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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1IOBgV0:
So unrelated to anything else, I’ve just discovered that jerusalem artichokes, which have taken over my tiny yard and choked out all other plant life, are a useful crop for one particular purpose:
Distilling into hard alcohol. They don’t ferment readily; you have to use a special yeast/bacterium that’s mostly otherwise used for kefir in order to convert its particular components into something that’ll make alcohol as a waste product. And it doesn’t taste all that great as a fermented beer-thing. But when distilled, you get an enormous amount of hard alcohol out of it. (Like, 600-1000 gallons per acre per year. Which is twice corn, and comparable to sugar beets.)
It just so happens I’m getting a copper pot still for Christmas, and New York State has recently drastically relaxed its laws around home distillation, so… I guess I’m going to be making hard liquor out of weird, weird shit in the near future.
So unrelated to anything else, I’ve just discovered that jerusalem artichokes, which have taken over my tiny yard and choked out all other plant life, are a useful crop for one particular purpose:
Distilling into hard alcohol. They don’t ferment readily; you have to use a special yeast/bacterium that’s mostly otherwise used for kefir in order to convert its particular components into something that’ll make alcohol as a waste product. And it doesn’t taste all that great as a fermented beer-thing. But when distilled, you get an enormous amount of hard alcohol out of it. (Like, 600-1000 gallons per acre per year. Which is twice corn, and comparable to sugar beets.)
It just so happens I’m getting a copper pot still for Christmas, and New York State has recently drastically relaxed its laws around home distillation, so… I guess I’m going to be making hard liquor out of weird, weird shit in the near future.
