Recent content by Vopiscus

I'm debating whether or not to use wyeast 3763 Roeselare as my go to distilling strain to try something a bit more funky.

I find that the starter tea is more viable than the actual SCOBY. I've let kombucha sit at room temp for half a year and had no issues reviving it. Only time I had issues was when the top of the SCOBY dried out and started growing fuzz.

Heh, didn't mean to quote myself. Been sampling a current brew and it's snuck up. But, yeah you can also add additional spices like vanilla or cacoa nibs to the oak you're extracting with this method.

A lot of people sanitize oak chips by boiling them for a few minutes and use the oak infused water in their beer. I'm assuming you tossed the oak chips along with the grain, so my main concern would be you didn't fully extract the compounds you wanted out of the oak such as the ones responsible...

I'm curious how that would work. Isn't the nicotine dangerous? I'd imagine perique or some Latakia would make one hell of a campfire beer.

I extracted them in some cask strength whiskey and I find a little goes a long way. The taste and aroma is pretty wild though. You certainly won't need any non-liquid food.

That solved an issue I was struggling with. Gonna give it a try once I get a larger still.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the graph. Still new and haven't been able to find detailed distilling books as easily as the ones on brewing science. Which column design would you say allows you to preserve more of the wash's flavor?

Grapefruit juice 250 mL per 1 L bottle and a DME carbonation tablet for better head retention is my personal favorite.

I prefer doing single distillations for maximum flavor and am pretty particular about the cuts. I probably didn't word it properly, but I meant it's difficult to keep the still consistently at 91C without it ramping up to 96C in less than a minute. Then when the heating element cuts out it...

Anecdotal story, a distiller from Lost Spirits mentioned when they used sea water for their Leviathan whisky it helped out with the fermentation and gave the finished product umami notes. Kinda curious to try it out on a sour, how much sea salt did you use?

I've played around with the kegland pot still with the copper alembic dome and it yielded some tasty results. The only issue I had was that it's impossible to keep consistent temps and it requires you constantly playing with the temp on the brewzilla. If you do go that route I'd recommend...

I know Seven Stills beefs up their specialty malts percentage by as much as 5x for their recipes to get more of the flavor to carry over. Also you tend to lose the floral and more volatile hop aromas and pull out more vegetal notes even if the hops are added through a gin basket. As for...

I used black cardamom for an adult chocolate milkshake porter. Really seemed to play well with the rye and lactose.

It's not fit for human consumption, but livestock seems to go crazy for it.