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This is something I've always wondered about, because there seems to be such a range of opinions regarding the topic of when to rack. Up to now I thought the time to rack was after fermentation was no longer active (as determined by the SG not changing over a one week period). Others have said...

I'd suggest focusing on traditional meads for a while. A traditional mead is just honey, water, nutrients, and yeast. I used to think that a traditional mead would be easier than, say, a Melomel or a Metheglin, because it has fewer ingredients, but as another forum member recently pointed...

Thanks for your awesome post! If I'm reading you right, using TOSNA may save a lot of time and is all upside and no downside.

That would be great. I'll give it a try. I have some leftover Voss that's been sitting in a few small jars in the refrigerator for the last 5 months. I'll try pitching one of them without a starter into a test batch and see how it fares. Afterward I'll report back.

I hear you. The answer would be no, not if I already have liquid yeast on hand. Right now it may sound hard just because right now I'm blazing my own trail on how to dry it. However, if this drying method works, I do think drying it will be easier than the overhead of freezing it and then...

Surprisingly, I couldn't get lower than 16% RH at 70F within the current sealed setup. However, I have 7.5 pounds of additional desiccant on order and arriving late today. I expect the extra desiccant will help drive the RH lower so that I can finish drying the Hothead yeast enough to finally...

Answering my own question, it appears that 8% moisture content is what I should be aiming for: Dry yeast is fresh compressed yeast that has been pressed and dried until the moisture content is only about 8% which makes the yeast dormant. The granules only become active again when mixed with a...

The RH is now 34%, and so there may be residual moisture, but there's no liquid left per se. The yeast looks dry, and due to shrinkage most of the yeast has already detached itself from the parchment paper. The longer I wait, the dryer it will become. Not sure what level of dryness I should...

Reporting back: well, putting it right away into a sealed box is probably a bad strategy. Even with the desiccant, the humidity sensor showed that the humidity kept going up until finally, at 68% RH, significantly above ambient RH, I pulled the lid off to release the trapped moisture.

Update: I grabbed 5ml of the 10ml Hothead yeast cream. 5ml is so little that I simply spread it out very thinly on the parchment paper, and therefore I expect it will dry quickly. I can only hope that later releasing such a thin layer of dried yeast from the parchment paper won't be difficult...

A bit of trivia: out of 100ml of Omega Hothead yeast solution from the packet, after allowing it to settle, only about 10ml is yeast cream plus whatever other solid ditritus was either packaged with it or developed afterward.

I'm about to start this experiment. I have a roughly 60 quart airtight box that I've sprayed with star san and let air dry. I plan to put the parchment paper and a porcelain plate in the oven for about an hour at 400F (the parchment paper is rated to 420F), which should (I hope) kill anything...

OK, so for those who need a TL;DR, here's a two minute video on where the 3-5 megaton number comes from: Apparently it would not have been just a steam explosion (which is what the physics forum tried to calculate) but instead somehow a nuclear chain reaction. Is that even possible? I don't...

LOL. OK, I'll report back in 15 years....

Wait. Let's calibrate our definitions. What should I call a TOSNA mead that, aside from nutrients, is otherwise made with the exact same ingredients and ratios as a traditional polish mead? Would it be called a modern polish mead, or something else?

He was a tragic hero. He apparently blindly trusted that the state would take care of him and his crew, whereas the truth was just the opposite. Seems as though he could have negotiated for good treatment of his crew before agreeing to do the work, but maybe that would just have gotten him a...

Your yeast has a strange color it. It's not the light beige cream color I'm used to seeing.

In the documentary that I linked to above, one of the soviet officials that was interviewed referred to the thermal explosion threat as being 5 megatons. So, I'm not sure that the writer for the HBO show was just making it up to be dramatic. Even if the number if wrong, it's a number a the...

I don't see how one can casually dismiss "what-if" scenarios. After the explosion nearly everything involved "what-if" scenarios to decide what to do and whether it was worth the cost of life and injury to do it. It's not as though reactor 4 simply exploded and rapidly burned itself out with...

Does it still take that long if it's made using modern methods (e.g. TOSNA?).