Literature. Drinking. 【文飲】

I'm trying to get a short wine recipe to work, but it's tricky. One of the problems is how long to incubate the yeast cakes before using them.  The recipe says: 浸麴發如魚眼湯。 Soak the yeast cakes until they bubble with bubbles the size of fish eyes. And so I waited for bubbles.  They never came, and one day when I checked on the brew... Sadness.  It's covered in a slick of fungus. This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License . 

In the recipes so far, I've been working on the assumption that 10 sheng  is one dou , and ten dou  is one dan , based on the entries for those characters in A Student's Dictionary . I'm writing up the lesson plan for the class I'm teaching at Pennsic ( Zidian and Cidian : Chinese Dictionaries ) and as I was paging through Wang Li's Classical Chinese Dictionary , I noticed that one of the appendixes has unit conversions.  What's more, it has dated  unit conversions, with a list of textual and archaeological evidence to back them up. This doesn't really change the recipes since they scale, but it's interesting.  What volumes are the recipes actually calling for? According to Wikipedia , the Qiming Yaoshu  was finished in year 544 CE and took perhaps ten years to write.  This places it during the Eastern Wei dynasty.  Unfortunately, there is no entry for the Wei dynasty at all, but it's one of the  Southern and Northern Dynasties ...

It occurred to me that my experiments in homebrewing might be interesting for other people to read.  While I'm still at an early stage, it seems to be a good way for people with patience and foresight to make cheap, tasty alcohol in quantity. I had made some briefly-fermented sodas in the past, which mostly worked out well, but I didn't attempt to ferment anything fully until this summer, when my brother graciously let me make some mead on his equipment.  That is to say, it started as an attempt to make honey soda, but the container didn't seal well, and we just let it go the rest of the way. Today, I opened the first thing I've produced on my own:  a gallon of hard cider, fermented to 4% alcohol.  Cider is nice because it's dead simple to produce, much easier even than short mead, and far easier than beer.  Here's the recipe I wound up using: Ingredients: Just under a gallon of sweet cider.  I used Littletree Orchards cider from the Ithaca Farme...