You’ve got to remember [that] for thousands of years, if you lived in a town or a village, the water was pretty undrinkable. … [I]f you lived in ancient Athens or if you lived in ancient Babylon or Alexandria, you couldn’t drink the water, so wine was something that people drank from morning to night. Babies drank it; old people drank it; soldiers drank it; everybody drank wine all the time, and in order for them not to be falling down drunk by 10 in the morning, they mixed it with water and used it to sanitize or purify the water.

— Paul Lukacs on using wine to improve the quality of the water

On today’s Fresh Air, Sandor Katz talks about DIY techniques for making your own cheese, wine, cured meats and beer: ““Fruit and honey will spontaneously ferment into alcohol whereas grains, which are complex carbohydrates rather than simple carbohydrates, need to be predigested. They need to have those complex carbs broken down into simple carbs. In the Western tradition of beer-making, we do this through malting — which is germination, or sprouting. In the Asian tradition, molds are used. And really, the most ancient method of doing this is chewing — using our human saliva to break down starches into sugars, and then you brew the beer from the grains which have already been malted or otherwise enzymatically broken down into starches.”

sam’s latest commitment (by qichao)

newyorker:

A cheese cartoon of the day. For more cartoons from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/ryp6Ai

Today: DIY tips for fermenting beer, wine, cheese and meat.

Tomorrow: Part Two of Fermentation (To quote Rent: wine and beer!)

If you missed Part One of Fermentation (To not quote Rent: Yogurt and Probiotics!)

Beer Pong (by skinnyandy)