Bubonic Brewery

According to new reports, government tests have been unable to verify the presence of rat poison in pet foods that have allegedly been linked to scads of pet deaths nationwide, and a whole lot of petfood recalls. However, they have found something interesting.

Melamine.

Hey, wait a minute, you say. I have dishes made of that stuff! How can the crappy plastic they make cheap dishes from kill my kitty?

Well, I’m sure they’re going to hemm and haw and investigate this and that, and send in Grissom and Warrick to do their CSI magic to try to ferret out the evil plot to K. O. the felines, and someday we’ll see a bunch of shrugging and a theory that it was in some random batch of wheat. But here’s my theory.

AHEM… this is my theory. It is mine.

Ever seen the equipment they use to make petfood? Okay, neither have I, except on an episode of “Unwrapped”, and I read a description once. Mostly, there’s a lot of metal augers and grinding and stuff. Well, I wonder how the hell you clean stuff like that. I’m sure there’s a specified procedure, probably using steam, or some appropriate sanitary tool and appropriate cleanser approved for food service, or at least for pet food service.

And I’m sure there’s some guy that has to use these tools, and they probably don’t work all that damned well. They work well enough, if you work hard enough, and they get the grinders and augers squeaky clean and don’t leave any kind of contaminants behind. But it’s a lot of damned work, and poor George, or Matilda, or whoever it is that has to clean this blasted machine has to spend hour after hour scrubbing. Then they make some pet food. Then George, or Matilda has to do it again. And they get paid what some yutz gets paid to park cars, read porn, and scratch himself.

It just ain’t fair.

So George, or Matilda, brings in one of those Magic Sponge thingies from home — you know, it’s one of those white sponges you can use to take magic marker off the stainless steel countertop, or rust off the car’s bumper. Hell, if you just scrub a little harder, it’ll take paint off a car or stain off a bannister. Hell, if it’ll take little Bobby’s doodles off the refrigerator door, it’ll take that catfood off that auger real easy! And George…or Matilda…scrubs that auger clean with that white sponge thing, and damn, if it doesn’t clean that caked-on gunge off in nothing flat! Wow, fantastic! Made George or Matilda’s life a hell of a lot easier! Bring in a whole BOX of those white sponge doojies, keep ’em in the ol’ locker, save hours a week!

Maybe even have some time to read some porn.

Except…

Those white sponges clean so well because they’re made of a micro-abrasive foam of melamine plastic. It doesn’t just wipe at the stains, it chews them away, the foam breaking away, exposing new, sharp edges as it wears off, to create what amounts to a soft, microscopic knife that shears the crud off the surface. The melamine that breaks off is left behind on the surface being cleaned. If you use one of those sponges a lot, you can see “crumbs” of soiled sponge falling off and away, as it wears. And the rinsing and cleaning protocols set by the company don’t take these little pieces into account. They don’t get properly flushed away. They stay in the equipment, and get into the pet food.

I’m sure the pet food company didn’t plan on having razor-sharp, microscopic pieces of plastic left behind on their grinding equipment. It wouldn’t take a lot. Get that stuff into an animal’s liver, and who knows how badly it might chew up the microscopic tubules?

I have no idea if this is actually what happened to these animals. It is pure conjecture. But I don’t use these melamine sponges on my brew equipment because they are abrasive, and because they leave a residue I can’t be sure is removed because I can’t see it properly. I know it leaves microscopic scratches on the surfaces it cleans — this is bad for brew equipment, because bacteria love tiny scratches. Perhaps this is what happened to the renal systems of the animals? Tiny scratches, little places for bacteria to grow — blam! — septicemia from ten thousand tiny places too small to see.

It’d ruin the heck out of a batch of beer. I’d hate to see what it’d do to a pet’s liver.

Update: Turns out that the melamine in our pet food is coming from cheap Chinese feedstocks, where melamine made from coal is being used as “fake protein” to stretch profits by stretching the volume of animal feed. It is extremely profitable in China, where just a few percent savings in protein cost can boost profits astronomically. It looks for all the world like the Chinese have discovered the benefit of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, as several of them would seem to apply to this situation perfectly.

I was watching Food Network (if I’m not watching Cops or something on Sci-Fi, I‘m watching Food Network) and saw some show about Key Lime stuff with a funny little guy named Kermit, who makes Key Lime pies, and stands outside the shop like a mannequin as the tour buses go by, then leaps forward, as if he’s going to throw the pie at the passengers. He never does, but for a second there…

Well, here I am, watching them make these scrumptious, slightly-greenish, slightly-yellow pies, and I’m tasting that tart, mouth-puckering flavor as they’re describing the basic recipe. And the thought runs through my mind…Key Lime Soda.

Well, why the hell not? It’s so crazy, it just might work! So off I go to the grocery store, and find a bottle of Key Lime Juice (sorry, Kermit, it wasn’t yours ) and zip home.

I didn’t try for a large batch at once, in case it didn’t work out well. I only did a quart or so, enough for a couple of 500ml bottles. So here was the basic recipe:

All utensils, containers, etc. are all fully sanitized prior to use, and inbetween uses.

• 1 qt. hot tap water in large glass beaker with pour spout
• 1 1/4 c. cane sugar
• 10 tbsp. Key Lime Juice (approx. 2 1/2 limes)
• 1 tbsp. Lemon juice
• 1/4 tsp. Cream of Tartar

Depending on the tartness of the particular juices you get, and how tart or sweet you like your soda, you may wish to adjust these quantities.

Set aside to activate was the carbonating yeast:

• 1/4 tsp. Red Star Premier Cuvée Champagne yeast, dissolved in 1/4 cup warm water with 1 tsp. sugar

Any good champagne yeast will serve here, but during the winter I prefer Premier Cuvée because it works better at lower temperatures, and my kitchen tends to be chilly at night. But a Red Star champagne, or Lalvin 1118, or anything like that will work fine. Bread yeast will work, but it will taste incredibly yeasty, like drinking unbaked bread.

I dissolved the sugar in the water first, then added the juices to taste. Cream of Tartar adds a pleasing, tart aftertaste and helps stabilize carbonation. Then the whole thing had to be cooled down to around 85 degrees before pitching (adding) the yeast. If you add the yeast too soon, it’ll get cooked to death!

After that, I shook it up real good, to mix everything well and to get some oxygen into the liquid, then used a sanitized funnel to decant into sanitized 500ml brown PET plastic bottles. There was a bit left, so I filled a third bottle about half way as a test bottle. Then on went the screw caps, nice and tight, and I stuck them on my electric brew pad to ferment for a couple of days.

After a day and a half, the test bottle was rock-hard, so I refrigerated it. A half bottle has more oxygen for the yeast and will usually ferment faster. When cold, I stuck it in my handy-dandy insulated lunchbag with a chill-pak and took it to Keystone Homebrew for a ritual uncapping. I shared it around the store, and we pronounced it good.

My thoughts on the recipe were that it could use a bit more sugar, perhaps a touch of an adjunct sugar like table syrup (corn syrup) or a tablespoon or so of light brown sugar to give it some complex sweetness and caramel notes that the yeast and the tartness wouldn’t overpower. I also thought maybe a touch of cinnamon and vanilla, just a tiny touch, to try to get a hint of graham-cracker into it for the crust of a key lime pie might be worth an experiment. Jason at Keystone also thought some bottle conditioning might help it mellow a bit over a few days or a week or so.

SUCCESS: Skeleton Key Lime Pie Soda

Gee, that doesn’t sound very tasty…

Why on Earth would I name my luscious, delicious, and vitamin-packed creations after the Black Death?

Well..um…er… I don’t really have a good reason. I’m big on hyperbole. I get a kick out of the goofy beer labels with incongruous, funny company names and joke beer brands. One of my favorites has to be Schmaltz Brewing Company, and their He’Brew line of “chosen” beers.  I also like to come up with my own oddball beers — my favorites were my Howling Black Death Dark, and my Old Maidenhead Cherry Stout.

There’s been a bit of a hiatus in BB’s brewing, a number of years, but I’ve had some time lately and a resurgence in my interest in zymurgy in general. I’ve been working my way back into beer using naturally-carbonated soda, something that lets me practice a bit, get used to the whole “sanitize everything” drill, gather equipment and supplies, that sort of thing.  Most of the tools for building a good beer are the same you use for building a good soda, and a lot of the techniques are the same. Of course, there are specialized techniques for each, just like there are for winemaking, for mead making, for cider making…you name it.  But when you come down to it, there’s just making a sweet base for yeast to eat, letting it ferment to alcohol or not, and either letting it carbonate the result or not.

I looked at my other websites, and what I have already built isn’t really suited to my brewing efforts, so I bought Yet Another Domain Name and set up WordPress (it was available on Fantastico, so I didn’t have to go to any effort), and whammo, blammo, I have a blog for my brewing.  Who knows?  I hope it’ll be interesting!