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YOU’LL BE Delighted
Newport company aims to dominate trivia market nationwide Chris Varias Special to Cincinnati Enquirer USA TODAY NETWORK
CinSoy Foods founder and CEO Sam Pellerito holds a bottle of CinSoy Small Batch Soy Sauce. PROVIDED
Your new go-to soy sauce is made right here in Greater Cincy Keith Pandolfi Cincinnati Enquirer USA TODAY NETWORK
Inside the Incubator Kitchen Collective in Newport, Sam Pellerito opens a blue, plastic barrel of fermenting soybeans and begins to stir them with a large steel paddle. The nonGMO soybeans inside are all sourced from central Ohio and trucked, by Pellerito himself, to Newport, where they are boiled for four hours, combined with toasted and cracked wheat from Carriage House Farm in North Bend, and inoculated with koji – sometimes referred to as Japan’s national mold – that’s grown on fully cooked grains, in this case, rice. The mixture is then incubated for 36 hours in 90-degree temperatures and 85% humidity then placed in the barrels, mixed with a Pacifi c Sea salt-water brine and aged for four to six months. That’s not the way most soy sauces are made these days, Pellerito tells me. Instead, the process is often sped up by adding hydrochloric acid that quickly breaks down the beans. That acid is then stripped from the beans with citric acid, which leaves you, as Pellerito says, with “soy sauce-fl avored liquid.” Other brands might be brewed in a similar manner as Pellerito’s, but few have the purity, since they use preservatives and other natural (and unnatu-
CinSoy Foods Chief Product Officer Kendall Holmes stirs up some soybeans. KEITH PANDOLFI/THE ENQUIRER
ral) fl avors blended in to enhance their appearance and taste. As he stirs, large planks of cedar, which give the sauce added fl avor, come to the surface like fi sh bobbing in and out of the ocean. Pellerito lifts his paddle and pours some of the mixture on my fi nger so I can give it a try. It
tastes funky, and salty and nutty and, well, addictive. My fi rst instinct is to track down a ladle and start slurping it like stew. Something my doctor would surely frown upon. The soybeans I’m tasting have ferSee SOY SAUCE, Page 6A
There’s no bar trivia without bars. It’s an existential truth for a company that hosts trivia nights. Before the pandemic hit, Newport’s Last Call Trivia was hosting 300 weekly bar events across the country. COVID-19 hit business hard, and though it’s rebounding, currently hosting about 100 events, Last Call is plotting big plans to complement its bar-trivia operation. Adam Johnston, the company’s CEO, wants Last Call to be the brand name synonymous with trivia. “There’s not a company out there,” Johnston says. “I like to ask people, when they think of trivia, what companies do they think of. What brands? And almost everyone goes to “Jeopardy” and then Trivial Pursuit. But there’s not a company out there that really provides trivia on a bunch of different platforms.” Johnston has several ideas. Last Call Trivia is developing a card game. He says it will be one of the world’s fi rst trivia card games. “We have a really big network, tens of thousands of people who’ve been playing at our trivia shows, so we reached out to them and got a huge response. We’re still tailoring the ideas and the rules and sending these card games out to people, and then we’re getting their feedback,” he said. “We’ve fi nally come down to one set of cards that can be played two diff erent ways. One focuses on speed trivia, where you have to be quick to answer, and the other focuses on strategy.” Last Call Trivia is also trying to drum up corporate business by packaging the thousands of trivia questions it has asked at bar events over the years. “We’re fi nding ways to utilize these questions in this database for players and companies, because some companies might want to use them for advertising or to play games with their employees,” Johnston explains. “You can use it as team-building with HR departments, where it’s eight separate sessions, and each team would talk about a team-building question that’s related to trivia, so you get to know the people you’re working with, and over the course of eight diff erent sessions, you cover what a trivia game would be.” Johnston says Last Call is also planning to launch a newsletter, a new website and a trivia podcast. But he’s not abandoning what has been the See TRIVIA, Page 10A
YOUR HEALTH with Dr. Owens
With the COVID-19 vaccine, good things come to those who don’t wait www.interactforhealth.org
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