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

Thu Mar 13 14:14:34 CET 2014

Thanks Steffen,
I'm completely done from the work every day (and also reading "The 
Hunger Games" novel, lets be honest ...), but I will put some threads 
up.

I wonder is there a chance of "deeper structure" like have a "directory" 
: non alcoholic ferments, and under this post for example directory: 
kombucha,  another one for water kefir etc? In this way we coul split 
the forum in to different categories some dedicated to the low 
temperature cooking (sous vide) or incubators, other to fermentations 
both alcoholic and non alcoholic, other to food preparations etc.

Just a question :-)

Talk to you all soon,

Sincerely,

FAA

PS I've harvested water kefir (WK) culture and ginger beer plant (GBP) 
culture and these are the results:

24/2/2014
WK- 51 (51-53)g
GBP - 194 g

5/3/2014
WK - 59 g
GBP - 207 g

12/3/2014
WK - 63 g
GBP - 201 g

The temperature was around 24C for most of the time, later on (last 
three days or so) 20C. Medium black tea (0.25% (w/v)) and light brown 
sugar (7% (w/v)). I use local spring water, no chlorine (sometimes I use 
the one from tab but not very often).

On 2014-03-12 00:50, Steffen Beyer wrote:
> I wrote up some thoughts here:
> 
> http://lab.foodhackingbase.org/t/fhb-web-presence/13
> 
> and would suggest to leave the forum as playground for at least a week 
> or two...
> 
> Would be good to have some real threads going there for testing
> purposes. But I can't make any promises now, in the worst case they
> will vanish.
> 
> Sincerely,
> --
> Steffen Beyer <steffen at beyer.io>
> 
>> On 11.03.2014, at 13:05, Frantisek Algoldor Apfelbeck 
>> <algoldor at foodhackingbase.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 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
>> 
>> 
>> 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
>> 

-- 
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