151–160 of 190 posts
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There are a number of other examples... Like the companies selling whip cream chargers by the case of 600... You know, for the people that need to make whipped cream by the gallon at home.
Bakeries do exist and bulk orders do make sense for them.
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In germany beer homebrewing is limited at 200L/year (approx 50gallons, which is a respectable but not huge amount if you have friends). Anything above you have to pay taxes on. Those taxes however are pretty minor for a typical 20L batch, and customs are only allowed to investigate a case if they suspect a big enough discrepancy (I think 10€). So there's a group of petty homebrewers who don't make use of their free 2…
If it's just homebrewing / for personal, family / friends consumption, how would they even find out? A lot of laws are only there to enforce if they actually uncover a big operation. Like, during the 'rona lockdowns you weren't allowed to have more than X visitors, but no policeman would want to go door to door to see if people were having visitors. (actually don't quote me on it, the visitors thing may have been adv…
And yet there are plenty of countries where this happened…
Ontario has a bunch of make-your-own wine companies that work like wine bricks. 1. you buy 5 gallons of grape juice for ~$20 per gallon. 2. yeast is dropped into your grape juice 3. you come to the store to decant your grape juice into wine bottles and cork them up. Since no alcohol is bought or sold, you avoid the (very high) taxes on liquor. You end up with ~28 bottles of wine for ~$4 per bottle. It's not the great…
DIY winemaking kits can actually make some pretty decent wines if you spend a bit of time and money getting proper equipment. Not a lot - $100 will get you a really, really good setup with two glass carboys for fermenting, siphons, thief and test jar, hydrometer, corker, etc. I've been making my own wines for years now. Occasionally I'll do a full from-scratch wine, but more often I buy a $40 kit from Midwest Supplie…
PET plastic fermenters (Better Bottle, FermZilla, Fermonster, etc.) are much nicer to work with.
Ontario has a bunch of make-your-own wine companies that work like wine bricks. 1. you buy 5 gallons of grape juice for ~$20 per gallon. 2. yeast is dropped into your grape juice 3. you come to the store to decant your grape juice into wine bottles and cork them up. Since no alcohol is bought or sold, you avoid the (very high) taxes on liquor. You end up with ~28 bottles of wine for ~$4 per bottle. It's not the great…
thankfully, here, we have Trader Joe's and their "3 buck chuck". the local Kroger store (Fred Meyer) also has $3 wine, but I think of that as "emergency wine" - the 3 buck chuck is much, much better. I have some questions though: 1. do they teach you about sanitization and airlocks, or is it simply "toss some yeast in this bottle" 2. I'm guessing no aging? it would be awesome if they allowed you to pop some in a barr…
Never seen a shop do ageing, so the wine will be noticeably "young". My parents like dryer and sharper white wines anyways (Pinot Grigio, Riesling, etc.) so it doesn't bother them. Also note that due to taxes and such, the cheapest wine you'll find commercially is C$11 a bottle, so even at C$20 / gallon you're getting a great deal if you like the resulting wines.
Personally, I quite like the wines my folks get through these shops - properly chilled they make a wonderfully refreshing beverage in the summer, and we'll often drink a few bottles on the back deck together when I go to see them.
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The thing about human psychology is that if you tell someone not to do something, especially something that is not outright harmful to themselves or others, they will yearn to do it. The answer to alcoholism is to de-glamorize it. Young impressionable minds are susceptible to such glamorization. If governments around the world are seriously committed to reduce alcohol consumption, better shun it, rather than putting…
I wonder if they simply banned alcohol advertising what the effect would be. That was a big thing for tobacco in the 90s. I still remember “joe cool” the camel on the back of my parents magazines.
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DIY winemaking kits can actually make some pretty decent wines if you spend a bit of time and money getting proper equipment. Not a lot - $100 will get you a really, really good setup with two glass carboys for fermenting, siphons, thief and test jar, hydrometer, corker, etc. I've been making my own wines for years now. Occasionally I'll do a full from-scratch wine, but more often I buy a $40 kit from Midwest Supplie…
I would recommend avoiding glass carboys for fermenting. They are heavy, especially when filled, difficult to clean with their narrow mouths, and quite dangerous if they shatter when you accidentally drop them. (They're easy to drop while you're cleaning them and they're wet and slippery.) There are numerous accounts on home brewing forums of trips to the emergency room because a glass carboy broke and injured someon…
Cleaning any bottle with a narrow neck is extra work, but you can get it done with a pipe cleaner, and it's best not to clean at an elevation or to do so in a deep basin.
These are things that come naturally after handling significant glassware for a period of time.
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Or cryptography. It used to be illegal as well, right?
I have a tattoo of an encryption routine, partly as a protest. Unfortunately I changed it at the last minute to make it look cooler and introduced a bug. Here's the entire proper Perl 5 code: undef $/;print $ The buggy version is slightly shorter but I depended on an incorrect reading of some tricky wording in the docs and didn't test thoroughly enough. I'm considering turning the tattoo into a diff. I recommend Cryp…
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Til you can get 20% out of fermentation, I always thought the limit was about 16 since that’s the top end for beer and wine. Is it because starch yeasts can keep on keeping further than glucose ones?
It's the yeast strains. Some can survive higher alcohol concentrations than others. For instance this[1] one can achieve up to 25% under right conditions. [1] https://www.whitelabs.com/yeast-single?id=146&type=YEAST&sty... No yeast can digest starches afaik. It's why you need a mashing phase to turn starches into simpler sugars when brewing beer.
I've also come across "triple distilled" turbo yeast that's supposed to be less harsh but not as high ABV.