#no.070523

I ordered special rice wine yeast, after being warned that regular yeast won't break down the starches properly. I do not have a rice steamer or rice cooker, so I'm just boiling the rice in a pot.

It's supposed to be kept fairly warm. One recipe I found called for keeping the rice in a dutch oven, but I'm just going to leave the fermenter outside in the sunshine for part of the day to save electricity.

I am not taking a pic because it just looks like ... greyish milk. The crepe myrtle infusion released some pigment that looked purplish on its own but greyish once mixed in. Its effect on the flavor was barely noticeable, but it did improve the scent.

It took a lot more back-sweetening than I expected to actually taste "lightly sweet."

Mostly because I didn't actually check how sweet allulose was before adding it. Most zero calorie sweeteners are much sweeter than regular sugar, but allulose is actually only 70% as sweet as regular sugar.

I picked that one because it doesn't have a weird aftertaste and according to City Steading Brews (the youtube brewing channel) it is less likely to cause digestive distress than erythritol.

Anyway, now that it's lightly sweetened, the rice wine tastes lovely, if you like rice wine.

My rice wine has this odd clump in it that looks kind of ... SCOBY-ish?

I used to brew kombucha years and years ago. It's definitely not a kombucha SCOBY, but it is kind of rubbery like a kombucha SCOBY, which is why my brain jumped to that comparison. The Shanghai yeast balls I used for this do contain bacteria and fungus to break down starches, so I think it's theoretically possible that it could have formed a "Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria/Yeast" aka SCOBY.

According to the SCOBY wikipedia page [link], rice wine can form a scoby. Unfortunately the page doesn't include a picture of what a rice wine scoby looks like.

.

I asked for some advice on reddit.

The ppl on r/prisonhooch are useless. Hilarious, but useless. They're all just like, "Drink it and let us know if you die!"

Someone on r/homebrewing suggested it might just be a clump of amylopectin from the sticky rice I used. They also said it probably wasn't a SCOBY unless my ABV was really low, which, well, doesn't actually rule out that it's a SCOBY because it appeared when my ABV was low and then stopped growing once my ABV got higher.

They did assure me that as long as my ABV was higher than 4% (it definitely is) this scoby/pellicle was waxy/slimy (as opposed to powdery) it was probably completely harmless.

So...

I think the batch is probably safe for consumption.

I'll strain it tomorrow and give it a taste test.

My honey arrived yesterday! It was very, very thoroughly packaged. Each individual 16oz jar was wrapped in a 24" × 60" (60cm × 152cm) piece of construction paper before going into the bed of biodegradable packing peanuts.

Rice wine on the left, Yosemite wildflower honey in the middle, Sierra Foothills wildflower honey with Hojicha tea (Japanese roasted green tea -> my favorite) on the right. Bought D47 yeast, which is supposed to preserve the natural honey flavors a little better than the EC-1118 I've been using.

Got a roll of cute little labels, so I could put info like gravity readings on the batches, so I can properly calculate my final alcohol percentage, except then I broke my hydrometer.

This is what my rice wine batch looked like when I started it yesterday:

I left it sealed with an airtight cap overnight. When I woke up in the morning, it was full to the brim, so I placed it in a clean bowl to catch any overflow and carefully removed the cap, then separated out some of the batch (including the overflow that went into the bowl) into a separate jar:

I'll let them ferment separately for a few days and then pour the contents of the small jar back into the bigger jug when there's less risk of it overflowing.

I don't have an airlock for the smaller jar, so I'm just sealing it for the time being. It's only half full, so there's no real concern of air pressure building up too much.