Saké UPDATE: Blew It.

Alright, let's start with the basics.

Ingredients

1 gallon boiled or otherwise de-chlorinated water
8 lbs. (dry weight) organic sushi rice
1/4 cup dried Koji rice
LV 118 yeast or other white wine yeast
2 gallon sanitized fermentation bucket with airlock

Procedure

First off, when I list off an amount of rice by weight I am saying "dry, uncooked rice" OK?

Anyway, start by washing (very thoroughly) 1 1/2 lbs of rice, steaming it with 2/3rd the amount of water it normally calls for and then allowing that rice to cool. Meanwhile turn on the light in your oven. This should make it about 75-85' F which is just right for Koji growing. Now spread the rice into a clumpy layer across the bottom of a small casserole. Grind a few tablespoons of the dried Koji up with a mortar and pestle or a CLEAN spice grinder and sprinkle over top. Cover it with a damp cloth and place it in the oven. Don't forget it's in their when you're pre-heating to pan roast a big assed rib steak, mkay?

I used this stuff. It was about $10 a bag, which should last me 8 batches if I don't back slop.

So after 2 days the rice should be white and fuzzy and there should be liquid in the bottom of the pan. Bueno. Now steam 2 1/2-3 lbs of rice, allow to cool and then combine 1/2 your water, the koji rice, the steamed rice and the yeast in the bucket. Break up the rice with your fingers (thoroughly washed/scrubbed) and hands and pop on the lid/airlock.

Wait 2 days.

Do all of the above again.

Wait 7 more days.

My pictures are shitty on purpose. It's my personal style.

 Strain through a brew sack and bottle if all the rice has broken down.

Well, that's how I should have done it.

Instead I did 3 Koji/rice cycles because I have a tiny rice cooker. I doubt this effected anything negatively.

I also added apple slices (don't ask) and then was forced to let the fermentation go 20 days because I was short bottles and time and headspace. These two things lead me to having 1 1/2 gallons of Rice Kefir.

This is not the worst thing that could have happened since my impetus to make my own sake was Sandor Katz unpasteurized sake recipe on his blog from a month or two ago. I wanted all those good microbes all up in me like a yoga hippy. So that's great.

However the resultant sake is SOUR as fuck. Lactic fermentation. This was likely caused by the A) higher than desireable temperature during the fermentation. You should shoot for 45-50'F but by the time I got my shit together this Spring it was in the high 50's to high 60's with a few 80' days. B) Those fucking apple slices. Wild yeast, my ASS or C) letting it go too long.

Of the above factors, I think that letting go too long (from what the internet full of Fellow Traveler Bumblefucks has told me) is the biggest bukkake moment in my string of bad decisions. Basically 10-12 days max beginning to end, bottle and refrigerate (or pasteurize). It might be a little sweet but it won't be sour. Soon I'll have some bottles so I can dance that theory. 

Oh yeah, and the fasting idea from the last post? Didn't take. Who knew?

Dumbing Down Things Even Further

If you're nervous that this might be the title of another of my screeds against the short-attention-span-theatre of Western civilisation, breath free my friends. It is not and I will tell you exactly why.

I was hiking down the hill this morning, past the great lines of 200 plus year-old grave markers, with a bit of a bee in my bonnet. I intended a screed of screeds against stupidity and thick headedness of all sorts. You see, I had just spent 36 hours in NYC for a bit of pre-birthday alone time and arrived back home with a bad taste in my mouth about the dangerous increase of spiritually dead materialism I saw at work there. By God I was going to set the world to right with the strokes of my digital pen! 

Then a strange thing happened: as the tombstones ticked by a question appeared in my head I had heard said by Ur-permaculturist Mark Shepard in a presentation about selecting food producing trees that thrive in local conditions: "Why would I spend my time helping out something that wants die or trying to kill something that wants to live?" The point is that trying to change anyone's mind with a screed seems, well, stupid and thickheaded at this point in time. THE wisdom of Permaculture is to work with nature, not against it.

Onward.

What this post is really about is how I have doubled down on the simplification of my cider making procedure.

Ever trying to cut down on things to buy, clean and sanitize I elected to simply allow my gallon jugs of cider to spontaneously ferment and then simply poking a small slit in the their tops with a sharp pocket knife to allow CO2 to exit but not allow the vinegar bugs to enter. Not that I am that worried about them at this point since sour beers and kombucha seem to all the rage these days thus contamination and laziness would be once again cloaked by the current mode.

And so it went for two weeks when I drilled the tops, slid the siphon tube in and filled 2 champagne bottles, 2 twenty-two ouncers, 1 Pellegrino litre and a bottle of Mexican Sprite. The results were just as good, if not better, than the previous batch. Different, lazier, method. Same great Pet Nat.

I was curious if I was perhaps high on my own supply. While I was a wine buyer for 3 1/2 years and have a decent pallet, I am also aware how one's mind can cloud things so I took a few bottles along on my trip and gave them to a few people who make their money with wine. Results have been more than favorable. Valhalla. Do try this at home.

This weekend I will be bottling up my first batch of Saké. It probably should have been filtered and put up last week but I ran short of bottles, so we'll see how that turns out. Ultimately there is $8.00 worth of rice at stake and, worst case scenario, I'll have $25 worth of rice wine to cook with for the next year or two. C'est la vie,' say the old folks, 'it goes to show you never can tell.'

What else?  

I dunno. I've been thinking about fasting. 

Let me explain. The spring of my Senior year of high school I got really sick. Fever. Hallucinations. Sweating. The whole nine yards. When I eventually got completely better several weeks later, my sense of smell had been completely altered. Most things had no smell at all while the few things I could smell were mostly things like the exhaust from old, pre-smog, automobiles. 

You can probably see how this condition might make food seem unappealing. It took almost a year for my sense of smell to grow back and during that time I ate much, much less that I had previously and, also, I experienced a lot of personal and spiritual growth. These two things, obviously, were not likely related. However I can't shake the feeling that they were. Pretty much all religions have periods of fasting to help attain spiritual growth in their orthodoxies AND science more and more says that there is a role of fasting in extending human lifespan. Hmmmm.

Anyway, I got a fucking TERRIBLE Flu in NYC. Yep. Chills, sweats, fever, hallucinations. My past 36 hours have been spent in a liminal state of shamanistic illness that I emerged from this just a few hours ago and it reminded me of all of this. I'll give it a try and see what happens.

Weekend Weirdness: Meet Viktor Schauberger

Comprehend and Copy Nature: The Legacy of Austrian Forester Viktor Schauberger.

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.

Basics: Italian Sausage

"...if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn."
 
Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie,  Mrs. Dymond (1885)

Time to get your sausage fingers on.

One of the single most useful things you can learn to do, if you cook a fair bit, is to make your own Italian sausage. Pasta sauce, lasagna, risotto, sausage, kale and bean stew, etc., etc. are built on the central pillar of sausage. So much so that their flavor and quality more or less depend on how good the sausage used in it is. Unfortunately, if you've spent much time in the average grocery store meat aisle, you've discovered that most of the commercial sausage out there is complete shit.

This is totally fine.

You can easily leave the world of crap sausage behind and never look back. Of all of the "artisan" food trends out there, making really good sausage is, by far, the easiest to do yourself, without any special equipment, in a few minutes.

What lies below is a all-purpose Eye-talian recipe suitable for most applications. You can easily customize it to your taste by adding or subtracting ingredients. Just remember that not all the stuff in the "Optional" section play well with each other. Fennel pollen is a stand alone. Parmesan, parsley and lemon zest go well together. Rosemary can be added to the existing recipe to make it *nice*, just don't use too much!

THE key to successful sausage it to use GOOD ground pork. Go to a real life butcher shop and get freshly ground pork shoulder or buy a frozen pack of pork at the farmers market, just don't buy the donkey-dookie ground pork they sell at the Stater Brothers, OK?

Italian Sausage:

1 lb. ground pork (80% fat 20% lean)
3-4 cloves garlic, crushed and minced fine
2 Tbsp. decent red wine
2 1/2 tsp. whole fennel seeds, lightly toasted in a dry pan until fragrant
1 rounded tsp. Kosher salt
1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp. sugar

Optional

Crushed red pepper flakes
Fresh rosemary pulled off the stem and finely minced
Fennel Pollen
Grated Parmesan
Chopped parsley
Lemon zest

First, you're gonna need a big mixing bowl. Plop your ground pork at the bottom of it and simply add all of the ingredients on top, saving the red wine for the last. Now mix the pork and friends together using a dough kneading motion, giving the bowl a quarter turn after each single kneading action. When the sausage firms up and starts sticking to your hand, you're done.

Yeah, that's it. Seriously.

Are you now as angry as I am about how shitty pretty much all the sausage commonly available in these United States is? You should be. It's the direct result of fucking Cultural degeneracy, people! Take the power back. Make some sausage.

p.s.

If you'd like to make linked sausage, get you some 32mm hog casings from the internets or butcher shop and cut off a 3 foot section. Soak this in a warm water for 15 minutes while you cut the top (the mouth to the bottom of the shoulder, like an inverted funnel, which it is going to be.)  off a stout 1 or 1.5 liter water bottle (Fiji bottle work good and the water has free silica in it, or so I've been told) and round off the edges with a bit of sandpaper. Wash your new homemade funnel and slide the hog casing over the bottle neck like you were trying to get a Trojan on a wiener. If wiener jokes bother you, stuffing sausages in NOT for you.  Tie off the end, fill the funnel 1/2 full of meat and start jamming the meat through the neck with your thumb while holding the casings taut with your other hand. Keep doing this, trying to avoid air bubbles as much as possible, until you're out of meat. Tie off the other end flush with the end of the meat and then twist the tube of sausage into 4 equal links.

Finally fold the sausage links over one another till you get this kinda thing:

Refrigerate, uncovered for a few hours to allow the casings to dry out and then snip into links for grilling. Not too hot! Medium heat or they'll blow the fuck up.

Enjoy.

Heavy Horses

Mid-1990's NOS Raichle Eiger Boots, baby hand for scale.

I skipped out on doing a happy weekend post last week. Life, it seems, had other plans for me that involved driving through a snow storm to go to a Raptor center full of misfit owls.  I'll say this, if you are ever up close to an owl you'll notice that they give off a strong vibration. Not spooky. Just intense. If you get bored look up all the mythological shit mapped on owls by the ancient cultures of the world. It seems that they all agree: Owls are heavy, man.

Anyhow, 20 years ago I was big into hiking and backpacking. In 1995 my friend Darren and I somehow managed to make 17 backpacking trips. That year I did 340+/- miles of switchbacks and ridges wearing a $35 pair of Chinese Wolverine work boots I bought at a Walmart in Carson City, NV two Summers before.

This is of note for several reasons:

1) These days doing some sort of sport or activity is really just an excuse to buy a bunch of expensive gear that you probably won't use because the point of the activity is really to obsessively pund on and accumulate gear, not to do the thing that the gear is designed to do.

In 1995 I made $2,300 under the poverty line (I'm not just flexing poverty nuts here, the poverty line will figure into the story in a bit). When you make $12,700 a year you can't afford nice gear. In fact you can't afford any gear that isn't a hand-me-down, from Walmart or bought at an Army/Navy. More to the point, the very fact that I went hiking so much was exactly because it was free and I only needed a $35 pair of work boots, a $15 surplus rucksack and a $3 Nalgene bottle full of tap water to do it.

2) After putting so many miles on a pair of broken down shitkickers I had come to the conclusion that I could really use a nice pair of boots that wouldn't soak up water like a ShamWOW! or allow a mesquite thorn I stepped on to stick into my foot.

Cue my tax refund for 1995. I'm not sure if this is true anymore but back in the mid 90's if you made under the poverty line the IRS would give you back enough tax money to push you above the poverty line. At the time I wasn't thinking that it was some sort of scam was meant to cook the income stats, I was just pumped to get enough money to buy THE NICEST pair of boots I could lay my hands on.

Enter my first pair of Raichle Eigers.

Darren and I drove his blue metal flake '73 Camaro with a tunnel ram to the new REI 20 minutes down the 55 freeway to secure said pair of boots on a Thursday afternoon when we were both off work. I was an idiot. A cartoon hayseed bumbling around a pristine footwear dept. that smelled like the lobby of an Ace hotel in a filthy pair of 501's stained with sweat, dust and sagebrush. I ogled high dollar boots from Italy, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. I had a party boner for a pair of Zamberlans but, like all the other Euro boots, save one, my flat, wide Hobbit feet would not fit inside them without footbound pain or enough room for my feet to rattle around like a pinball. Not good.

My frustrated but diligent Al Bundy finally suggested trying a pair of Swiss Raichles that were the boots that REI rented out to weekend warriors dabbling in dirt and blisters. They were heavy leather throwbacks to the era of exploration. No Gore-tex, no lightweight synthetics or molded footbeds. The sales guy relayed to me in a harsh whisper that they were the boots worn by the Swiss army mountain warfare battalions and that they were about to be discontinued so he would take $40 off the $265 price tag.

Put this story on pause for a minute. In 1996 $265.00 was just 10 bucks short of my monthly rent. Not my share of the rent. The whole fucking apartment. Imagine spending your monthly total rent on a pair of boots. Heavy man. Like an owl playing a xylophone made from dragon bones.

OK. Obviously, between the $40 discount and the story about them being issued by the Swiss Army, I bought the boots.

In the coming months learned to I love and hate them in equal measure. They were heavy. This is not hyperbole. I doubt that most people own a pair of shoes that weighs more than 3lbs for both shoes, combined. These motherfuckers were 4lbs. 7 oz. PER BOOT.

Also, being made from heavy duty full grain leather, they were a stiff and inflexible blister factory. I wore them everyday, all day out of necessity. Every evening I unlaced them and shucked my swollen, beat up feet from their hard, black shells. It was 5 months until they became comfortably formed to my feet or, more likely, my feet had formed to them.

I have a friend named Aaron. He taught me how to cut beef a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away and he had a story he loved to tell with great relish from a time when he was working the floor at a particularly rough and tumble slaughterhouse staffed by ex-cons. One day he was skinning a huge steer with a particularly grizzly old con when he accidentally slashed his partner's hand to the bone with his skinning knife. The gentleman looked at his hand, looked at Aaron and then, while stanching the bleeding with his mouth, said "Shiit Aaron! Looks like you and me are married now!"

That's how I felt after 5 months of blisters and bloody socks with my pair of big black anachronistic boots. We were married. I wore them most days for 5 years until the soles worn through and I was forced to send them off to get resoled. 3 months later they returned from Seattle with a new set of Vibram soles, cleaned and waxed, looking nearly brand new. In 2003 I moved to New York City and they became my default Winter boots. Through the snow, ice and salt of 12 Winters I abused them, took them for granted. The leather was scuffed and stained with white rings of sno-melt. The soles had worn nearly smooth and cracked. I hadn't seen or noticed them and they had suffered. When I sat down to clean and wax them a month before I moved to Vermont I was ashamed.

 A New Hope

You never know what something means until it's too late, it seems. After having my boots as a constant companion for 20 years I was coming to terms with the fact that they were not going to make it another 20. After cycling through anger, denial, etc. I decided to throw myself onto the mercy of the universe and set up an eBay alert for Raichle 11.5 boots and see what happened. What happened for two months was nothing. But one morning I awoke to see that not only had someone listed a pair of Raichle's in my size but even the same obscure model, of which there was almost no information on the internet. $130 flew from my paypal account and for a week I waited like a child for a box to plonk down on my front step.

When the day finally came I took the box and hid it in the closet. For days I could not bring myself to open it so contorted were my emotions with worry and disbelief. Obviously something would be wrong with them. They wouldn't fit. The leather would be dried out and crispy like an old saddle. On and on the spirals of neurosis went. When we're young we don't know what thing mean but we also don't worry them to death either. So it goes.

I cracked the box on a Saturday afternoon.

The boots were perfect. Someone had obviously worn them to the store, once, and promptly stuck them in the back of the closet never to be seen again. The only things missing were the wads of paper stuffed in the toes. I slid my feet in and carefully laced them up. The smooth white leather lining caressed my feet. Magic and bliss. Until I started walking around in them.

Holy SHIT those motherfuckers were stiff as a wedding night prick! The love/hate relationship had been made anew.

I'm now 3 months into breaking my new Eigers in. I wear them dutifully everyday, all day and I have the bruises, blisters and weird calluses to prove it. In the beginning I was afraid that maybe, because I'm now an old man, my feet wouldn't endure months of aching feet. Perhaps I had just gone irretrievably soft. Then there was my daily climb up the hill from town to my house now made 4x harder by the small boat anchors tied to my feet.

Maybe I would just die of a heart attack, thinking to myself "Is this how it ends?" as I sank dizzily to my knees, head thrumming with proud moments and regrets as everything faded to grey.

Well, good news all the way around!

One, I have not died and I am now, in point of fact, in much better shape because of those heavy bastards than I was even 5 or 6 years ago, well before I officially become a sooty old geezer. And two, while the boots aren't exactly like wearing bedroom slippers, they are almost comfortable and 2 full months ahead of schedule. Just in time for Spring here in Vermont and the miles of hiking trails just a few minutes from my front door. Oh, and those old boots? Well, as it turns out, I have found a shop that is willing to resole/restitch them, replace the nonexistent leather linings and fix the cracked and stained scree collars. Unfortunately, good work doesn't come cheap but, when I'm more flush with cash this Summer I'll send them away for a few months to be renewed while I get to know these Heavy Horses a little bit better.

For draft horses, everyday is Hump day.

Weekend Cider Update: Mistakes Were Made. Plus Saké!

Here's a one sentence update on my cider making project: It went good, then it went bad.

A few technical items before we get to the fuckery:

1) I added a 1/2 teaspoon of Pectin enzyme that helps make the cider less cloudy to the juice about 1 1/2 weeks in.

As a natural wine nerd I have nothing against cloudy drink but it became pretty apparent that, if left untreated, the final product was going to be downright murky. Not exactly what you want when you're trying to convince people that your weird homemade cider is not a horrible tasting neurotoxin. Plus, pectinase helps free up some extra sugar and thus a bit more alcohol, which is nice.

2) The fermentation took 3 weeks, about 1 week longer than I was planning. This is actually good because a long, cool fermentation produces less headache inducing elements than when it goes warm and fast.

3) The end result was nice. Not super apple-y but clean with a crisp, white wine mineral mouthfeel and finish. In all honesty, surprisingly good! I'm picking up 3 more gallons tomorrow when we head to the store.

What would I change? Well, I'd like to add a pound of sugar per gallon to get a bit more alcohol. the apples up here are well suited to good tasting cider, it turns out, but they don't have much sugar. I'd guess that my first attempt was around 3-4% where most cider is around a beer-like 5-6% and the lack of alcohol makes the mouthfeel slightly off compared to quality commercial dry ciders.

Johnny Appleseed, real estate speculator, gentrified eastern waterways by planting fucking apple trees.

So, what did I fuck up?

In the actual MAKING of the cider, nothing. It couldn't have gone better. I was fully expecting that I was going to end up with murky turd-water or a marginally drinkable cider that had more in common with kombucha than Crispin. Anyway, where I failed was in assuming that champagne style bottles took regular American-sized bottle caps. Spoiler alert: They Do Not. I found this out by tearing the glass lip off the top of my first bottle, completely grenading my heavy duty capper thingie and spraying my kitchen with shattered glass. It was a real donkey fuck and now I have blue painters tape over the top of all my bottles as I wait for my 29mm caps, new capper and 29mm capping bell to arrive. Lesson learned: do not assume anything when it comes to cheese eating Euro equipment. 

Anyhow, my first fermentation project, all technical issues aside, was a success which has won me enough proof-of-concept brownie points to order a big-assed brew bucket in which I plan on making a pilot batch of Nigori Saké with some organic sweet rice from the hippy bulk aisle, some Koji from the internet and the same champagne yeast I used for the cider.

Warning: Sake ahead.

 Don't worry, rice wine is much more complicated than cider making and there will be MANY more entertaining opportunities for me to completely dick it up along the way. Have a great weekend.