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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • When the CTO decided that he wouldn’t do anything about my work getting sabotaged by a busy-body from another department. As soon as I had signed a new contract, I handed in my notice and told our head of HR (who was very understanding but ultimately powerless) all the reasons why I quit. They didn‘t even try to make me a better offer. I don‘t think I did anything wrong, in fact the CTO had awarded me the company’s “tech employee of the year” award just 3 months earlier.













  • Making alcohol-free or low-alcohol beer that tastes good is actually really hard and is still actively being researched. Because of reasons, it’s even harder at homebrew scale.

    The main methods are:

    • biological method, aka arrested fermentation: low OG wort, ferment only briefly, then chill down hard to stop fermentation. Similar to what @[email protected] described. You can further reduce the amount of alcohol produced by selecting a maltose-negative yeast, such as Saccharomycodes ludwigii or a maltose-negative Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain, such as Lallemand LalBrew LoNa, which has only been released recently.
    • physical method, aka dealcoholization: brew a normal strength wort, let it finish fermenting, then remove the alcohol through vacuum distillation or non-porous membrane distillation.

    Each of the methods have their drawbacks. If you use a maltose-negative strain, you need to be able to pasteurize your beer, otherwise infections are inevitable. This is the reason why LalBrew LoNa is currently not sold to home brewers, as Lallemand does not think that home brewers will be able to reliable pasteurize and use the yeast correctly. The beer will also taste worty and sweeter than regular beer. Dealcoholization on the other hand is basically impossible to do at home. It also leaves behind a thin-tasting beer with unsatisfactory mouthfeel. Recent research has shown that the best tasting non-alcohol/low-alcohol beer can be produced by blending two beers made with these two methods.





  • Have you checked what’s even available to you? In practice, you will be limited by which hop rhizomes are even sold in the Swedish market.

    Here in Germany, I could buy Cascade, Centennial, Comet, Ariana, Callista, Tango, Chinook, Polaris (all of these are probably interesting enough for IPAs and Pale Ales), all the typical German varieties, both landrace and older breeds, and some English ones as well.




  • Just remember how Kharkiv oblast was liberated in September 2022. Ukraine made some progress in the weeks before, which put enough pressure on the Russian occupiers to make the continued occupation untenable, so they had to pull back into Luhansk.

    Something similar could easily happen here, all it needs is a cirumvention of the defense fortifications to push far enough to disrupt e.g. the supply lines between Donetsk and Crimea, and significant parts of the occupation could crumble quickly.