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

Tue Mar 11 13:05:04 CET 2014

Excellent Daniel!
I wonder if you have a chance (and also the others) to measure the 
weight of the grains so you could more easily see if they are growing 
properly = increasing in amount/weight, of course checking by eye sight 
is fine too but sometimes hard to remember ... If several of us keep 
notes for few weeks we can get quite nice data/idea what is going on and 
what works well for the culture. I should be harvesting my cultures 
tomorrow, I plan to make a post on our brand new forum which Steffen put 
together then

http://lab.foodhackingbase.org/

I put also link to it on our wiki under How to get in touch

https://foodhackingbase.org/wiki/How_to_get_in_touch

I hope it is OK Steffen, or shall we keep it off for now yet?

Talk to you all soon, I've another manual hardworking day behind me, 
waiting for the rain = off time = more posting here :-)

Sincerely,

FAA

On 2014-03-11 00:20, Daniel Kolbus wrote:
> 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 In addition, I continue with my fermented porridge originally made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 [1]) 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/ [2]
>>> 
>>> 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 [3]
>> 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 [4] 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.
> 
> 
> Links:
> ------
> [1] http://www.yemoos.com/faqwaintro.html
> [2] http://design.arkreactor.com/
> [3] http://hackerspaces.org
> [4] http://gingerbeerplant.net

-- 
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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