Four Good Dogs
Meadmaking, cooking, and building things worth finishing.
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meadmaking
Batches Two and Three: One Brew Day, Two Meads
Six pounds of Georgia tupelo, a packet of champagne yeast, a new conical fermenter, and a plan to split one fermentation into a sparkling mead and an apricot melomel. Day zero, mistakes included.
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meadmaking
Batch One: It Turned Into Wine
A week on the oak and vanilla, and the flat, yeasty mead from racking day has quietly become something that smells like Sauvignon Blanc. Plus the plan for sweetening — off-dry, by taste.
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cooking recipes
Pique: A Grandmother's Hot Sauce, and the Vinegar I Ran Out Of
Pique is a Puerto Rican country hot sauce — unblended, fermented, built by feel. I made a dozen bottles, ran out of live vinegar halfway through, and turned the mistake into an experiment.
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cooking recipes
A Gallon of Vanilla, Two Kinds of Bean, and a Bottle of Rum
Vanilla extract is one of the easiest, most patient projects in the kitchen — beans, alcohol, and time. I put up a full gallon in rum, split between Tahitian and Madagascar beans.
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meadmaking
Why I Made a Dozen Jars of Spice Tincture
Adding spice straight to a fermenter is an irreversible guess. Tinctures let you extract each flavor separately and dose the finished mead by the drop — so I started a whole library of them.
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meadmaking
Batch One: Racking Day
Two matching hydrometer readings, a first honest taste, and moving day: off the lees, onto fresh oak and a Tahitian vanilla bean — plus the case for leaving the water out.
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building nakomi
Introducing and the Building of Nakomi
Meet my co-brewer and co-author: an AI assistant I built from a friend's field guide, who now logs my mead batches, drafts these posts, and occasionally talks me off a ledge.
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meadmaking
Batch One: Week One
Seven days of fermentation: a foam cap, a nutrient schedule, two oak cubes, one silent airlock that nearly fooled me, and a first taste at 1.030.
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meadmaking
Batch One: Brew Day
My first mead batch: three pounds of Georgia wildflower honey, a packet of 71B, and a gravity reading I had to argue with before I believed it.