BI article with entertaining details

https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-su34-jets-basic-gps-receivers-taped-to-dashboards-uk-2022-5

“In his Monday speech, [UK Defence Minister] Wallace said Russian vehicles "are frequently found with 1980s paper maps of Ukraine in them"”

The headline, of course, is for the ages — GPS receivers! They are using a US nav system! Wow! OK, moving on. TAPED TO FIGHTER JET DASHBOARDS! Very frugal of them. Also, further evidence for the thesis, that the layer of tech from the last two decades that we are completely familiar with and have embedded in absolutely everything is being taped into fighter jets because it is better than anything else that military has.

But, I must say, the 1980s paper maps _is_ the detail I have been looking for. There’s really only one form of evidence that would be even more powerful. _MY_ thesis for what the hell Russia were you doing sending troops to entrench in the Red Forest was that the entire original invasion plan was a Soviet Era plan _on paper_ _in binders_ you know the way everyone did everything before computers. And it dated from before the Chernobyl meltdown, and no one implementing that plan _remembered_ Chernobyl melting down, because first it was a Secret and you could be Punished for talking about it and then it was irrelevant because a whole lot of other shit was higher priority for most of Russia. The Ukrainians, having been stuck with taking care of that mess, of course have not forgotten and also have managed to peel off that ancient layer of Secrets you can be Punished for talking about.

This thing is a zombie dinosaur, with all of the horror movie tropes of fighting a zombie dinosaur. Very hard to kill, because it is unnatural, and already dead and rotting, and that nevertheless is not stopping it from doing insane amounts of harm.

Thursday: the ongoing experiment

We wound up trying a variety of different time and temps on the mash yesterday. A little word about the inputs, tho, first.

I had initially planned a small, can I even germinate this grain, test, with no intention of brewing anything with it. However, along the way, I learned about green malt and diastatic power, and enzymes and so forth, and I hatched a crazy plan that would primarily cost me time, secondarily fuel for the stove, and of course the grain inputs which I already had. And it isn’t much grain. The germinating grain was maybe a couple ounces, optimistically, of dry grain (I did not measure — remember, wasn’t planning on doing anything besides a test germination run). I learned about making malt, decided NOT to kiln the malt because it is a high energy step and I was going to immediately use the malt. Also, kilning destroys enzymes. There is an _enormous_ amount of enzyme in green malt, so I hatched a plan to try to make a small batch with my tiny amount of sprouted grain.

The general rules are: if you are learning how to brew, you should not use any adjunct grains. If you have successfully brewed, you should keep your adjunct grains to 10-15% of the grain bill. If you are brewing with wheat, the wheat shouldn’t ever be more than 50% of the total grain bill. Etc. I’m breaking every possible rule along these lines with _wild_ abandon.

The underlying theory is pretty simple. Fermentation is when microorganisms turn sugars into alcohol. Grain doesn’t really have any free sugars. It does have starches, and, when germinating, produces enzymes capable of converting those starches to sugars. Those enzymes are catalytic. It’s not one and done. They operate better in some temperature ranges than in others, and go too high and they get frantic and die. Also, whole grain is kinda hard, and the starches are locked up inside that kinda hard layer, so enzymes need a little help getting _into_ the hard shell to get at the starch to turn it into sugar. So that it can be fermented.

The basic idea behind turning grains of any sort into a fermented beverage is: germinate some or all of the grain. Break up _all_ of the grain, so the enzymes from the germinated part can get at the insides of all the grain, access the starch, and convert it to sugar. Keep it at a happy-ish temperature so the enzymes can do their thing. The enzymes need some minerals (notably: calcium, which I did not add) and in addition to a happy-ish temperature, they have pH preference. The current experiment is: can I take that tiny amount of germinated grain and combine it with about 8-10X (I know, I know, lie down if you need to and I’m not calling this beer, okay?) of unmodified grain and extract sugars and ferment them?

Step 1: germinate some.
Step 2: coarsely mill the larger quantity (think grits)
Step 3: make a porridge with the grits

A little discussion here about the porridge. There are all kinds of discussions online about how to make porridge whether to eat or for mashing for brewing. I read a lot, and then I added water to the grits, and turned the burner on medium. I was looking for evidence of gelatinization of the starches in the wheat — that would make the starches as accessible as possible to the enzymes. I wanted to do this _before_ added the germinated grains, because the temperature at which wheat starches gelatinize is _higher_ than the enzymes in the germinated grains can tolerate. So, I needed to get a nice sticky porridge and then cool it down. Which I did. The porridge never boiled; you don’t need to boil it to gelatinize the starches, and a big part of this exercise is trying to get the fuel used to an absolute minimum.

Step 4: food processor the germinated berries

They look milky! And while they smelled very bready while germinating, food processoring them made them super bready smelling. Apparently, that’s where bread smell ultimately comes from.

Step 5: once the porridge is cool enough (I let it drop to 120ish, but anything below 140 should be okay), fold in the food processored, germinated grains.

Honestly, if I had it to do over again, I might have stopped here. But I added water. We were aiming for 140, so we heated water up to 160 and poured it over the mash from a height and stirred constantly so we wouldn’t get anything _too_ hot. We were overly cautious; it was fine.

We messed around with it a bit, then we went to dinner. We came back, and it was somewhat sweet but the hydrometer has these colored sections and it was still measuring in the “beer is done” range, and we wanted it in the “beer start” range. So we increased the temperature (not by a lot) and stirred and waited some more.

Eventually, we got into the “beer start” range, so we pulled the bag out, squeezed it, and poured the wort out into a glass container. And here is where I made a substantial mistake. I pitched some sourdough into it when it was still above 100 degrees. Ooops. We discussed how serious this might or might not be, and concluded that, all things considered, I should just add more sourdough after it had dropped closer to 80. So I did. That means there is a ton of sediment in the jar.

This morning, there are little bubbles coming up, so things are definitely happening in there. I want to make several comments about this process.

At no point has anything here been boiled. In fact, you could plausibly argue that we have at no point killed off the native microorganisms on the wheat kernels. The same yeasts and bacteria that you can use to make sourdough starter from have been in this mix throughout … even _before_ I added sourdough starter. The sourdough starter has been around for years now, and _I did not send away for someone else’s starter_. That started was started with ground wheat berries and water, and is routinely fed using the same grain that I am experimenting with fermenting. I’m making a big deal out of this for several reasons.

First, the microorganisms being used here have not undergone much in the way of selection pressure. Certainly, they are in no way closely related to “baker’s yeast” or “brewer’s yeast”. I’m working with the wild predecessors of those. They _are_ selected for enjoying sitting in a jar on the stove eating the grain in question, using the water in question. That is _some_ pressure in the direction of bread vs. ale.

Second, there are a _lot_ of wild things in here, that haven’t undergone _any_ such selection pressure. I didn’t heat anything up far enough to definitively kill what was on the grains, and there are more grains in the not-sourdough-starter than in the sourdough-starter (even if you figure I didn’t kill what was in round one of the sourdough starter, which is a bizarre assumption, but okay).

I’ve learned a lot from this. I learned how to make a tasty wheat porridge. I learned how to sprout grains. I learned how to use a hydrometer.

I did not have any kind of plan to account for the pH of any of this, nor did I have a plan to supplement calcium for the enzymes. We did have a red cabbage in the fridge, so we were able to check the pH qualitatively; it was probably a little too alkaline, which meant we ultimately did not experiment with adding a crushed up tums to the mash, since we didn’t really _know_ it needed calcium, and the form of calcium (Tums) we had readily available would have increased the alkalinity, which we did not want to do.

We _were_ able to extract meaningful amounts of sugar using the germinated grain combined with the porridged, milled grain. That’s a huge accomplishment. It also _is_ fermenting (which is no guarantee that it will produce something drinkable, or non-disgusting). I’m never repeating _this particular experiment_, because OMG that was nuts. However, I am germinating a baking tray of grain, for the next experiment, which will have a much more reasonable ratio of modified to unmodified grain in it.