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An ancient ale based on literary, artistic, and archaeological evidence from China's Bronze Age Shang Dynasty. Prepared by Lucas Livingston, http://morguebrewing.com. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/threads/fungal-malting-barley-with-koji-and-red-yeast-rice.625179/ https://byo.com/article/making-sake/ ————————————————— BATCH 3 2019-6-23 1 cup millet toasted in frying pan. Simmered 15 minutes in 3 cups water. (3:1 water:millet). 1 cup was too much. Laid down thick layer in clay cooker with enough left over to fill one of my black plastic Chinese takeout containers. Crumbled and mixed 1/4 package koji with millet in clay cooker. Placed in shut off oven for mold saccharification. 6-24 Mixed grains. Koji certainly propagating. Slowly. Will surely increase after another day. Still quite moist. 6-27 Very bleu cheese odor. Mold out of control! Transferred to fridge. Will mash tomorrow. 6-28 Covered in water and put in oven on Warm for an hour. Will it kill the action? Warm setting brought to 105F after 1 hour. Set to 170F for hour raised batch temp to 120F. Left overnight in oven with lid. 6-27 Strained with yellow colander into bowl. Scooped with ladle and pressed in colander with ladle. Liquid tastes mildly sweet and tart. Smooth and thick. Opaque beige color. Got about 1/2-1/3 gallon. Including containers: 2.482 lbs 1.658 brown rice 0.827 sorghum Container 0.19 Actual fermentable weights: 1.468 brown rice syrup 0.637 sorghum OG 1.040 7/8 Still bubbling away. Added 3 oz prune juice. Will bottle soon. 7/20 SG 1.008 Bottled About 4% ABV ————————————————— SEE 2018 FOR RECIPE BATCH 2 2018-2-18 BREW DAY Shang residue analysis suggests possible tree resins, chrysanthemum, peach, plum, jujube, sweet clover, jasmine, hemp, artemisia (wormwood relative). Prepared in conjunction with the special exhibition Mirroring China’s Past: Emperors and Their Bronzes at the Art Institute of Chicago, February 25-May 13, 2018. Simmered rice and millet for about 30 minutes in BIAB. Always a goopy challenge. Took out a gallon of water. Made a nice milky tea, though. Rice flakes are stale. Hopefully that’ll boil or ferment off. I made about a 28 ounce starter with a couple heaping teaspoons of rice syrup and Côte des Blancs. About 0.11 oz fresh diced ginger instead of powdered. All the dried chrysanthemum blossoms. 1.40 oz. 1 tea bag Bentley’s Peach, 1 bag Numi toasted rice green tea. OG 1.058 (if memory serves a week later) 2/25 (7 days) SG 1.046 Slightly sparkling. Still very thick, murky, and sweet. Aroma of chrysanthemum. 3/5 SG 1.040 4/21 SG 1.020 Lemony tea and foot nose. Sweet and sour. Thick mouthfeel. With the extremely slow fermentation, it probably needed some yeast nutrients. Next time I’ll also forego the flaked rice. Maybe boil whole rice and millet. Maybe masticate it, ha! Of course, mold saccharificafion (aka koji) would be proper. 6/22 Tart. Clear but has a thick mouthfeel. Chrysanthemum prominent which is great. I added a good splash of prune juice weeks ago. That may have fermented out, but maybe I still taste a little remnant of that. 7/3 Cloying, cidery, tart, aroma of foot ————————————————— BATCH 1 Prepared for a workshop taught at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute in 2016. 10/22/2016 Brew day To 1 gallons filtered water, I added a pound of flaked to rice. Heated in a kettle to about 165F. Shut off heat. Ground the millet in the magic bullet to a coarse grist, then added it to the kettle in a grain bag. Steep for 20 minutes at no less than 155F stirring occasionally. Since I'm not using any malted barley with its lovely enzymes, I suspect the flaked rice will not convert into fermentable sugar. In ancient China they overcame this limitation through the use of mold to break down the rice starches into sugar. One of these days perhaps I'll play around with Koji rice. After a good steep, ran through colander into another pot. Pretty much a runny grit consistency. At first I thought the colander was largely useless as the flaked rice either completely gummed it up or went straight through with stirring. The grit would likely just settle out during fermentation, but alternatively I boiled about 0.5 gallons water to sparge a few times through the colander. I also boiled the millet in bag in the 0.5 gallon sparge water. It's good to mash up the bag to break up the millet, because it likes to clump. That also releases a lovely milky whiteness into the water. I'll use that water to sparge duty rice goop. Sparging the rice goop got out a substantial amount of grit to yield about a gallon of essentially thick rice milk. Squeeze millet bag to extract lots of great cloudy yummies for body. Added fresh ground black pepper and old ground ginger. Then filtered whole mess through a grain bag. I think 1 tsp black pepper was too much. Should have stuck with 1/2 tsp and add after final filter. But we'll see. Topped off with filtered water to 1 gallon. 1 pound per gallon flaked rice likely too much. Too thick. Better if use either less flaked rice or boil whole rice and use runoff. At 80F pitch Red Star Côte des Blancs recycled from tart cider and my proprietary Frankensaison. Maybe 3 oz each? 10/24 Not a foul aroma. Kind of bready. I guess that's a plus.