In retrospect, I should have saved it, but it was my second beer ever and went for an overly complex recipe also. Knowing what I know now, it would have probably aged nicely.

I’ve discovered boiling is not fully necessary to get a good brew and that heather tips make it awesome. I’ve just added maybe 1-2 handfuls now to the mash. Next autumn I plan to go nuts on collecting the thing and will try to fit maybe half a kilo in there, see how it comes out.

Honorable mention to red yeast rice, I have this notion of doing a rice mash for maybe a week with it and then plopping that into a raw ale mash to get enzymes and flavour of red yeast rice wine in a beer, as I’ve noticed that its enzymes also work up to 70ish Celsius.

Did a raw ale with heather tips foraged from the forest that turned out pretty good.

And now fermenting a raw pumpkin ale. Added around 3 kg pumpkin mash to the mash. A bit difficult to work with and had an OG of around 1.055, bit on the low end there. Fingers crossed it’ll be drinkable. Assuming it’s going to come in at session strength.

Loving the goblin fermentation vibes you re giving off there. Never stop.

Mostly beer brewer here, so dumb things I’ve done were mostly process related. Fermenting beer with unsanitized wood chips - turned sour. Adding too much rye or pumpkin - took me 12 hours to get the damn thing made - stuck mash.

Fermentation wise, not brewing, messed around with some koji with varying degrees of success.

If you’re doing things like spam alcohol, have you also considered miso as an ingredient?

that link returns a 404 error for me

taking this opportunity to not double post and comment on your post as well

don’t remember where I heard this from, was a long time ago (perhaps during some sort of botany class or another) but hop compounds should exhibit some surface tension action (like what soap does to water), so that might be the explanation for the foam

christmas-y cider sounds awesome.

edit - ninja’d on 404 comment - ignore that part

Oh brother, where art thou?

Man of constant sorrow. Nuff said

Gout. Big toe on fire, throbbing with pain, joint swollen until there are no discernable features. Even a feather touching the area is enough to generate hot searing pain. The constant urge to ‘pop’ the big toe joint set against the impossibility to actually wriggle the toe without passing out.

Should drink lots of water to flush out the uric acid, but every trip to the bathroom has to be carefully considered because walking there takes 2-3 minutes of grabbing on to nearby things/people while stepping awkwardly on the outside edge of the foot, instead of 20 seconds of normal walking.

I’ve had severe tooth pain for a couple of weeks (a cyst - the pain killed the nerves in some of my teeth), and 3 days of gout until the meds worked well enough to walk less painfully were worse.

No Man’s Sky. Pretty sweet deal, I think.

I’d just start mining random stuff to put together to make better mining gear to mine better and more stuff.

Then just get on my dinghy and explore the 'verse while looking out for a better dinghy. Maybe plop down a few bases on nice planets, rinse and repeat.

In addition to everything else suggested here already, I would say maybe cloves or tonka beans, if they suit your palate. Careful though, they might be overpowering. Maybe a vanilla pod or two, depending on the quantity.

Planning on trying my very first raw ale. So far, was thinking of doing a 3ish hour mash, finishing for about 30 minutes at 80 C, and adding something like 60g Simcoe (14.4%) to the mash. For laziness reasons I’d like to avoid doing a hop tea. Has anyone tried this before?

Sweet. Are you planning on using any spices or just the apple juice?