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

[Daniel Kolbus]

Hi all,

Regarding the calcium supplements and my struggle to get a well-working
water kefir:

I read at (http://www.yemoos.com/faqwaintro.html) that one reason for
adding lemon is that it contains calcium, which apparently is needed in
some cases with water kefir cultures. Another thing is that the pH is
lowered, which may help the culture at least in the beginning. Dried fruits
apparently contain other nutrients that the kefir grains may need. As my
grains haven´t started to multiply or produce any mentionable probiotic
drink during the first month of water+raw sugar culture I started adding
dried fruits and yesterday baking soda. Let´s see if that will be
beneficial, today the taste was slightly sweet metallic, but it might as
well come from the dried apricot. Any ideas would be helpful. The water is
medium hard (8), do not contain that much chlorine and the temp. is around
22 degr.

An interesting thing was that I used the waste liquid from one passage as a
starter in another project - fermented porridge. I mix oat and rye grains
with the waste kefir liquid + water and deem to my surprise - after 24
hours I had a sour, fermented product. So, there seem to be activity in the
waste liquid after all - but it apparently likes the oat/rye milieu better
than the raw sugar milieu.

Regards,
Daniel


2014-03-01 5:37 GMT+01:00 Frantisek Algoldor Apfelbeck <
algoldor at foodhackingbase.org>:

> 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
>
>
> Disclaimer - there are other people who have access to this email account,
> please be aware of that it is part of the design. For "highly private
> communication" use algoldor at yahoo.com
>
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