5 minute read
LIFE IN A BARREL: BREWING FOR FUN AND PROFIT
COCO ST. GEORGE
From the moment the holy Patriarch Noah decided to celebrate the end of the Universal Flood by gulping down fermented grape juice, the fate of mankind became tightly entwined with some kind of beverage, be it fermented, distilled, macerated, or any combination thereof. You can take fruits, cereals, or grains and let them ferment, have them distilled, brewed, or any other process to make the sugar turn into alcohol, and… cheers! That’s all there is to it.
Every culture in the world has their particular version of alcoholic drink. Ancient Aztecs fermented the maguey mead and obtained pulque, still a very popular beverage in modern Mexico. If you distill mead from blue agave –a special variety of maguey– you get tequila, without which we couldn’t imagine college life as we know it from the movies. And by fermenting pineapple peels you can make tepache, a deliciously refreshing beverage also very popular even if its alcohol content is as low as 1.5%.
In the Far East, the grain of choice is rice with which sake is prepared in Japan, soju in Korea, baijiu in China, sombai in Cambodia, and lao-lao in Laos. But of course, in other Asiatic countries, they use several different plants, trees, and herbs to distill a wide variety of alcoholic beverages: alak from the sap of palm trees in the Philippines; from the flowers of the coconut palm, they make arrack in Sri Lanka, India, and other countries where they also use rice, fruits, or sugarcane.
In Europe, we find wine, of course, in a variety that depends on the kind of grapes used for the fermentation: cabernet, riesling, pinot, graciano, merlot, shiraz, and zinfandel, among many others.
But grapes are not the only fruits we can ferment to get us tipsy. You can use most fruits to make alcoholic beverages: apples to make cider, pears to make perry, or plums to make the delicious Slivovitz if you live in central Europe and have at hand damson plums or, if peaches are what you have, you may make broskovice, a highly appreciated liquor in the Czech Republic. The possibilities, as you can see, are endless.
Being so important for our human civilization, it was only a matter of time before alcohol reached the digital realm. And I am not talking about a bottle-shaped prim with a suitable texture. No, I’m talking about a veritable process for growing, brewing, fermenting, distilling, and finally bottling a wide variety of beverages. All this from the comfort of the piece of land you happen to own or rent. Does this sound like something you’d like to try? Keep reading.
This process is known as Guardian de las Sombras, or G&S for short. Originally devised for the Gorean world, it eventually permeated to the outside, general population and acquired an enthusiastic following. Nowadays you may find vendors and markets to buy and sell every conceivable product, not only wines and liquors, but also produce, fowl, livestock, meat, and whatnot. And this has given rise to a thriving secondary market: smiths to craft the tools you need to grow your vineyards and care for your animals, and coopers to make the barrels where you keep your wine, among many others.
If you want to try your hand at this fascinating trade, let’s begin with something simple, like rence beer. Rence is a plant akin to papyrus, from which several products are manufactured: papyrus for writing, baskets if you weave it, flour to bake bread if you grind it, and beer if you ferment it. That’s right, you can have a kegger with your own beer! Let’s see how it is done.
First of all, you need rence, of course. You can buy it (as cheap as $L1 a bale, enough for one barrel) at the Co-op Market. Now that you have rence, you need to ferment it. For that, you use a fermentor. You don’t need to buy it, of course, since you may use the one at the market. You only need to join the group and you’ll be able to use it.
Rez the rence bale next to the fermentor and click the fermentor. You’ll be asked if you want to ferment grain or rence. Choose rence, and in the next menu, click Fermenting to start the process. The fermentation process may take a while, maybe a little over one hour, so you may want to use that time to look around the market and check all the products that are available.
You may see some animals designated with a name other than the one you know, like bison are called bosks, goats are verrs and boars are tarsks. Remember G&S originated in Gor? Well, some of the original names in Gor stuck and are still widely used. You even may see a dinosaur called tharlarion, which is similar to a velociraptor. Its meat, I was told, is delicious.
Time to go back and check the fermentor. Your beer is ready! Click the fermentor to have your freshly brewed beer delivered to you. One barrel will give you ten jars of beer. Big jars, mind you, so you can get a good buzz.
One final word. In order to keep it real, all G&S products are no copy (and transferable, that’s how you can sell the stuff you make) and are also perishable. This means that the beer jar you are drinking will be gone after you gulp it all down. You rez the barrel, click it, receive a beer jar, add it, drink it, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. It will detach from yourself and, if you try to reattach it, you’ll notice how it disappears immediately. That is how it is. But don’t worry. Now you know how to make all the beer you and your friends will need to have a sensational party. Bottoms up!
