alzymologist

joined 3 months ago
[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago (4 children)
[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 days ago

I've read kiwis are forest floor bullies, isn't that true?

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 week ago

But, as far as I remember, major contributor to carbon emissions are not poor villages, but jet sets and their factories in poor villages exploiting the work of poor villagers who have no say about their air quality lest they lose their jobs like they lost their means to sustain themselves from farming. Indeed, just not flying for fun and not selling the oil and coal that do not really belong to them would be so much more technological than trying to get grants for things they do not understand (and waste them traveling the world on planes telling everyone they should invest in it too only to then burn the rest in taxes used to support oilgascoal industry directly or not). When you show perpetum mobile here it is totally relevant - that's how greenwashing works in terms of economy on every level, no matter what technology is being praised.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 week ago

How about I want to have my inference process to negate error bound to my priors?

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

In object oriented onthology, to know is him is to be him.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 week ago (4 children)

That's essentially how many gases are made from mixtures, like notrogen or oxygen. Showing this as something new tells a lot about author's uderstanding. Carbon capture is not about making entirely new tech, it's optimization, and that's where startups suck at everything except for getting and then wasting cash.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 week ago

Yeah, I wanted to move to Alberta many years ago to join your university and have fun with bitumen. But I'm in Finland now, so winter is ok, and now summers are intense and hot everywhere. I don't know why exactlt anybody would crop grow these grains south of here, where other things thrive. Leave hardy grasses for arctic steppes.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Malting it for base malt is probably not worth the effort indeed (kind of weird that there are a few small-scale enterprises around where I live who try to make small batches of malt - and it's base malt. Of course it's inferior to large scale, sadly, I had sad experience trying to use super-local. Why don't they see the real market potential for weird stuff? Maybe I should take that space when I set the process?), but there are limitless potential specialty varieties you can try. Roast it differently? Skip toasting altogether and use it asap to see what happens? Reproduce some historical process? So much fun (probably).

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

But at the same time remember, that scaling (both ways) is the toughest task in chemical technology. Small masher has very different heat and matter exchange properties than large one, just take it into account. Expect efficiency to drop 2x or even more on first try.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I have similar situation (but right now I have ~20 kg of oats, there are other stuffs around too, I just happened to take oats), so I'm trying to build some decent malting equipment. Unfortunately, doing it outdoors in winter is sad enterprise, but I'm totally just giving it a try when I can! (Doing it indoors would be either stinky or loud, and I already have too many microbiological stuff going in same space) I do not believe I'll lose much except for conversion rate and sugar content, but might discover some new flavor tones. When I'm done, I'll be posting here and trying to share the product.

So I urge you to do the same!

There is no reason to expect that something will not ferment well just because it was not purebred for brewing. Even random yeasts mostly yield good results. Well, yeast is much more definitive in final profile and you CAN screw up by using some really stinky or low fermenting yeast. Grain, on the other hand, is just yeast food and grain flavour mostly (yes, there are other things to fine tune, but first order approximations is what we should care about in experimentation). Does it smell and taste good? Then go for it!

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Sure it is not, grain is not fruit after all. I think grain will turn into angry shoggoth if threated with metabisulfite. At least it would be a mess.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 3 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

Well, it's bad news, all those super-processed products almost always are treated with metabisulfite or something close enough, and only wine and a few other products require it to be listed on the label. It's pretty much treated as part of detergent for washing fruits. Completely unjustified as product is sterilized later in turning it into extract, but it is simpler to keep buying this historically accepted mild bleach and treating all fruits with it anyway. Maybe increases their storage time in shipping pipeline. Something I do not wish to think about in great detail, for my first lab in Finland was in a rented fruit storage bunker and I washed it and dismantled control equipment myself. Could have been WW2 nazi camp facility for what it was worth.

 

This time of year one thing happens that has absolutely no relation to holidays: late berries (cranberries, lingonberries, rowan) spent enough time in frozen state to develop flavor worth of melomels. A gift for self in several years, something to be safely forgotten until bottling and then again.

Of course, I've kept those in freezer, as I don't want to fight all the birds for rowans (note: they still had plenty, I'm not greedy) and I'm not that good at digging frozen forest floor for the rest.

 

I've been doing homebrewing together with my wife for quite some time, and at some point we started collecting a yeast library. There was a point in my life where we had an opportunity to start a company that does something we enjoy; we've tried starting an analytic lab for microbreweries (as we are both actually doctors in chemistry), but it didn't take off at all due to lack of demand (and COVID breakout), we had to switch to doing whatever brings cash (of course IT stuff it was, mostly, I feel ashamed).

But yeast library kept growing. We've decided to give it another try, got permissions from the Big Brother, and rolled out a small production!

We've deployed a webshop at https://store.zymologia.fi/ , there is other stuff that's kind of a byproducts of whatever other things we've had to do to get along (some of it was and is fun after all). The idea is that I don't think it makes sense to scale it up any further, we just have proper but minimalist equipment to do sterile pure culture cultivation, not large tanks, only glass that could be properly washed and autoclaved, and full-grain growth media because I hate smell of extract (and proper preparation of wort is about as difficult as getting extract clear enough for yeast making). Anyway, it's an actual commercial operation, I'm curious to see how far we can go with such attitude and whether it would become profitable or just another "make the world a bit happier place".

Most of yeast on sale is listed as "not available" which means we'll just have to wake them up, feed them up to speed, and package, which takes up to 2 weeks, which is less than beer recipe planning and preparation phase, at least for me. I don't think keeping an inventory with live yeast is a good idea anyway - many times I've had sad starved liquid yeast fished out of fridges in stores only to see lags on 30+ hours. That's also why I'm reluctant to go to resalers, though I might try it.

What I really think should be happening is yeast exchange. I don't want to keep things any more commercial than the general Finnish anti-soviet spirit tells me, so let me propose this idea: yeast growth takes time and effort, but sharing is caring - I'd be happy to share a swab of yeast culture with anyone who comes to our place (just tell me when, of course most of the time there is only yeast in the lab) with their own sterile slant carrier - I won't be shipping these, for I'm absolutely certain delivery services will mess it up, and also I (or whoever would be hanging around at that time) won't get to have a chat with you. (Please do this if you know what you are doing though, storing culture and scaling it to a starter is a bit more complicated than just making a starter, mistakes multiply badly with exponential growth and it's not very feasible to propagate without going through single-cell plating or something similar. If you don't know what that means, learn it first, or it's worth just buying a ready liquid yeast, the great purpose of sharing culture material is to let other people have it in their library, which would require you to go through single-cell propagation at least a few times a year).

We also have an opensource (all we do is opensource, I believe in the idea) piece of software to keep yeast lineage in check here: https://github.com/Alzymologist/yeast It's a bit underdocumented at the moment to say the least, but it uses Bayesian inference to analyze yeast parameters and catch mutations, and it was able to detect deviations before we've tasted the outliers blindly, I think it's quite cool too. I don't think anybody did this before.

Sorry for self-advertisement, I've asked moders if this sort of thing is OK here before posting. I hope this is interesting enough to be worth being here.

view more: next ›