Is that really how you do birth control in the US? That‘d explain a lot.

Totally forgot got mention it: These are actually wild hops! Foraged next to a rural road with not zero, but little traffic.

And yes, it’s a sous vide stick. The one by Inkbird, which I got relatively cheaply. It sits in a hop tube so no grains can get into it.
After use, I instantly rinse it, then put it in a jar with clean water and let it sit there until I’m cleaning up everything. Then, I rinse it again. As it doesn’t have to be sterile, I’m fine with this regime for the time being.

Personally, I had beer sitting on its yeast cake for months (in the cooled keg though), without any issue. Also, when bottle conditioning, you’ll have some yeast sediment at the bottom, which has never hurt the flavour in my experience, even a year or so of not always cool storage.

If you leave your beverage on the yeast for years, I suppose you risk autolysis, but I’d say you’re safe for anything up to a year or so.

Mine is only 20 days old at the time I took the photo on October 3rd, at the beginning of the cold crash, but the sample already tasted really nice!

I’ve got a saison sitting on sweet cherries I picked in my garden and froze for a couple of weeks for something like three months now. The last sample I took was quite promising. It might only the wrong style for a Christmas beer as saison is typically drunk in summer, but other than that, it’s at least partially Belgian.

We‘ll need a bigger boat

Plug in the coax cable and forget the terminator.