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I know nothing about soy sauce or brewing in general, so naturally I will now prescribe improvements to the process from my perch on HN: Why not get rid of the

I know nothing about soy sauce or brewing in general, so naturally I will now prescribe improvements to the process from my perch on HN: Why not get rid of the ridiculously complicated (but truly beautiful) barrels, and instead use pieces of kioke wood, maybe from actual kioke barrels, in stainless vats? In other words, brew the soy sauce in stainless vats, but seed the cultures using pieces of wood that harbor the microbes. Why does the wood need to take the form of a barrel? This would be similar to how I make traditional kefir, or how my mother makes kombucha. We just put the stuff in a glass jar (milk for kefir or tea+sugar for kombucha), and add bugs. In this process, a big piece of koike would serve the same purpose as kefir grains or a kombucha baby; it would supply the biology, and the brewing process in turn would feed the microbial colonies in the wood, the same way making kefir feeds the bugs in the kefir grains so you can keep using them indefinitely. To anyone who actually knows about brewing: does this sound remotely plausible?

scrumbledober 8y ago
It sounds totally possible. There are a lot of home distillers that age whiskey by putting charred oak pieces in a jar of fresh whiskey. The problem with this process for aging whiskey is that it skips the evaporation that happens through the semi-porous wood and I've heard that the process of the liquid expanding and contracting through the wood also aids in a mellowing of the flavors.
ars 8y ago
Maybe it needs air on one side? (No knowledge here, just conjecture.)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
amyjess 8y ago
What you're asking for is actually very common with wine. A lot of cheap reds and chards are made with oak chips in the stainless vats, and it's pretty controversial because it results in a different flavor profile from using oak barrels. Edit: From Wikipedia's article on oak aging [0]: > Oak chips have the benefit of imparting intense oak flavoring in a matter of weeks while traditional oak barrels would need a year or more to convey similar intensity. Critics claim that the oak flavoring from chips tend to be one-dimensional and skewed towards the vanilla extract with the wines still lacking some of the physical benefits that barrel oak imparts.[16] The use of oak powder is also less common than chips, although they are a very practical alternative if oak character is to be introduced during fermentation. Oak planks or staves are sometimes used, either during fermentation or aging. Wines made from these barrel alternatives typically do not age as well as wines that are matured in barrels. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_(wine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_(wine)
cthalupa 8y ago
>Why not get rid of the ridiculously complicated (but truly beautiful) barrels, and instead use pieces of kioke wood, maybe from actual kioke barrels, in stainless vats? In other words, brew the soy sauce in stainless vats, but seed the cultures using pieces of wood that harbor the microbes. Why does the wood need to take the form of a barrel? I do a lot of beer homebrewing, including long term lambic-style sour beers in barrels, which actually shares a lot of similarities with shoyu brewing. Surface ratio is the big thing here. It affects not only how much of the flavor comes from the wood itself, but also oxygen ingress, etc. With shoyu it's open air, so a bit different compared to beer or wine which is usually aged in a sealed barrel, but it does affect the total amount of oxygen in there, even with an open fermentation. Oxygen will get in through wood, it won't through steel. But in general with chips or rods/spirals, you are imparting the wood flavor very quickly in comparison to a barrel, especially an old one. Depending on the biological interactions taking place, the organisms might not be able to process all of that in the same way they would over a longer period of time - they might have different reactions when some compounds are present in higher numbers, than if it is smaller. With beer brewing, if you are using brettanomyces strains of yeast, they produce entirely different flavors if the brett is used as the primary fermenter when there's tons of sugars available, or secondary/co-pitched fermenters where saccharomyces takes care of most of the sugars. I expect you get different flavors from new kioke barrels as well - many microorganisms can eat the sugars in wood, so you're likely to have a different bioflora profile in something fermenting in a new barrel vs. one where it's all already been digested. And there's other processes that'll bring in flavors from fresh wood vs. old. It's a lot harder to maintain something like chips or even rods or spirals over the multiple decades of use you can get out of barrels. It's not that I don't think all of those variables are possible to account for, in the theoretical sense, but no one has so far. Cantillon, a brewery in Belgium that is quite famous for their lambic beers has a sign in their brewery that translates to "Time does not respect that which is done without it", and in my experience, it's been true so far. (Interestingly enough, there's other parallels with Cantillon here - this story talks about the microflora living in the eaves, etc. When expanding their barrel aging program to a new facility, they went and sprayed the whole thing down with their beer to try and jumpstart the microbes being in the environment.)
- nate_meurer 8y ago

scrumbledober 8y ago

It sounds totally possible. There are a lot of home distillers that age whiskey by putting charred oak pieces in a jar of fresh whiskey. The problem with this process for aging whiskey is that it skips the evaporation that happens through the semi-porous wood and I've heard that the process of the liquid expanding and contracting through the wood also aids in a mellowing of the flavors.

ars 8y ago

Maybe it needs air on one side? (No knowledge here, just conjecture.)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

amyjess 8y ago

What you're asking for is actually very common with wine. A lot of cheap reds and chards are made with oak chips in the stainless vats, and it's pretty controversial because it results in a different flavor profile from using oak barrels. Edit: From Wikipedia's article on oak aging [0]: > Oak chips have the benefit of imparting intense oak flavoring in a matter of weeks while traditional oak barrels would need a year or more to convey similar intensity. Critics claim that the oak flavoring from chips tend to be one-dimensional and skewed towards the vanilla extract with the wines still lacking some of the physical benefits that barrel oak imparts.[16] The use of oak powder is also less common than chips, although they are a very practical alternative if oak character is to be introduced during fermentation. Oak planks or staves are sometimes used, either during fermentation or aging. Wines made from these barrel alternatives typically do not age as well as wines that are matured in barrels. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_(wine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_(wine)

cthalupa 8y ago

>Why not get rid of the ridiculously complicated (but truly beautiful) barrels, and instead use pieces of kioke wood, maybe from actual kioke barrels, in stainless vats? In other words, brew the soy sauce in stainless vats, but seed the cultures using pieces of wood that harbor the microbes. Why does the wood need to take the form of a barrel? I do a lot of beer homebrewing, including long term lambic-style sour beers in barrels, which actually shares a lot of similarities with shoyu brewing. Surface ratio is the big thing here. It affects not only how much of the flavor comes from the wood itself, but also oxygen ingress, etc. With shoyu it's open air, so a bit different compared to beer or wine which is usually aged in a sealed barrel, but it does affect the total amount of oxygen in there, even with an open fermentation. Oxygen will get in through wood, it won't through steel. But in general with chips or rods/spirals, you are imparting the wood flavor very quickly in comparison to a barrel, especially an old one. Depending on the biological interactions taking place, the organisms might not be able to process all of that in the same way they would over a longer period of time - they might have different reactions when some compounds are present in higher numbers, than if it is smaller. With beer brewing, if you are using brettanomyces strains of yeast, they produce entirely different flavors if the brett is used as the primary fermenter when there's tons of sugars available, or secondary/co-pitched fermenters where saccharomyces takes care of most of the sugars. I expect you get different flavors from new kioke barrels as well - many microorganisms can eat the sugars in wood, so you're likely to have a different bioflora profile in something fermenting in a new barrel vs. one where it's all already been digested. And there's other processes that'll bring in flavors from fresh wood vs. old. It's a lot harder to maintain something like chips or even rods or spirals over the multiple decades of use you can get out of barrels. It's not that I don't think all of those variables are possible to account for, in the theoretical sense, but no one has so far. Cantillon, a brewery in Belgium that is quite famous for their lambic beers has a sign in their brewery that translates to "Time does not respect that which is done without it", and in my experience, it's been true so far. (Interestingly enough, there's other parallels with Cantillon here - this story talks about the microflora living in the eaves, etc. When expanding their barrel aging program to a new facility, they went and sprayed the whole thing down with their beer to try and jumpstart the microbes being in the environment.)

nate_meurer 8y ago