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

[Daniel Kolbus]

Hi all,

Just wanted to give an update on my issue with water kefir grains that
didn't work. Well, I would say they work pretty OK now. I added some dried
fruit and a slight knife edge baking soda and a few tiny bits of lemon to
the grain solution. After a few days there were some bubbles and the taste
was less sweet. I continued with the second fermentation without grains
containing dried fruit and lemon in a sealed bottle and it resulted in a
fizzy drink with grape tone after a few days. I guess I succeeded!?

In addition, I continue with my fermented porridge originally made from the
water kefir grain supernatant. I has a slight taste of sour milk but the
texture is of course more grainy (mix of oat, rye, spelt and barley). I eat
it cold for breakfast together with some sweet topping and crunched nuts.
Works well for me!

Regards
Daniel

On Saturday, March 1, 2014, Daniel Kolbus <kolbus.daniel at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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.
>
>
>
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