Somehow my 4 year old phone's camera doesn't look as nice. A complete mystery.

I plan to do a full write-up about this mead and brew once I go through the backsweetening/balancing process, but I thought this was interesting enough to share as is.

The plan was to make a low ABV, quick turnaround strawberry lemonade mead to have on tap for the summer. For a ~6.5 gallon batch I used a full pallet of strawberries juiced into 7.14lbs of juice, and 9.68lbs of honey (really just the rest of the honey in the bucket). Low starting OG of 1.057 which fermented down to 0.994 in 11 days.

I wanted to see if the combo of low ABV and aggressive filtering would let me skip out on any of the aging process.

Before it'd even fully finished blubbing, I ran it through a series plate/disk filters. The image shows, from left to right, Original -> Clarifying (5-7um) -> Polishing (1-2um) -> Semi-Sterilizing (~0.5um).

Taste at each stage: Undrinkable -> Bad -> Pretty Good -> Shockingly Clean

Most of the strawberry flavor was sadly left behind, but I think that was true even before the filtering. Left with a nice strawberry aroma and a hint of the taste in a very smooth, if lacking in depth and complexity, mead.

My conclusions from this is that filtering bypasses the "suck less" part of aging, where off flavors are removed, but (obvious in retrospect) does nothing to build character and complexity.

I now plan to backsweeten using a batch of lemon oleo saccharum I made, sour it with citric acid, and potentially add some strawberry concentrate to bump up the strawberry flavor. I'll bottle some to see how actual aging treats it, and put the rest on tap to enjoy this summer.

Me and my wife originally tried smoking our own bacon out of sheer novelty after finding out we could buy whole pork bellies at costco. It then turned out so good we've kept up with making a new batch anytime we run out.

Not pictured: trimming the pork belly small enough to fit in a vacuum bag, coating it with a curing mix (borrowed from this Kenji video on pancetta), vacuum sealing, and keeping under weights in the fridge for a week.

On the smoker:

Sliced:

Packed up:

The off cuts on a "whatever's in the fridge" sandwich:

Got them out of the ground to make room for the peppers to go in. Looking forward to making a bunch of toum, garlic fermented honey, and whatever else we can think of to try and use them all this year.

My wife and I recently got a charcoal smoker/grill after our old bullet smoker finally rusted through. It came with a pizza oven attachment and we've been slowly perfecting our dough and cooking techniques.

The combo of sourdough and high temperature baking produces the exact sort of crispy, chewy, slightly charred pizza experience I crave. We're constantly rotating through different topping combos (and begging friends to come over so we can make more pizza without having to gorge ourselves).

Favorite so far is probably the spicy honey aged garlic pizza, but it's all been fantastic. Any got any good pizza topping suggestions? Unusual options especially appreciated.