I am “starting a new series” where I am testing new recipes that I can premake, freeze and then enjoy at a later date. The first candidate for this is french onion soup which takes a lot of time and effort to make but making 1 serving or 10 servings takes the same time. I premade about 4L of soup with homemade stock and then froze it in ramekins. Then when I am craving it I pull it out of the freezer and bake with a bit of gruyere. It maintains taste fairly well and I highly recommend.
I was on a tour of one of the oldest distilleries in Poland. It was an interesting setup where they had a plate distillation column for their high volume high proof production and a copper pot still for niche product distilling. It was cool to see the “back room” where they had their SCADA system and showed me some of their operation process when they load form a new fermentation tank. We talked about their CIP processes and product changeovers, it was great to talk with the actual technical team and definitely a lot of passion for their process. They mentioned that they have a dedicated flow meter that tracks how much product is produced and all of it has to be accounted for with the government and “every drop is tracked”.
I had a great opportunity to tour a small vineyard and was able to get technical with the owner. Most the equipment was all on triclamps so it was nice to see standardization across the world. It was also the first time I was able to see a tracking sheet used to monitor fermentation progress. It was cool to see how they track specific gravity and seeing it drop as fermentation progresses. Additionally you can see all of the additions done during fermentation and the chemical analysis when fermentation finished.
I was on vacation in France and on a hike I was able to find a gorgeous rosemary bush just past bloom. It was over a meter in diameter and the “trunk” was over an inch thick. I put my head into the bush and it smelled amazing. Also rosemary flowers would make a cool garnish for a gin & tonic, they have a nice sweet scent but still carry the rosemary aroma.
