Recent content by xevioso

The beer is done. I bottled it about a mon ago. I left it in the secondary for about 3 months, longer than I originally thought I would but just never got around to bottling it until about a month ago. You can definitey tatste the extract in the beer. I have had two bottles, one about...

So, the insect itself is eaten as a snack (I dated a thai girl for a while and she loved em..pretty extraordinary to watch her bite into a big one of these) but people also supposedly extract the pheremone liquid (not theremone) from the insect and use it as a condiment. So, I would expect I...

Here's another great link on what these insects taste like. I hope very much I can get the real thing this week. http://duckfatandpolitics.blogspot.com/2008/01/mang-da.html#comment-form

So, this is going to be a wheat beer; I have the ingredients and I will post the recipe soon. I am thinking I will be able to find the actual insect at our local Ranch 99 store in South San Francisco this week; supposedly they are sold in packages like this: IF I can actually find the...

Probably to the people in Vitenam in that video I linked to who are trying to bring the bugs back fromthe brink of extinction. That way we can eventually use the real thing!:rockin:

So, the ingredients are those two esters AND "Artificial True Bug Flavor" whatever the hell that is. So, I might go down the Lavender Wit path, which means that less of this stuff is more. Hopefully the flavor will come through and not just the smell.

So, here is a little video with more information on this insect and how it is used. Use of the extract actually goes back a few hundred years at least. Very interesting. Edit: at least 2000 years, not hundreds.

So, out of curiosity, I looked up the ingredients listed on the side of the box. 1: Hexenyl Actate - seems this is used in perfumes...supposedly it is the main chemical component that gives this stuff it's smell http://www.flavornet.org/info/3681-71-8.html 2: Hexenyl Butyrate: Seems this is...

I'm going to check out my local brewcraft shop later today or tomorrow to talk to the owner, who is very wise on these issues...SF Brewcraft here in SF. The owner, Griz, looks like Jerry Garcia (or at least when Jerry was alive) and will certainly be intrigued. So, this will just be a normal...

So I have actually tried a drop or two of this in an IPA and a Porter...Okocim, a Polish beer, and Anchor Porter. It works better int he porter. Basically, this stuff is EXTREMELY floral... I could not put my finger on what it tastes and smells like...now I can..It tastes and smells like...

So, these bugs are somewhat rare over there, but there is a version of this species that lives in the US. However, they are not, um, "farmed" like they are over there; I'd have to find them myself. Not gonna happen. But I will try with the extract...

This is actually a good idea, as I have a few bottles of previously made homebrew laying around. I can experiment with these.

So, sure enough, my local Asian supermarket here in San Francisco (New May Wah supermarket at 8th and Clement, if you are interested) did not disappoint. I just went there after work, thinking, surely they will not have bug extract. How crazy would that be. And here it is! Here's...

So, if I were making a peach beer, for example, a batch of 5 gallons, how much peach extract would I put into the secondary? 1oz? 3? 5? I tried making a sassafras mead and I clearly didnt add enough for the sassafras to come through. I want to make sure this flavor, whatever it is, comes...

By the way, the link to what this essence looks like is here: http://www.mythaimart.com/g00260.html And the bug it comes from is here: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/2009/02/mangda_na_--_th.php The Thai people eat them all the time. The actual essence which is a pheremone is...