No idea what happens in Helsinki. In Kuopio they are in Finnish only and that’s typical, but Helsinki is a unique place.

And remember to check out your local craftspeople who might have no website or any internet presence at all! At least in Finland, in bigger cities there is a yearly knife making class that usually gets filled and ends in exhibition, some alumni end up quite good. And there is usually local smith who knows what they are doing.

It dissolves in cold (tested with 14C) water, just takes a bit more time.

When it comes to mead, questions like “why” are outside of scope! Magic is magic.

Other than finesse from literature, meadmaking is very simple - start with something like 300g honey diluted to 1L with clean water, try not to heat at any stage (I tried centrifuging frames - works, obviously - and I tried just dumping honeycomb wax and all into water - this is yet simpler and you get amazing propolis flavor in mead), pitch wine/mead yeast (for example those from store.zymologia.fi, that’s my store, very much affiliated, but it’s what I use), lock and leave for about a year, longer is better.

It’s “compleat”! Totally best book on topic.

I happen to have a beer bottle with a crown cap, better get to work right now!

If you inoculate it with vigorous yeast and add a bit sugar, you can just pour new bottles into active fermenter with minimal spoilage risk, certainly safer than storing non inoculated medium.

It’s usually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan_Lake though

You can clean the grain by blowing air through it - starchy and sugary parts are denser, while fiber shells fly. I guess most of dust is just dust. That dust might enhance coagulation and make product cleaner. Might be worth investigating. There is nothing simple there.

They actually ship best at +4C, fridge storage temperature they are used to.

Haha, did this months before trump the first, enjoying early start fruits!

There are no full alternatives in whole world for cf, unfortunately, but that’s just because they reward lazyness. We should identify particular issues and stop placing all eggs in competitors basket.

I haven’t done my part yet here.

Are big drewers striking with police? That’s a coincidence?

Anyway, just to mentuon, Alzymologist Oy is NOT on strike, yeast is available as usual.

We have https://professional.sunstargum.com/en-en/#cmp-accordion__item-europe too. There was really nice toothpaste from Urtekram, but it’s gone from stores for a year now for some reason.

Dry some leaves of this guy before it blooms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamaenerion_angustifolium. You can squeeze them by hands before drying or not, the tea will be kinda “red” or “green” accordingly.

This thing is awesome too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypericum, just dry the flowers or any part of the plant with blooming flowers attached.

If you are into fruity tastes, just dry loads of raspberry leaves or whatever berries you have and steep them with tiny amount of any tea.

We have a shop that sells some good teas made in Finland: teemaa.fi

https://www.poppamies.fi/

Going after light color quickly ends up a challenge. Extract mfgrs do not invest much effort into conforming to color, it’s tricky and would quickly kick the costs up, while few users will go full length of making sure the rest operations keep color light. Pretty much anything that is not fermentable sugar will darken beer on every heating stage. Fermentable sugar would darken too, but a bit slower. So going pale requires good ingredients and experience, you’ll get there eventually if you want.

I personally do not enjoy chasing light colors, though. Not worth the trouble imo. Still play with it occasionally. It is indeed much easier with fullgrain, which is all I do.

As far as I know, birds milk is a soviet recipe, comfort food for former ussr sufferers, and the only way to get it to taste really good is DIY which is super simple and fast. Industrial fab just calls for instant enshittification of this treat. Still nice to see the concept alive.

I just bought discount auctioned server from Hetzner, but it was a massive overkill, just happened to be that way; their cheap VMs are totally enough.