Maybe tea bricks could be part of the process? In premodern east Asia, all kinds of tea were pressed into bricks (and often in powder form) for longer storage and transportation, which is still the current process for puerh. This was the precursor to matcha, for example. Tea bricks can also be eaten as food.
Tea would of course have to be quite valuable (maybe even [MATERIAL_VALUE:5] or higher still) since those bricks were used as currency.
As for the brewing, they follow different processes, depending on what you're brewing. For example:
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Wine is made by pressing the must from fruit and adding a yeast culture. This would leave behind a pomace, which can be distilled into brandy (you could make wine of it too, but I like to think, it's too weak for dwarves' tastes). Making reactions for pressing has the advantage of putting Pressers to work, instead of being drafted as
meat shields soldiers.
- Some kinds of fruits like banana need to be mashed instead of pressed, as pressing them doesn't easily extract juices. I personally just directly use the fruit itself as part of the brewing reaction.
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Mead is made from honey, which of course is sweet, so can be directly fermented when mixed with water. Metheglyn is mead mixed with various herbs and spices.
- Grains don't have natural sugar as fruits do, so they must be malted, before it can be made into wort to be fermented. For
beer, malting is simply done by letting the grains sprout, while traditional
rice wine is made with a mould called koji. Koji is also used to ferment root starches like sweet potato in some kinds of shouchuu, and other grains like barley, or sorghum for Maotai (truly evil stuff, perfect for the dwarven taste
).
- Beer often uses a bittering agent for flavour and preservation. Hops are the typical kind today, but in the middle ages wasn't universally used. Toady notes bitter melon as a substitute, and other herbs like wormwood, bergamot, rosemary, even pine bark were used in traditional gruit recipes.
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Distilled spirits like brandy, vodka, whisky, soju, and maotai needs a fuel source for the distillation process. You would also make less of it, since you're boiling away a lot of the water. For the hard brewing mod you could use Vattic's idea, of processing the mash glob as with wine, rather than the drink itself, for less micromanagement.
Rum would be made by processing cane syrup (or dwarven syrup) extract into molasses, fermenting it, and then distilling it. Spirits should be much more valuable than a peasant's beer.
- For the extra cost of making spirits you could compensate by adding a syndrome that boosts up their mental stats or even agility. I like to think of that as the logical extension of alcohol keeping dwarves working at a tolerable pace.
- For things that aren't wine you'd theoretically need a water-source, but this is hard to do and needs DFHack, so might be skipped. Masterwork has a way to pull water by building a still on top of a water hole, that I can't quite remember.
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Topic: Brainstorm: Hard Brewing Mod (Read 4995 times)