Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/7742150
Apologies if cross-posting isn't appreciated, the RPG community is splintered enough over here that I'm never sure where to post things.
> [!](https://awkwardturtle.itch.io/cloud-crawl) > > I wrote this as part of the CBR+PNK Jam, and if people aren't familiar CBR+PNK is a super condensed Forged in the Dark one shot system where you play a group of cyberpunk operatives on their last run. > > Cloud Crawl was sort of an experiment to see if I could capture the sort of procedural generation depth crawl games (as epitomized in Stygian Library) in a small sized single pamphlet package. I'm pretty pleased with how it turns out, and I'm also pretty sure no one has ever done a depth crawl in a binary tree before (happy to be proven wrong here if someone can find an example!). > > [! > ! > !](https://awkwardturtle.itch.io/cloud-crawl) > > The game is half off this weekend for its launch, but I'm also keeping it fully stocked up with community copies for the time being so feel free to grab one for free if you want to take a look! >
The bochet and berry meads aren't doing anything super out of the ordinary (well, out of the ordinary if you're already caramelizing your honey) but the Strawberry Lemonade one is weird enough that I keep meaning to do a full write up about it.
Just gotta actually get around to setting up a blog or website or something so I can host it someplace useful.
Thank you! I have next to nil artistic ability, so I actually really surprised myself by managing to make something I actually liked with these labels.
[!](https://awkwardturtle.itch.io/cloud-crawl)
I wrote this as part of the CBR+PNK Jam, and if people aren't familiar CBR+PNK is a super condensed Forged in the Dark one shot system where you play a group of cyberpunk operatives on their last run.
Cloud Crawl was sort of an experiment to see if I could capture the sort of procedural generation depth crawl games (as epitomized in Stygian Library) in a small sized single pamphlet package. I'm pretty pleased with how it turns out, and I'm also pretty sure no one has ever done a depth crawl in a binary tree before (happy to be proven wrong here if someone can find an example!).
[! ! !](https://awkwardturtle.itch.io/cloud-crawl)
The game is half off this weekend for its launch, but I'm also keeping it fully stocked up with community copies for the time being so feel free to grab one for free if you want to take a look!
We semi-recently got a corker which has let us move a bunch of our meads out of carboys and into bottles (and then boxes). It's extremely fun to be able to pull out a corked, labled bottle of mead at a gathering, just an extra bit of pizazz.
Details of the labels.
Burnt Honey: A bochet that's absolutely delicious, but a bit too sweet to drink a lot of. The yeast simply gave up partway through the fermentation (I assume due to the hilariously high SG) and rather than restart it we decided to lave it as is.
The Hard Way: Elderberry + Blueberry mead, nicely aged, lightly backsweetened, balanced with a bit of acid. Tastes shockingly similar to cranberry juice. Hence the name, a bunch of effort and a year of time to create something that you could get a similar end point to with cranberry juice and vodka. Still super nice to drink.
Summer Lovin': Fast turnaround mead made with fermenting juiced strawberries with the honey, then filtering immediately after primary, and backsweetening/flavoring with "oleo saccharum" and some citric acid. Extremely tasty, excellent summer drink, we liked it so much we've made two batches of it. Best part is that total time from start to bottle is under a month.
All of these were filtered using plate filters down to the "semi-filtration" level, which appears to be enough to stabilize them for back sweetening! My theory is that although the "semi-filtration" of about half a micron can't promise it removes all bacteria, yeast tends to be significantly larger and is removed without issue. At the very least we've had no bottle bombs yet.
To explain why there's a bee in a garbage can, "Garbo" was a combined last name me and my wife were throwing around as a possibility when we were getting married. The name was veto'ed, but we kept it as our "meadery" name, and since it brought to mind a little Garbage Bee that's what I doodled as our logo. It stuck as a theme after that.
Yeah, I don't know if that tracks. Wingspan has sold more than 1.3 million copies (as of September 2021) which is way way way more than the average board game sells.
I'd far more believe that they couldn't keep up with production than they were intentionally limiting supply.
Ooo, fantastic. I've been doing sugar extractions of lemon zest for a mead recently, and we tried drying and blitzing the zests after filtering.
For us the powder was nice (partly because it got a bit candied during the process) but fairly mild in taste. I think it could still absolutely be fun to use to sprinkle on desserts of drinks, for visuals if nothing else.
Somehow my 4 year old phone's camera doesn't look as nice. A complete mystery.
Having recently tried the filtering thing, it's still a roll of the dice unless you're using the much more expensive professional grade filters.
It does get your mead clear as hell though, and removes a ton of off flavors.
I plan to do a full write-up about this mead and brew once I go through the backsweetening/balancing process, but I thought this was interesting enough to share as is.
The plan was to make a low ABV, quick turnaround strawberry lemonade mead to have on tap for the summer. For a ~6.5 gallon batch I used a full pallet of strawberries juiced into 7.14lbs of juice, and 9.68lbs of honey (really just the rest of the honey in the bucket). Low starting OG of 1.057 which fermented down to 0.994 in 11 days.
I wanted to see if the combo of low ABV and aggressive filtering would let me skip out on any of the aging process.
Before it'd even fully finished blubbing, I ran it through a series plate/disk filters. The image shows, from left to right, Original -> Clarifying (5-7um) -> Polishing (1-2um) -> Semi-Sterilizing (~0.5um).
Taste at each stage: Undrinkable -> Bad -> Pretty Good -> Shockingly Clean
Most of the strawberry flavor was sadly left behind, but I think that was true even before the filtering. Left with a nice strawberry aroma and a hint of the taste in a very smooth, if lacking in depth and complexity, mead.
My conclusions from this is that filtering bypasses the "suck less" part of aging, where off flavors are removed, but (obvious in retrospect) does nothing to build character and complexity.
I now plan to backsweeten using a batch of lemon oleo saccharum I made, sour it with citric acid, and potentially add some strawberry concentrate to bump up the strawberry flavor. I'll bottle some to see how actual aging treats it, and put the rest on tap to enjoy this summer.
I'm no expert, been doing it as a hobby for about five years now, but from my own experience I'll make a few notes:
- Be prepared to wait for your mead to age out, especially if you go high ABV and pure honey with no additions. If you want fast turnaround do sweet, low ABV meads or make beer instead.
- Time forgives all sins. If your mead tastes like ass, simply wait long enough and it'll probably taste great. Sometimes that time frame is 2 or 3 years, but it'll (probably) get there eventually. Rack into a new vessel every once in a while as long as you're seeing sediment collect at the bottom.
- Adding nutrients, especially adding it in steps during primary, makes a huge difference. As in, being able to drink your mead in 4 months rather than a year+. I've found the easiest way to do it is with Fermaid O and the TOSNA Calculator. There are more complex nutrient calculators out there if you want to get deeper into the math.
- I've also started adding O2 during primary fermentation, although I started it around the same time I started using yeast nutrient so I can't really tell you how much of an impact it makes.
- I've personally found that doing one gallon batches just isn't worth it, for all that I see it commonly online. Unless you're doing low ABV mead, it's going to take time to age out into something nice. At which point if it's good, you'll be disappointed you didn't do a larger batch. It takes more setup equipment and 5+ gallon glass carboys are pricey, but if you have a local homebrew store getting a basic fermentation bucket (often found in beer homebrew kits) is very worth it. That also goes with getting actual airlocks which are cheap enough that I think it's worth picking up to take less risks with your mead
- See if you can get your honey locally, and if they'll cut you a deal on buying in bulk. If you can't, webstaurantstore.com has surprisingly reasonable prices for delivering 5 gallon buckets of honey.
- Making your wine sweeter is a good way to make it taste good faster without having to age as long, but do give dry meads a try! They're very nice!
- I have filtered mead (using basic plate filters and gravity), and it improved the taste and clarity more than I was expecting. No idea how successful it was at stabilizing it because I didn't backsweeten afterwards. From my research, if you want 100% guaranteed stabilization from filtering you're looking at some pretty expensive equipment and filters. By the same token the science behind chemical stabilization as talked about in the OP is not as cut and dry as I was hoping, so I don't know that there are good guarantees anywhere for this.
- Edit: Do research first if you want to attempt a bochet. Boiling honey expands to 3x the original volume, and superhot molten sugar is one of the most dangerous things you can have splattering around in your kitchen!
Got them out of the ground to make room for the peppers to go in. Looking forward to making a bunch of toum, garlic fermented honey, and whatever else we can think of to try and use them all this year.
My wife and I recently got a charcoal smoker/grill after our old bullet smoker finally rusted through. It came with a pizza oven attachment and we've been slowly perfecting our dough and cooking techniques.
The combo of sourdough and high temperature baking produces the exact sort of crispy, chewy, slightly charred pizza experience I crave. We're constantly rotating through different topping combos (and begging friends to come over so we can make more pizza without having to gorge ourselves).
Favorite so far is probably the spicy honey aged garlic pizza, but it's all been fantastic. Any got any good pizza topping suggestions? Unusual options especially appreciated.
AwkwardTurtle @beehaw.org Photonics Engineer by day, indie RPG writer by night, especially interested in open/CC games.
See my stuff here: http://awkwardturtle.games