that only the locals know about places that aren't readily found by those passing through.

The best advice really is to taste around. If you happen to be passing through NYC, make a point of stopping by the Brandy Library on North Moore St and sampling some of their wares. They do flights of various spirits, from a tour of America's bourbons to an exploration of different styles and ages of cognacs, that are well thought out and showcase the differences within the spirits. Once you've figured out the style that appeals, talk to the folks there about other spirits that are in the same style.

Column stills are more modern, more efficient, and make a higher-proof alcohol distillate more quickly and in one pass, while pot stills are old fashioned, less efficient, and allow the distiller to exercise more control over the booze as it comes out of the multiple stage distillation process. Pot stills are traditional in Cognac and Armagnac making, while column stills are key to vodka making. Read into those details what you will about claims of which kind of still is "better".

As you may have gleaned amongst the jargon on that thread on the Burgundian Babble Belt, the idea of a "mild" or "small" beer implies the existence of a strong, or a big beer. The concept of "small beer" is actually pulled from the lexicon of partigyle brewing. That style of brewing is about taking one large batch of grain and making several different beers from it. First comes the big beer, a very strong barleywine type thing sometimes, that comes when the first quantity of water that the grains rested in is drained off. Next comes the small beer, which contains all the sugars from the grains that didn't dissolve into the big beer. The volumes of the big and the small beers are proportional to their strengths. So, to make a small beer like you're imagining, you've got to make a big beer too... or just brew in the modern one-beer-per-batch style and mix all the runoff together into one beer of average strength... or you could use malt extract, which is much much easier for a beginner.

I think that even hops don't perform as expected in a beer when there is nearly no malt flavor in the recipe. Mild ales in the british tradition treated the hops quite differently from other beermaking traditions... Here is a link to a recent discussion between a bunch of brewers on formulating a mild ale recipe. Hopefully it is not too opaque with brewers jargon. Actually, it might be fascinating to ask your question on that board and get a response from a quorum of clueful brewers of wacky and obscure stuff. I'm tempted to go over there and ask their thoughts on a project like yours. If you're up for it, I'll get the topic started by performing a little translation of what you want into brewer's jargon, and you can drop in to fill in the specifics. It's a no-register board, so minimal bureaucracy involved in getting involved over there.

There's a historical angle to this in North America as well... there were bloody "Range Wars" amongst the pioneers pushing westward across North America, and those wars decisively vanquished sheep herders and left the range open to cowboys and cattlemen. There may be some leftover symbolism from that conflict in the stocking choices of supermarkets in places that sided with the cattlemen. Sheep weren't just another meat choice, they were the enemy.

Thanks... I'm glad the course is providing help and inspiration. As to styles that finish low in alcohol and don't seem unbalanced: British style- Ordinary bitters, mild ales German style- Berliner weissbier The Berliner weiss is often paired with herbal woodruff syrup... it ferments out to be very tart since the style includes an innoculation with lactic bacteria in addition to the yeast. Wyeast labs is currently offering a Berliner weiss yeast and bug blend, though it will be phased out very soon in favor of their next batch of specialty yeasts for the spring. I am going to add that experimenting with wacky herbal flavors in a very low gravity beer is a likely recipe for disappointment. If there's no malt there to play off of, you're just going to end up with an herbal tea with a little fizz to it... which is much more easily accomplished with some hot water and a teapot, and a cold can of Lite beer... If you don't use a reasonable amount of malt it will be halfway between beer and tea, and likely not have the charm of either.

IF 1% is your goal, then once your gallon ferments out, dilute it with 3 parts water. You might want to taste it at full strength before you do the dilution. It would be very very difficult to brew something that comes out to 1% without doing the dilution step. Also, you should read over my eGCI homebrewing course so you have some firm grounding in brewing principles. I notice that there are lots of important steps I'm not telling you here, like: sanitize, ferment in a covered container, keep the temperature between 60 and 70F, don't add yeast before the liquid is below 80F, etc...

Fermentation only happens through yeast. Your question is more about where the yeast come from, than what causes the fermentation. Wild yeasts have an affinity for certain plants... orchards often harbor interesting wild yeasts, and your meadowsweet may be another plant with a yeast affinity. Going that route, you are taking a significant chance that unpleasant microbeasts will get into your beer and do undesirable things (like turning it into vinegar or worse). Sometimes wild yeast fermentations turn out very nicely... sometimes they don't. If you want to experiment with non-hops bittering, I'd limit the other variables and use a pure culture of yeast. I don't know about homebrew ingredient availability in Japan for you, but I do know of folks in Japan who do homebrew (though they talk of mail ordering ingredients from the US)... IF I were you, I'd also use dried malt extract for my fermentables, and a very simple recipe, with the variability between batches coming solely from the herbs. I'd start out with something like this: Boil together: 1 lb dry light (or pale, or maybe even amber) malt extract 1 Gallon water After the boil foams up, then add your herbs and allow to boil for 5 to 10 minutes. To start, I'd think of adding herbs in amounts of about 5-7 grams per gallon, and adjust from there based on how it turns out. Longer boiling times in modern recipes are an artifact of chemical properties of hops' bittering compounds... since you're using no hops, those rules don't apply to you.

Brewing an herbed beer won't be different in procedures from brewing a hopped beer... hops are an herb, after all. The tough part will be calculating how much bitterness your chosen herbs are going to give you, and how much of which herb will allow you to balance the sweetness of the malt you're using. I've never brewed a beer that wasn't bittered by hops... though things like sweet gale, coriander, orange peel, rose petals, chamomile, and other herbal goodies have gone into batches I've brewed. If you were going to start brewing herbal beers, I'd start by making very small batches of a gallon or less to test the bittering balance you get from the herbs you want to try. As a start, you might look to the old European style of pre-hop brewing, Gruit ales.

For something a little more useful, you might look into beekeeper's smokers... They're handheld smoke generators... http://beesmokers.com/

When you try that White Peony, make sure to use water that is well shy of boiling. White and green teas don't play well with water hot enough to get the most out of black tea. Too-hot water will lead to bitterness and astringency in the more delicate teas. You're looking for water around 175F or less.

There's a great big world of tea out there, so recommendations for equipment and suppliers should really be tailored toward what kinds of tea you like. Sounds like British style black tea is your thing right now, so I'll point you in that direction: If you like oil-scented teas like Earl Grey, don't get a bare clay or metal teapot, but rather glazed ceramic. That will resist absorbing flavor and making everything made in the pot taste of Earl Grey (or Lapsang, or Jasmine, any other strongly scented flavor). There's lots of folks out there who love Chatsford pots, though I've noticed that they can be very drippy pourers. I like to use a french press to make teas that I don't want affecting the vessel they're made in. As to tea kettles, it again depends on what kind of tea you like... Black teas like water just off boiling, so it is purely an aesthetic choice of what you want to see on your stove... unless you want a British style electric kettle... and another aesthetic choice for you. If you think you'll get into green or oolong teas, then maybe an electric kettle that has an adjustment that allows you to set a target temp less than boiling would be a good thing to get. For online tea sources, I've had excellent British blends and a great vanilla infused black from Tea Trader in Canada. Upton Tea is a fine and reliable source. Adagio Tea is an upstanding vendor of interesting black teas too. I've noticed that on old Philadelphia favorite, the House of Tea is doing online ordering now, and they've got a killer Earl Grey blend, and a generally excellent selection.

Helena- Glad to have provided you with some useful information to get you started. As to the orange peel question- it really depends on what you're looking to get out of it, and what variety of orange peel you are planning on using. Homebrew shops tend to sell packets of dried peel (sometimes with a choice of sweet or bitter), which don't really seem to pack as much aroma or flavor as fresh fruit does. They do bring something to a beer, but fresh zest brings more. I've also used a bit of the Boyajian orange oil, maybe a 1/4 teaspoon for a 5 gallon batch. As to zest, I'd not use more than an ounce for 5 gallons. I'd also not use fresh pith (the white bitter stuff between the zest and the fruit), as it can screw up your bittering balance. Recipes calling for whole citrus fruit seem wrong to me, and I'd not brew them... Different citrus fruits bring different characters. As an example, get a Navel, Temple, and Seville orange. Scratch the zest and compare the character of the citrus oils there. Very very different. For more citrus flavor, things like citrus leaves work quite well, actually. So does coriander (seeds not leaves), which brings a lemony citrus flavor.

I'll try to get out for some of the festivities! It looks like it could be quite an impressive shindig.

Fascinating. I'm going to have to try that. I like the thought of a Special B loaf with some raisins in.

Nope. I've never noticed any off flavors after grinding malt. It blows itself clean... no malty residue left over.

In the course of my beer brewing adventures, I've discovered that running something like malted barley through my flat-burr coffee grinder (Saeco MC2002) does a fantastic job of getting it sparkingly clean. Since I don't want the malt turned into flour, I crank the burrs wide open to the point that the clicky indicators of position stop clicking... running a half pound of grain through gets all of the coffee build-up gone.

Here are a couple of pictures to give you an idea of what I'm talking about: Which is the keg in the basement. and Which is the cobra tap hanging from a U magnet on the side of the fridge. The astute might notice that no gas line is hooked up to the keg. I find that I don't need to keep one connected, so I don't. My preferred technique is to add about 3 gallons of water and ice to the keg, seal it, and then apply 50 PSI while shaking it furiously for about 3 minutes, and then let it rest for 10 minutes, then remove the gas in line. It's sufficiently carbed for my tastes, and has enough pressure to dispense everything in there without another shot of gas. Reasoning behind my method: 1) cold water absorbs and dissolves CO2 better than warm water... the colder it is, the more gas get in there and 2) shaking a not-full keg under pressure increases the amount of surface area exposed to the gas, which increases the rate the gas gets into the water, as does the high (50PSI) pressure.

Very easily and inexpensively done on the 5-gallon scale. Just invest in: 1) Some 5-gallon steel pressure vessels (which have been phased out of the soft drink industry in recent years and are available used inexpensively). 2) A CO2 tank and the hardware to provide the gas a way into the keg, and the liquid a way out. 3) Water filters to prepare the water you're going to fill the kegs with. (see http://morebeer.com/view_product/18190/102298 for a sample system) Voila- For maybe $200, you've got the capacity to produce fizzy water. There are temperature and time considerations, so it isn't instant, but can be done pretty quickly if you maximize the variables towards dissolving CO2 into the water. I've dedicated a keg to seltzer, and have run a tap line from the basement at home where the keg is kept into the kitchen, so I have running seltzer. It's very nice.

Yup, making a starter is the best way to tell if your yeast is still good. You don't need to go out and get dry malt extract to do a starter, either, if you live somewhere that has malta drinks in the supermarket (look in the "ethnic aisle"). 1:1 dilution of malta with water makes a fine starter medium. Put the mixture plus the yeast into a clear sanitized container, close it with some aluminum foil over top, and let it sit next to a radiator for a day or two. If your yeast is alive and happy, a cake of beige sediment will fall to the bottom of your container. That's new yeast. Put it into the fridge overnight, decant the liquid off the top, and use the cake of new yeast to ferment your beer.

He's blogging at: http://www.studiokitchen.typepad.com/

I'll chime in as well, as I managed to meet up for the final two stops on this jaunt, adding another 40-some miles of GPS-aided suburb stalking to my usual route from the wilds of Pennsylvania to Manhattan. After getting a mid-afternoon call from Mayur letting me know that some Jersey food hunting was going on, I resolved to meet up with the hunting party when I could... which was at Mitsuwa. Mitsuwa was a rather slick Asian market with a monster food court appended to it. The shopping side carried quite a variety of East Asian produce, as well as a huge selection of Japanese pantry items. It was reminiscent of the Korean mega-mart in the Philadelphia burbs that I frequent, Assi Plaza. The intrepid food hunters had hit the North Jersey Korean mega marts before I managed to meet up with them, so I can't compare the N. NJ versions to the Philly suburban version... Mitsuwa's primary problem is that it is buried deep in the most heavily built up old riverfront suburbs in North Jersey. The parking lot is a mad house, the road it is on is windy, two-laned, and packed to the gills with condos. I'd go 20 or 30 miles out of my way if there was someplace with a comparable selection of stuff in a not-quite-so-claustrophobic-traffic-nightmare locale. Mitsuwa does, apparently run a bus from Manhattan... but given their riverfront location, I think a ferry from the uptown Fairway would be the best foodie-centric transport connection to get the place into people's shopping routines. We did partake of some of Mitsuwa's food court ramen, which were quite tasty, though Raji is a better person to delve into the description of that experience. We then wended our way back onto the highway and out to Hackensack to White Manna, a neon-signed classic burger joint that made many many sliders for the crowds that flowed in and out of the place. I'm not a slider afficionado (and I've never been to a White Castle, so I can't compare the WM burgers to anything else), but it was a fun last stop.