Uncle Bumblefuck Attempts Shoyu, Saké and Accidentally Makes Pet Nat

I got pétillant naturel, dawg.

Item One: Cider Successsssss

I hate to follow directions. Obviously, not when I'm replacing critical suspension components on the front end of my 2007 Chrysler Town and Country, but most of the time I have an allergy to doing what people, especially "experts" tell me to do, particularly when it comes to making food type things. The rationalization for this is that failure during the pursuit of a goal teaches you far more than following directions to the letter. In fact, said failures often teach you WHY you follow instructions to the letter. 

Anyhow, the first time around making cider I bent a lot of cider making rules without breaking them. I didn't use carboys or brew buckets. I added no yeast nutrients or acidifiers or additional sugar that almost all recipes call for. However I stuck to the plan fermentation-wise and used Lavin 1118 "champagne" yeast and added a bit of pectinase to make the cider less cloudy and boost the alcohol a tiny bit. 

The results were fine. It was clean tasting and completely serviceable. If someone gave you an ice cold bottle of one at a BBQ you would drink it and not think anything about it. Most folks would count this as a success but I was determined to do better or totally screw it up trying. 

With this in mind I picked up another couple gallons of cider and, instead of pitching yeast and popping on the airlocks, I let the gallons sit on top of my fridge until they started to spontaneously ferment then added pectinase, a few pinches of Lavin 1118, the bubblers and called it a night. A few days later I noticed that the bubblers were conspicuously not bubbling. Fuck. 

As it turns out, when I shoved the airlocks into the holes I drilled into the caps, I tore the lids and they all had 1/2 inch cracks letting all manner of who-knows-what into my fermenting daddy juice. Not. Fucking. Good. Rather than abandoning the batch to cider vinegar I covered the tears with painters tape and let them go for two weeks until they started to slow down fermentation. Upon opening the caps I noticed that they smelled WILD.  Well, too far down the path to go back now, I figured and proceeded to bottle them up and hope for the best. From the juice that spilled on my hand, as I clumsily racked the cider into a duke's mixture of scrounged glass bottles, it seemed weird, but tasty. 

Rattled as I was because my well laid plans had gone distinctly awry, I neglected to dose the bottles with sugar to carbonate them, figuring that, since the cider was still nominally fermenting, there would be enough natural sugar left to make them fizzy. Phrased another way: Fuck It. 

Anyway, a week later several things happened. First, I decided I needed to do some quality control testing on my confused, half-assed cider and cracked open my 12 oz. tester bottle. It was DAMNED GOOD. The light carbonation had added a refreshing bite to it and the weird aromas of my feral cider came together under confinement into grapefruit and pineapple flavors that rivaled the best Pet Nat sparkling wine I had ever drank. Alchemy! 

Sow ears => Silk purse. 

Speaking of Pet Nat: I am an idiot. 

5 or so years ago natural sparkling wine (or Champagne for you vulgar uninitiated) was all the buzz in Brooklyn wine snob circles and they dubbed it Pet Nat which is short for it's French name pétillant naturel. I was aware of it, drank a bit of it and pretended to know exactly what it was. 

Honestly, I didn't give a shit about Pet Nat. 

I was more into rye whisky and cheap beer at that point, having tired of the increasingly douchey wine scene that was attracting the same type of trust-funder "Me Too!" fuckturds that were busily ruining the food scene in New York City. I assumed that it was natural wine (wine made from the naturally occurring yeasts on the grapes, rather than farmed commercial yeasts) that was put in bottles with Dosage (sugar of some sort) and capped. Fin.

Nope. You bottle incompletely fermented wine and let the natural sugars in the juice carbonate it. Yep, Uncle Bumblefuck had, through lazy half-assedness, accidentally made Pet Nat cider. Who would have guessed?

Onward.

Turd City

Shoyu or, for the rest of us, soy sauce. 

With an eye towards teaching myself how to grow Koji so I could make Saké, I decided to do a trial run and make some bulgur wheat koji and turn it into olde fashioned artisan soy sauce. 

Basically, I sprinkled ground up koji starter over some abandoned cooked bulgur wheat in the fridge,  covered it with a damp towel and threw it in the oven with the light on which, by divine caprice, makes the perfect atmosphere for growing koji. After two days it got real fuzzy and I added pressure cooked organic soy beans and let it go another two days in the fuzz chamber. With all the ingredients looking suitably inedible I mashed in whole wheat flour and rolled it into a log and then cut it into the turdlets you see above. 

After a further 3-4 days they started to smell alarming and stunk up my house with weird aromas. Seemed like a good time to throw them in a jar with a strong brine and see what happens! Updates to come. Probably.

Moldy rice or Koji? It's both.

Lastly, I just began my saké last night. 

If you look online you will notice that the process of saké making is pretty fucking anal. Lots of steps and precise procedures. Well, fuck that. I set out to make a farmhouse style saké which is dead simple by design and that design is meant to stick it to the man and fuck the police.

"Wait a minute. How does one 'stick it to the Man' with saké?' you might ask and rightly so, since it sounds, frankly, crazy. 

Well, first off, you must know that making your own booze in Japan is illegal. While America may be an embarrassing dumpster fire, it is still a dumpster fire where you can make your own booze (except distilled spirits. But it's not like anyone at the BATF really cares if you're making vodka in your basement). 

Secondly, you need to know that a traditional Japanese farmhouse drink, called Amazake (which is steamed rice that has been broken down with the amylase enzymes of rice koji) is basically Saké that hasn't fermented yet. 

Thirdly, imagine that you are a Japanese farmer who likes his saké but doesn't want to pay for it and the saké police come around and finds your stash. Because you've made a crude and cloudy rice wine you coolly and calmly tell the Man that "Oh shit! I totally forgot about my last batch of Amazake. What a shame!". Plausibly deniability to the people, people. 

I'll update later with this recipe and how it's coming along. Until then I'll leave you with this:

 

Spring has finally gotten sprung here in Southern Vermont and my forty-wonderful birthday is coming somewhat soon so I figured I'd get Hobbit as fuck and renew my old Spring ritual of rereading the Lord of the Rings. 

$6.80 very well spent.