[foodhackingbase] recipes, wiki structure and other + water kefir and ginger beer plant

Sat Mar 1 05:37:00 CET 2014

Thanks for the emails, answers in the text as ### to the things which I 
feel relevant to me :-)

On 2014-03-01 06:42, Steffen Beyer wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> On Mon, 24 Feb 2014 00:17:18 +0900, algoldor at foodhackingbase.org wrote:
>> I'll make a short wiki page about makgeolli which
>> is traditional Korean rice alcoholic beverage, upload it to the wiki,
>> manual form is already there in I think proper section (Steffen was
>> taking care about that) and lets play with that as an example how to
>> link it, tag it etc. that may be the simplest way after that we can
>> apply it to the rest keeping to some "structure", what do you think?
> 
> Good idea.

### I'll try to make the article today or tomorrow, sorry for the delay.

> 
>> http://design.arkreactor.com/
>> 
>> or we can go for some alternative, does anyone know about any
>> preferably open source?
> 
> The system is Discourse¹, as far as I can see, a Ruby on Rails
> application. Not a bad choice in comparison to PHP.  ,)
> 
> Currently we have a wiki and two mailing lists, one at hackerspaces.org
> and a new one (incubator) at our new host, Uberspace. We should think a
> moment where to go from here. The wiki is fine for now, but regarding
> forum/mailing list I see two user friendly options:
> 
> 1. Stick to mailing lists, offer a web interface for reading (and
> possibly writing)
> 
> 2. Switch to a web forum, users can subscribe to get email 
> notifications
> 
> Basically I would prefer the first option, providing mailing lists to
> power users, web access for the rest of us. In any way, we should try
> to get a tight integration with MediaWiki, i.e. at least
> Single-Sign-On, instead of running multiple separate systems.

### I like mailing list as a media for communication, however concerning 
answering questions especially about fermentations and keeping easy to 
access history of these topic specific conversations (and reopening 
them) the forum seems to me really nice.

### Could you give me some example of nice web interface for reading the 
mail posts? The forum which I would like to see to happen in the future 
is likely to take time to establish and I do not want to jeopardize our 
current projects with something too big to chew, so little by little. I 
think we have several months to play with media wiki etc. before we will 
make it all nice and shiny including links to our activities on other 
portals etc. that is just my opinion. If we find time for more serious 
discussion about the forums before 31c3 where we could go through it 
together that would be nice. I wanted more or less check what is the 
situation out there and if there is not some easy to use open source 
well supported alternative already which would be simple to integrate. 
It looks like that is not really the case now so, lets give it time.

> 
> Software choices seem rather limited, suggestions welcome.
> 
> (...time passes...)
> 
> Just read a bit more about Discourse. It seems to support replying via
> email and features pluggable authentication modules, although there is
> none for Mediawiki, yet.
> 
> So this might be the way to go...?
> 
>> By the way before I run away we need as a group to talk about how to
>> properly cultivate the ginger beer plant and water kefir biofilm
>> polycultures.
> 
> I'm using the GBP from gingerbeerplant.net here, which worked fine so
> far for various brews. Usually I let it ferment openly for three days,
> then one day in bottles.

### I did my first fermentation after coming back from Europe, one batch 
of water kefir (51 g of culture in 5 l of brew) and one batch of ginger 
beer plant (194 g of culture in 5 l of brew). Both were 7% (w/v; 350 g 
of light brown sugar) and 0.25 (w/v; 12.5 g) of black tea. They were 
ready for bottling after 4 days of fermentation needing another two days 
of secondary fermentation. All fermentation anaerobic but I left around 
15% of volume in the vessel for air so the yeast have oxygen to 
multiply. I'm considering to use aeration as the beer brewers use in the 
future to make sure that the yeast has enough oxygen to multiply.

> 
> The growth of the plant is minimal, though. IIRC I read about using
> lime (chalk) to feed it. Could this be possible?

### I've read before that the water kefir culture (and most likely also 
ginger beer plant culture) is originating from milk kefir culture. As 
Daniel pointed to me, it is likely that culture which was growing for 
thousands years or at least hundreds of years in milk may need some 
supplements if you move it from this media. I know there is quite a 
decent amount of calcium in milk but also potassium, variety of vitamins 
and of course broad selection of proteins and amino acids. So in a way 
if it is really correct that the culture is originating from milk kefir 
than it is likely it is quite "spoiled" and we should therefore either 
try to find a way how to make it tougher or keep it spoiled. So calcium 
and other supplements are good idea I think. What do you think?

> 
>> PS And yes I'm transferring to the new email
>> algoldor at foodhackingbase.org which Steffen created for me and I guess
>> for anyone else who would like to get it :-)
> 
> Sure thing. Forwarding would also be possible.
> 
>> I talked about the idea of bringing people closer to the biological
>> principles of fermentation. What do you think of a category called
>> Category:Fermentation with two subcategories.
>> Category:Fermentation:Alcoholic and Category:Fermentation:LacticAcid.
>> We could tag every recipee with it and everynone who is interested
>> can have a look at it and understands the principles what is going on.
> 
> Yes, makes sense. But I would suggest an other naming scheme for the
> subcategories, as ":" is already used for namespaces. So instead of
> Fermentation:Alcoholic, how about
> 
> 1. Alcoholic Fermentation
> 2. Fermentation/Alcoholic
> 
> The first option is very readable – the hierarchy graph does not need
> to be represented in the name². And we would gain more flexibility if
> one subcategory sometime gains more than one parent. What do you think?
> 
> Sincerely,

### Leaving this up to you, lets make few example and see how it works 
before it gets too big and time intensive to change.

### Many thanks for the post,

### Sincerely,

### FAA

-- 
Frantisek Algoldor Apfelbeck

biotechnologist&kvasir and hacker

http://www.frantisekapfelbeck.org

"There is no way to peace, peace is the way." Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

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