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Comment by cylinder | Hacker News Reader

I think a winery and vineyard sound much more appealing than brewing.

For what it's worth... I live in the heart of Washington's wine country. Every year there are dozens of new wineries, and the same number that go bankrupt. Very few people who move here to be a "gentleman farmer" enjoying the imagery of the harvest find that to be the case - most end up bankrupt. While I am not in the wine business, it's pretty clear there are a lot of shenanigans that go on, like buying wholesale wine and putting a nice label on it - like most businesses, the marketing matters at least as much as product quality.

I make cheese, and have spoken to some of you here about that as well. Producing commercial dairy products blows away the health and safety regulations in beer and wine making. Think it is hard putting a fermented grape in a bottle for sale, try something that comes out of the backend of a live animal...

>it's pretty clear there are a lot of shenanigans that go on

Even in California, the beautiful tasting room all done up in oak often has nothing to do with the beautiful vineyards outside.

"making cheese is farming bacteria" as my (French) book says. Its fun to do, but I don't have a desire to do it commercially.

I am trying to decide whether or not to pursue it commercially. Makes a fun hobby though and a great way to teach your kids about microbiology ;-)

That saying applies to beer and wine as well. (Only that for cheese, you farm the bacteria on animal products.)

And salami and so on. With cheese it is pretty extreme - you don't even bottle it so even the outside of it is made form bacteria too...

Bread's even more extreme: I caught my own wild sourdough a few times. (You can catch your own wild yeasts for beer too, but that's more hit and miss, I believe?)

I make cider using wild yeast. It's always worked fine so far. I think this is fairly common with small-scale cider making in the UK. I do add some sulphite to the juice (amount depends on pH) to discourage the undesirable micro-organisms. If you want consistency then it's probably not a good technique, but that's not what I am after.

Yes, I think it is common for cider still. Its entirely doable with wine, but only high end places tend to, cheap wine, like cheap cheese, is more industrial...

This sounds like a lot of fun, can you explain the process you went through to catch your own? How did you ensure you were catching something useable and not something you didn't want in your bread?

There are lots of good resources on the web for the details. The gist is: the micro-organisms you want are already on the flour in traces, so you start with equal parts unpasteurized (eg organic) wholemeal rye or wheat flour and water, mix them, and let them stand in a container for a few days (or even two weeks, if you don't heat your home in winter, like I did when I started in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire).

That's mostly all there is to it. Reading up, will teach you what to expect the starter to look like, how to troubleshoot, and how to turn the starter into bread.

I like the simplicity of flour, water, salt. (And air, time and kneading.) The simplicity leaves no room for covering up mistakes like cakes allow you to do.

> How did you ensure you were catching something useable and not something you didn't want in your bread?

Humanity is very lucky that the most probably natural occurring fermentation in grain dough is not only perfectly safe, it also improves taste, nutrition, digestibility and shelf-life of your bread.

Your nose will tell you if something is off. I think mold is the most common invader. But even mold will have a hard time in a healthy sourdough, because the low pH (=high acidity) and some enzymes keep the symbiosis of yeast and lactobacillus exceptionally stable.

You can make beer from wild yeast too, like gueuze. Unpasteurized cheese is from the bacteria already in the milk.

I've watched the people at Beecher's at Pike Place in Seattle, and it seems that 80% of what they do is cleaning.

It's a hell of advertisement for the shop, though!

I just came back from a commercial cheese making class and you are spot on. Not only is cleaning/sanitizing a major topic, but the construction of both equipment and facilities for cheese / yogurt / etc all revolves around making it easy to clean and hard for unwanted bacteria to grow. Let's say they make cheese on Friday and then close for the weekend. They will clean and sanitize before the close on Friday and then when they come back in Monday, they will clean and sanitize again. They are fighting everything from cheese mites to Phage, plus trying to keep their own (desired) strains from spreading between cheeses, IE: trying to maintain consistency. Plus, they are fighting the cheese itself in a way - the whey is acidic and will eat away at grout between tile, for example, which is a place where bacteria could then grow.

I've done both wine and beer, recently planted my own home vineyard of 650 vines. In my experience, much more can go wrong with wine than beer but both are worth it when you open the first bottle.

I would tend to agree with this, on about four points that come to the top of mind (though I am not a commercial producer of either, I observe what my friends and neighbors in the business experience): 1) Grapes have more bug problems 2) Grapes have more potential frost problems 3) With grapes, you have to watch your sugar contents really closely. With hops, you grow, you harvest, and often you turn into a dried pellet form, IE: the end-product with grapes is more temperamental. 4) You are (typically) aging wine longer than beer, so there's more time when something can go wrong. Had a friend who was cellar master at a winery. New guy comes in and does something stupid, ruined wine that had been sitting in barrels for two years.

Regarding 3: the same goes for beer, except you can mess up over the course of just a few minutes to an hour instead of a few months. Crush your malt too fine or too coarse, mess up the mash temperatures, and you end with things like a too high or low efficiency, a stuck sparge, or too many fermentable and unfermentable sugars. Of course, in a fully automated industrial brewery this usually isn't a problem, but your typical nano or micro-brewery is a still a lot of manual works, and thus many ways to mess up manually.

Edit: and now that I think about the other things:

Regarding 1 and 2: some hop varities have mildew problems, and bad weather has negative influence on the growth and other things like alpha acid, so bad weather can have quite the impact on hop quality and availability. The 2013 hop harvest in Germany was quite the disaster, apparently. AA% is a lot lower, and young plants of some new breeds got way too much water.

All great points, thanks for the info!

Doesn't that depend on if you continue the whole process for each. With beer, did you also grow and malt the grain?

I did not but I was only basing my findings off of the production of beer/wine, not the agriculture side.

Brewery is better because you can make a great beer anywhere. In most of the world, a winery tops out at "this sure is pretty... and the wine is OK".

It seems like making wine is basically farming, making beer is basically an industrial product. I'm glad I live in Oregon where there are plenty of people doing either one.

Every brewery I've been to in oregon (portland) thinks "microbrew" means "put a shitload of hops in it."

So glad you said that! It's very challenging to find beer that's not overhopped but they do exist. Coming from Germany I'm still looking for some good lagers that aren't insanely hoppy.

Good luck! I studied in Muenster way back as a university student. Thankfully Pinkus Mueller is much more available these days in the US and I don't need to negotiate with a distributor to get a case or two. Koestrizer is still hard to come by though. Hard to find a really good beer in the US. The big name brewers produce corn-flavoured water, the micro-brewers produce over hopped barley soda pop (ok, I exaggerate a little, I know they are all trying to produce interesting products).

Broadly* speaking it's an east coast/west coast thing. East Coast imperial IPAs barely qualify as pale ales on the Best Coast.

*very broadly, no you don't need to tell me about DFH 120 minute or what have you.

I think you're greatly exaggerating the difference, unless you want to name any highly rated East Coast "Imperial IPA" that isn't as hoppy as, say, Stone Pale.

Heady Topper, for example, is pure hop madness.

The overhopped style drives me nuts because there is so much variety out there that offer more flavors than stereotypical hop and bitterness. Then you have crazy yeasts like they use at Bells that give beers like Oberon the flavor of a spiced or fruited beer without any spice or fruit.

There are good west coast breweries but the culture created a style and has stuck to it like gospel. Variety is what makes beer fun.

Hoppy flavors are the distinctive feature of west coast beers. A matter of taste, of course, but that's like complaining that there is too much stout in Dublin.

Yeah, there actually is too much stout in Dublin...

I would be willing to bet that a winery has just as much dealing with regulators, cleaning, and sales.

It's all really hard work and a winery is likely even more work. You need to always be watching the grapes, you have to hire seasonal workers to pick the grapes (actually not much automation in this area) plus the unpredictability of the weather.

Do you mean geographic area, or grape-picking? Because these [1] are fantastic at picking grapes automatically. Sure you still need a driver, but it's slightly faster than doing it by hand.

[1] http://www.agha.org.au/cms/uploads/images/Grape%20harvesting...

You are also more directly exposed to your crop. Brewers have to deal with hops, but grains aren't a big problem.

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