cdh

No need for a mash tun with heating capability when brewing small. A picnic cooler holds enough heat in to accomplish what needs to be done. Get a grain bag and a picnic cooler with a spiggot to let ice melt out and you've got yourself all the mash tun you need.

My trial run on the Saison was a 4 gallon batch as well... It was fantastic. Here's the exact recipe I used for the 4 gallons: 2lbs Belgian Pilsner 4 oz Belgian biscuit malt (a more intense munich-like malt) 4 oz flaked oats 8 oz flaked rye 8 oz torrified wheat (puffed wheat that hasn't been rolled into flakes) Mashed at 143F for 30 minutes, then raised to 152F for 30 minutes... This made for a very fermentable wort and a great light body. 1 lb dutch light malt extract 1 lb cane sugar 1 oz Stryian goldings at 60 minutes .25 oz Hallertauer at 15 minutes .25 oz Hallertauer after the boil Spiced with .5 oz seville orange zest, 1 star anise star, and half of a thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger. Fermented with Wyeast 3944. Don't think I'd change a thing about it. OG was 1.046, IBUs were 23.

Somebody mentioned this a few weeks back... and I pointed out the wine clip thread. Somebody out there read that and sent me an email explaining how wrong I was that this this was like the wine clip, and that it actually worked, particularly with brown liquor. They asked me to post something to that effect here. I wrote back exhorting whoever it was to join up and post it himself, but that never happened. This thing either has some grassroots marketing going on, or a huge marketing budget. If anybody has one, run some cheeeep cognac through it and see if it improves. I'm kinda curious.

Alright, now I've got an equipment/technique question. How do you remove the spheres from the calcium bath? I've found that using a stainless steel strainer pops them... and have moved on to pouring the calcium bath through a coffee filter, which leads to lots of spheres that stick to the filter and must be very carefully wrangled or they pop. Is there a particular tool that work well for this purpose? Next question is purely about equipment. Droppers make pretty tiny spheres... trout roe size or smaller. I've tried a turkey baster for bigger spheres, but can't get it to drop even sized spheres. What works to make something salmon egg sized or larger? Anybody try those plastic squeezy bulbs that gets sold as aural irrigators or ear syringes?

Indeed... a month or two in bottles does let a beer really come together and improve. Luckily for you, batch 1 was really easy to make, so you could make more of it ... So the red ale is carbonating nicely for you now? Let us all know how the Saison brew goes for you.

Are we talking scotchs, or whiskies more generally? As I recall, ChefKoo is not very experienced in whiskies... the bourbons are more approachable, and tend to go better with cigars, I find. For snob bourbon, get some Pappy Van Winkel. Caol Ila is another great scotch option, but both it and the Lagavulin are a bit strong in their islandy-ness. Hints of seaweed and salt, etc that might not appeal early in one's whiskey consuming adventures.

No. Just cherry juice.

Snob? Johnny Walker blue. Personal Fave? Elijah Craig 12 Night and day differences.

Ummm... not really. Mashing is not a boil. You're thinking of a protein rest at the beginning of the mash... which is inapplicable to a beer that isn't mashed (like the red ale recipe). A protein rest is letting the big vat of grain sit at a temperature of about 120F to allow certain enzymes to go to work on protein in the grain. This can help with head retention... but if there's no fizz in the beers, there's nothing to make a head to retain.

Love the Hitachino Nest beers. They're great.

That Cologne usage is only in relation to one product, and seems largely to be a local spelling that isn't correct anywhere but there.

I think you're meeting confusion as a result of all of similar sounding words that mean both "wheat" and "white". There are all variety of German wheat beers that involve the word Weizen, meaning wheat. Weizenbock, Dunkelweizen, etc. There is also a particular style of German beer that contains wheat that is called Berliner Weiss, meaning Berlin White. Then there is the Belgian style called Wit, which means "white" and also contains wheat. There is no "wiess" except in the land of typos and misspellings. Hope that helps. Also, see this webpage: http://www.ozaru.freeserve.co.uk/weizen/weizenweb.htm

And here is a pic of some cherry caviar I've just made... I'm getting the hang of this.... but need to work on getting this more consistent.

I've played with alcoholic spheres the other evening... I succeeded in getting diluted pastis to spherify...

dj Thanks... my chemistry is way too rusty now... Looks like a good presentation. How much acid is left in the drink after the base does its work? Does it retain a good tartness? Have you thought of adding a bit of powdered eggwhite to up the foam retention? I'd bet with some eggwhite in the mix, you'd get a great foamy head on the thing when you add the base.

The chemistry is about dramatic presentation. Charge with too much CO2 in a siphon and you get big bubbles that rush to the surface... this trick is about small foamy bubbles that keep coming.

The fizz was quick, and was quite violent at the beginning, and subsided into a light effervescence that then dissipated. You need to isolate the baking soda so that it can't all react at once. Consider maybe making a caramel and stirring in some baking soda while it is liquid, then solidifying it in molds that would present well. That would probably lengthen the fizzing by sequestering the soda only to the exposed surfaces of the lozenge. Better yet... coat the interior of the glass with the soda'ed caramel, and the fizzing would be evenly spread throughout the drink for as long as it takes all of the caramel to dissolve.

let us know what happens...

Just did an experiment with citric acid and baking soda... fizzes nicely, but leaves a bit of an Alka-Seltzer flavor... probably because it is just like Alka Seltzer. IT also appears you need more baking soda by mass than citric acid to neutralize out, as it was still sour after 1/2 tsb of each went into my juice glass of water.

Likely all at once unless you do something to the base to slow it down. My thought is a gelatin capsule at the bottom of the glass that dissolves and releases a base would allow for transport time from the bar to the patron. Or maybe a basic liquid encapsulated in alginate skin... Dunno if that would work or not... or how long it would last. Maybe the drama becomes popping the alginate bubble at the table and letting it fizz.

Well, the magic is that there won't be any peroxide left if you balance the reaction right. It should break down into water and its spare oxygen atom should become part of the CO2 given off. Citric acid is C6H8O7 and Peroxide is HOOH... So the chemistry problem is C6H8O7 + HOOH --> ? It looks like the OH should grab hold of some of the spare H (that makes the citric acid acidic) to form water, and the C and O should form some CO2... question is what's left after that happens. We'd need to measure how much CO2 is given off to figure out how much of the C and O are turning into CO2, and that would tell us if they're turning into something else in there too.

Citric acid is available cheaply and easily from homebrew and winemaking shops. Should go for around $3/lb. I don't think sodium citrate would work as an acid in this application... but you never can tell. Mix some up with water and hit it with a base. If it fizzes, you're good. As to safe bases, only two I can think of are baking soda and hydrogen peroxide off the top of my head. Peroxide is simple enough that it might work, and is likely safe... certainly flavorless, and can be diluted with water down to concentration that works for your recipe... The real finesse is getting just enough of the base to only neutralize the added acid rather than wipe the acid out of the drink altogether. Must get the formula of citric acid and see how it would react with H2O2 and what would be left over before I recommend you drink the byproducts of such a reaction.

That one appears to be a simple acid-base reaction... the article says it is the vinegar and baking soda volcano trick. The two difficulties would be figuring out what base (meaning alkaline, not mixed drink) to use, and how much of it. Chemistry and math... or a lot of trial and error. I'd make the daiquiri to your taste, then dose it with some citric acid powder to up the acidity, then at service add just enough of the preferred base to react with the added citric acid and bring the drink back to where it was in the beginning. To figure out your base, find out what basic ingredients are available and will react safely with citric acid, producing no toxic byproducts. Then mix some citric acid in some water and neutralize it out to pH 7, then give it a taste to see if you can detect/live with the reaction byproducts. Then start playing with your cocktail to figure out the most dramatic presentation of such a trick... a capsule of powdered base stuck to the bottom of the glass that dissolves and releases might be fun... but maybe a syringe of basic liquid injected into the middle of the drink would work too.

No mention of a fizzy daiquiri in there... do you mean the carbonated sphere of mojito? Interesting challenge. First question is when to add the fizz-- What happens when a carbonated liquid is given the sodium alginate treatment? Is the alginate skin gas-permeable so that exposing spheres to CO2 under pressure would dissolve gas into the insides? This sounds like just the experiment to try out my new toys... sodium alginate, calcium chloride, and a homebrew kegging system. Once I master making the spheres, I'll fashion some sort of platform inside an empty keg on which to rest a few spheres, and then seal 'em in there and hit 'em with a few atmospheres of pressure for a few days to see what happens. Worst possible outcome is that they pop when the keg gets opened... the cocktail equivalent of getting the bends, I guess.

Any word on potential new locations? The clock is really ticking now.