Cultivation Starts From Planting Sweet Potatoes

After Zhang He returned to Heishui Town, he brought Wei Peng over.

"You arrange a few people to go to the street to buy acorns in large quantities, as many as you want, and you can also send people to other towns to buy in large quantities."

"My lord, why do we need so many acorns?"

Although acorns are the cheapest of all grains, they don't taste very good.

Thinking of the previous actions of the young master, they always received good results. The most intuitive manifestation is that they can make a lot of money.

"I'm going to try making some wine out of acorns."

Acorns contain a lot of starch, so they should be able to make wine. This time he went to Suifeng City, he planned to make some wine and bring it there to sell for money.

In addition, there are too many sweet potatoes on Qifeng Mountain, it is not easy to sell in this small place, and a bigger place is needed to handle them.

Wei Peng left in a hurry after receiving the order. He didn't know how to make wine, but the young master said it was okay, so it must be fine.

There were some ready-made acorns in the warehouse. Zhang He took more than a hundred catties and asked the zombies to crush the acorns and remove the shells.

Acorns contain a lot of tannins, which taste very bitter, so they need to be soaked in water for a period of time to remove part of the tannins.

In fact, tannins are contained in many wine-making materials, such as sorghum and grapes. In addition to being bitter, the tannins in them can be transformed into a kind of aroma substance after a long time, adding flavor to the wine.

Some wines are specially added with some tannins, but too much tannins will be too bitter to drink.

Zhang He soaked the shelled acorns in clean water for seven days, changing the water every day.

Then steam it, let it cool, and when the temperature drops to not hot, add the koji.

His distiller's koji seeds did not come very well, he sneaked into a brewery at night and stole them.

He originally wanted to buy it with silver, but people took this as a secret and refused to sell it, so he had no choice but to do so.

Distiller's koji only needs some seeds, and then you can make distiller's koji with grain. The principle is similar to wine making. For Zhang He, it is not too difficult. He uses about one or two distiller's koji as seeds and cultivates dozens of catties of distiller's yeast .

After mixing the steamed acorns and koji evenly,

Pack loosely into several large vats.

In the early stage, the yeast in the koji reacted with the starch to convert the starch into sugar. At this time, a lot of oxygen was needed and ventilation was needed.

Two days later, the inside of the acorns had a scent of wine, which tasted sweet.

At this time, pour in a large bucket of water to soak all the acorns, and then cover the outside tightly with a lid.

This is one of many wine-making techniques, such as semi-solid fermentation with fragrance. The advantage of this method is the high yield of wine.

In addition to brewing wine with acorns, Zhang He also brewed a batch of wine with sweet potatoes, and planned to compare the pros and cons at that time.

Now is the season for harvesting acorns, and Wei Peng only took more than ten days to buy a lot of acorns.

The price of this thing is cheap, only a penny a catty, and a few tens of pennies are collected in a large warehouse.

It just so happened that Zhang Heniang's wine was fermented to a similar degree, and I planned to distill it first to see if there was any problem, and put it into mass production.

During this period of time, he has customized a wooden steamer and a sky pot. These things were very common in the countryside in his previous life. This world has not yet distilled alcohol, so naturally there is no such equipment.

On this day, old man Zhang, Wei Peng, Ma Gan and others gathered around the stove, wondering what Zhang He would do with the wine.

In their eyes, the liquid contained in the vat is already considered wine.

Zhang He poured the wine and distiller's grains into the cauldron, placed a strange wooden retort on the cauldron, and placed a large iron pot filled with water on top of the wooden retort.

Fat Tiger was in charge of lighting the fire, and a lot of firewood went down, and soon there was a gurgling sound coming from the pot.

"Ah! Come out, come out!"

I saw a clear liquid flowing out of the pipe protruding from the wooden steamer after bursts of wine fragrance, and Zhang He quickly caught it with a large bowl.

Zhang He poured the first bowl of wine into a small jar alone, and the head of the wine cannot be drunk directly.

The wine head contains the most fusel alcohols, including high methanol content. If you drink too much of this stuff, you will be blind at least, or you will be poisoned to death.

Especially the material he makes wine, acorns, he still doesn't know, the methanol in the sweet potato wine is notoriously high, if not done well, it will kill people.

However, since the boiling point of methanol is much lower than that of ethanol, most of the methanol is concentrated in the front bowl of wine.

As long as the first bowl is discarded, it will not be a big deal.

When Zhang He received the second bowl of wine, he passed the bowl to Old Man Zhang to taste.

"Is this wine?"

Everyone knows that the wine is cloudy, usually red, black or yellow, but I have never seen it like this. It looks like clear water and smells like wine.

Old man Zhang put the bowl to his mouth and took a big gulp. Everyone is used to gulping like this, and taking small gulps is boring.

"Cough cough cough..."

Old man Zhang had never drank such a spicy strong wine, the mouth felt like a knife, his tongue trembled, and when he swallowed it, he burrowed straight into his stomach like a fire dragon.

But old man Zhang swallowed this gulp of wine obstinately, no matter how uncomfortable he was, he was not willing to spit out a drop, and after swallowing, he couldn't help coughing again and again.

"Good wine! Try it!"

Old man Zhang handed the bowl of wine to Wei Peng next to him, and then everyone in the room took a sip and drank the bowl of wine to the bottom in turn.

His reaction to drinking was similar to old man Zhang's, and he was so hot that he shed tears.

Undistilled wine is generally only a dozen degrees, and at most it will not exceed 20 degrees, because the yeast will be killed by the alcohol after fermentation to a certain extent, and it is impossible to continue fermentation to increase the alcohol content.

Even if it is this kind of low-alcohol wine, some water will still be added when it is sold in the wine shop, and many inns will have to add water again when they buy it back.

When ordinary people really drink it in their mouths, there are only a few degrees left.

There is also wine that has not been watered down, but it is very expensive and most people cannot afford it.

But this kind of distilled wine has a high alcohol content, and the freshly steamed head wine has the highest alcohol content. This kind of semi-solid wine has at least fifty or sixty degrees. If it is fully solid-state fermentation, the first wine can reach seventy or eighty degrees.

Those of them who can only occasionally drink a pot of wine mixed with water, who can bear a sip of fifty or sixty degree wine occasionally.

"Son, how much water do you think our wine needs to be mixed with to sell it?"

Although old man Zhang doesn't have the concept of alcohol content, he can also feel that this kind of wine, like clear water, has an extremely high concentration.

Of course, you have to add a lot of water to it to make more money.

After his questioning, he reminded Zhang He that the people of the Great Zhou Dynasty had always been used to drinking low-alcohol alcohol, and they might not be able to get used to it if they drank such a strong alcohol all of a sudden, and it would not be easy to sell.

After thinking about it for a while, a flash of inspiration flashed in my head, and I came up with an idea.

If this idea can be successfully implemented, he should be able to defeat all other wine merchants and monopolize the high-end wine market of the entire Great Zhou Dynasty.

"We don't add water to it, we add wine to it."

"How do you pay for this?"

Old man Zhang and the others all looked surprised, they had never heard of mixing wine with wine.