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Greetings from southern China

Mofo

Grandmaster Brewer
Joined
Dec 11, 2014
Messages
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Location
Fujian, China
Now that Brad has unblocked me from the site (excessive spamming from my IP range, go figure.) I thought I'd say hi.

I'm Dave. My wife and I have a business in Fujian, China. We moved here from the SF Bay area in 2010. At the time the only beer available was the country's flagship brew, Qingdao (cheaper than a bottle of water!), and a few others distributed by Carlsberg. Nothing of what we left behind in California.  :(

So I last year started brewing at home. My wife had a Mr. Beer kit shipped from America. Great gift, but it was like making brownies from a box. Didn't feel like brewing. Then a LHBS opened ... in Taiwan. Close enough! I filled a suitcase with ingredients during a visit and pieced together a brew kit from local hardware stores. There's no shortage of plastic buckets in China.

Now there are a half dozen craft beer bottle shops in town (one with over 200 imports!) a couple brew pubs (one run by a German guy who started brewing 18 months ago, opened shop 8 months ago, and is now expanding!) and it's not uncommon to see Rogue, North Coast, Brew Dog, and Mikkeller behind the bar. The bottles are dusty, but IPA was made for long boat rides.

And I've recently made the jump to all grain. BeerSmith has helped a lot. And these forums have been even more beneficial. I've learned nearly as much reading posts by BrewFun, Tom Hampton, Pat, Scott Ickes and others as I have reading Palmer's excellent book.  Thanks Scott Ickes for your recent suggestion on mash tun specific heat. And, of course, thanks Brad. I've figured out that learning to use BeerSmith is learning to brew.
 
Welcome, Dave!  Congrats on joining the forum and getting started brewing.  I was in Fuzhou earlier this year on business. Very pretty region, great tea. 
 
@Oginme- I laughed when I read your signature; my toddler and I fed spent grains to the goat next door earlier today!
 
I used to take my spent grains to an 80+ year old woman show had three donkeys and two llamas.  Unfortunately, she passed away this past summer.  Now, they go into the yard waste recycling bin.  I do use some every once in a while to make biscuits, crackers or dog biscuits.  I don't have dogs (I'm allergic), but the neighbor has two dogs and they love them!!
 
My goats will mob me when I walk in carrying a bag of spent grains.  Two weeks ago they even passed up some of their usual sweet feed for the brewing grains. 
 
Welcome Dave,

glad to know 2 things, first you can get something other than Pearl River and Tsingdao and second you can actually access a forum from China. I have not been for a few years but the last time I went to Guangdong my companies forum was blocked and I could not access it. So I guess progress and change are coming slowly to China.

Happy Holidays!

Oh, by the way do horses eat spent grains? I have a couple living behind my house that the kids love to feed carrots to.
 
TAHammerton said:
Welcome Dave,

glad to know 2 things, first you can get something other than Pearl River and Tsingdao and second you can actually access a forum from China. I have not been for a few years but the last time I went to Guangdong my companies forum was blocked and I could not access it. So I guess progress and change are coming slowly to China.

Happy Holidays!

Oh, by the way do horses eat spent grains? I have a couple living behind my house that the kids love to feed carrots to.

I had asked around here with different horse owners.  They all told me that horses don't handle grains well and that they would make them sick.  I'm not sure why it makes them sick, but they said that cows, goats, donkeys, mules, chickens. llamas, ilpaca's, etc. all handle them well and love them.  But horses, according to them get bloated and sick from the grains. 

Not sure if it is true, but it was consistent from three different horse owners.
 
My wife says that horses don't process sugar well. Makes them bloat. It's called colic and it can be fatal. A friend of hers had a horse that got into an apple orchard and ate so many apples that it almost died. I did a quick google and it looks like they can't process carbohydrates, which would include grain and fruit. So it looks like it's not a good idea to offer your spent grains to horses.
 
Scott Ickes said:
TAHammerton said:
Welcome Dave,

glad to know 2 things, first you can get something other than Pearl River and Tsingdao and second you can actually access a forum from China. I have not been for a few years but the last time I went to Guangdong my companies forum was blocked and I could not access it. So I guess progress and change are coming slowly to China.

Happy Holidays!

Oh, by the way do horses eat spent grains? I have a couple living behind my house that the kids love to feed carrots to.

I had asked around here with different horse owners.  They all told me that horses don't handle grains well and that they would make them sick.  I'm not sure why it makes them sick, but they said that cows, goats, donkeys, mules, chickens. llamas, ilpaca's, etc. all handle them well and love them.  But horses, according to them get bloated and sick from the grains. 

Not sure if it is true, but it was consistent from three different horse owners.

I've had the same problem with connectivity when in China.  It has been a couple of years since I was in Guangdong but this past summer when in Fuzhou and Shenzhen, I could connect with a number of forums that I regularly visit (HBT, BeerSmith) but for some reason I could not access my own domain at all.  It must be my subversive capitalist goats.  ;)

Horses have a problem with metabolizing large amounts of sugars and proteins, which is the majority of what is left in the spent grains. 



 
Overseas websites are still very much blocked in China. You don't get anywhere without a VPN.

When the recent protests started in Hong Kong the gov't in Beijing launched the biggest DDoS attack in history, slamming organizations in HK. But it ground web access nearly to a halt over much of Asia. I had nearly a week when access was so slow CSS wouldn't load on any web pages. Makes the internet rather boring.
 
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