Thank you! I have next to nil artistic ability, so I actually really surprised myself by managing to make something I actually liked with these labels.
Photonics Engineer by day, indie RPG writer by night, especially interested in open/CC games.
See my stuff here: http://awkwardturtle.games
Thank you! I have next to nil artistic ability, so I actually really surprised myself by managing to make something I actually liked with these labels.
Yeah, I don’t know if that tracks. Wingspan has sold more than 1.3 million copies (as of September 2021) which is way way way more than the average board game sells.
I’d far more believe that they couldn’t keep up with production than they were intentionally limiting supply.
Ooo, fantastic. I’ve been doing sugar extractions of lemon zest for a mead recently, and we tried drying and blitzing the zests after filtering.
For us the powder was nice (partly because it got a bit candied during the process) but fairly mild in taste. I think it could still absolutely be fun to use to sprinkle on desserts of drinks, for visuals if nothing else.
Also if you use The Estate box set you have a nice, episodic little campaign pre-built for Mausritter. It’s a small hex crawl with a bunch of pamphlet adventures scattered around them, complete with hooks to tie them all together.
Might be a good ongoing structure, especially if you have an inconsistent group, or intend to be swapping GMs periodically.
I’d love to do so, but the price seems to jump up by an order of magnitude and it’s difficult to justify. I’ll probably be trying a combo of filter + sulfites going forward.
Having recently tried the filtering thing, it’s still a roll of the dice unless you’re using the much more expensive professional grade filters.
It does get your mead clear as hell though, and removes a ton of off flavors.
When in doubt, age it out!
Alternatively you could consider back sweetening, or oaking, to add some extra flavor that might counterbalance it some.
I used Lalvin 71b, and a couple days after pitching it occurred to me that this would have been a great opportunity to use something more suited to purpose.
Honestly different yeasts is something I haven’t really dug into much yet, although I want to. Currently I just have a big stash of 71b and default to that for every mead.
I honestly haven’t really done much stabilizing because I like my meads dry, so I don’t bother backsweetening. From my research KSorb/KMeta is your best as a home brewer, but it has some pitfalls.
Filtering is sorta a huge pain in the ass, and like I said doesn’t even guarantee stabilization unless you go for the professional grade equipment with the “absolute” filter ratings which is pretty dang expensive. Plus you’ll need either pressure, a pump, or gravity and a lot of patience to get it through the smallest sized filters.
My filtering was done with the fairly inexpensive plate filters with “nominal” size ratings, which means it doesn’t promise it’s actually getting everything.
I think fining plus just waiting a very long time for things to settle out gets you about as good of an outcome as filtering, as far as clarity and taste goes, but I’m still experimenting so I can’t say for sure.
I’m no expert, been doing it as a hobby for about five years now, but from my own experience I’ll make a few notes:
Lovely colors.
Pepcorn is actually and unironically very good.
I’ve been making mead pretty consistently for 4-5 years now. Super fun.
I’ve got a (planned) quick turnaround strawberry mead currently fermenting that I plan to filter, back sweeten, and add some lemon flavor in to have a strawberry lemonade mead on tap for the summer.
Otherwise I’ve got probably around 25 gallons aging in the basement, including some weird stuff like tomato mead, lambic mead, and sea water mead.
Both the NSR and the Cairn discord servers are friendly and helpful places, if you’re looking to chat with someone about running games like that. Or just hanging out and talking about games.
That looks great! We actually don’t add any flavorings into the mix outside of the salt + sugar, we did originally but found out we really liked the very smokey without anything added. I should really go back and try out some different options to see what’s out there though.
We also usually smoke with “neighbor maple”. Which is to say anytime a storm comes through a branches fall out of the big maple tree in our neighbor’s lawn, we take it, chop it up, and smoke stuff with it.
Slicing is both the easiest and most annoying part of the process for me. A few years ago we managed to get a hold of a second hand commercial deli slicer. It works incredibly well, as you might imagine, but then I discovered why you usually don’t have commercial equipment in your home. I use it maybe once every couple months, and it takes about as long to clean the dang thing as it does to actually slice something on it. I’m sure it makes sense in an actual butcher or deli where you’re using it all day, but for me I do 15 minutes of slicing and then have 15 minutes of cleaning off pork fat. It sure does make nice even slices of bacon though.
They go in the freezer, and when we want to use a pack we just toss it into the fridge the day before.
The stars are because I ran out of the good plastic wrap (each has a layer of cling film then layer of freezer paper), and had to do the final two with the bad plastic wrap. I’m less confident about how air tight they are so they’re starred so we eat them first.
If I can self promo for a minute, for anyone that likes to do some physical dice rolling to generate stuff, I’ve written a little business card sized dungeon generator: Wallet Dungeons.
I’ve also got a sci fi version for making space stations.
That sounds fantastic. I have some relatives that hunt, and I have not taken enough advantage of that.
Gotta set up a deal where they give me meat and I return half of it in the form of bacon or sausage.
Just ran a rad one shot of CBR+PNK, a forged in the dark cyberpunk system.
Otherwise I run a lot of my own system Brighter Worlds, which is a Cairn (and more) hack with the d20’s removed. Not that I was going out of my way to avoid d20’s, but that’s how it ended up. I’ve been playtesting it for more than two years now, I think, and I finally feel like I’m starting to close in on the finish line.
The bochet and berry meads aren’t doing anything super out of the ordinary (well, out of the ordinary if you’re already caramelizing your honey) but the Strawberry Lemonade one is weird enough that I keep meaning to do a full write up about it.
Just gotta actually get around to setting up a blog or website or something so I can host it someplace useful.