Chapter 30: Creeping Progress (V)
Everything has reached a bottleneck. The fermentation of potato wine is progressing slowly, and Xu Youlin has not sent anyone to seek emergency additional liquor. After the junior brothers finished learning the simpler characters from one to ten, as well as heaven, earth, population, and hand, their learning speed has greatly slowed down. The multiplication table also began to enter a slow progress stage after entering the four multiplications.
Huo Chong simply stayed at home and led his fellow junior fellow students in reciting scriptures like chanting sutras every day, doing exercises, doing exercises, and reciting.
In order to help these guys get used to it as quickly as possible, Huo Chong also made some stone abacuses and forced his junior brothers and sisters to learn addition and subtraction.
The only thing that changed was the rabbit family. The mother rabbit was even weaker. She lay motionless in the feeding pen on the coal slag every day and ate grass weakly. The baby rabbits were desperately feeding, but no one knew when they would be weaned.
Huo Chong once raised a cat and had experience feeding kittens. So Huo Chong knew very well that if the mother rabbit died during the lactation period, Huo Chong would not be able to provide milk powder for the little rabbits. If the little rabbits could not digest the grass, they would soon follow their mother. All of Huo Chong's previous efforts would be in vain.
Days passed like this, and the yard looked much brighter because it was cleaned in time. Huo Chong also built a worm house, and put a lot of small worms into the mixture of weeds and manure. This is a good source of fertilizer and feed, but it takes time to take effect.
The duty roster had already shown May 11. After finishing a day's work, Huo Chong urged his fellow students to take a shower and go to bed.
As soon as the lights were turned off, someone knocked on the door. Huo Chong was startled and quickly took out his weapon for self-defense. Since he had the furnace, Huo Chong made himself a crude dagger for self-defense. He went to the door and whispered, "Who is it?"
"It's me." Li Tongshan's voice came from outside the door.
Huo Chong was delighted, but immediately felt something was wrong. Could it be that Li Tongshan had colluded with others and was planning to launch a sneak attack in the middle of the night?
Fortunately, although the moon in the sky is not as full as it was on the 15th, at least it is not the dark new moon night. Looking out through the crack of the door in the moonlight, I saw that Li Tongshan seemed to be alone outside. Holding the dagger tightly, Huo Chong slowly opened the door.
Li Tongshan was the only one outside. He seemed a little shy and said, "Brother Huo, I don't dare to come during the day, for fear of being seen."
"Come in quickly." Huo Chong let Li Tongshan in, then went out and looked around, then quietly put the dagger back into his waist and closed the door.
Arriving at the central hall, Li Tongshan sat down and said, "Brother Huo, after you left, I thought about it over and over again, and the more I thought about it, the less angry I became."
"Oh?" Huo Chong felt that Li Tongshan was speaking from his heart, but it was really unpleasant to hear.
"Brother Huo, who did you learn the skill of baking from?" Li Tongshan continued to say unpleasant words.
Huo Chong did not answer, but raised his left arm. His sleeves dropped, revealing a sports watch. The dial lit up, and the various hands and letters on it formed a complex pattern that was clearly visible in the dark.
Li Tongshan sucked in a breath of cold air. Huo Chongcai continued, "Brother Li, I won't hide it from you. I met a master who gave me a compass and wanted to be his apprentice. The master didn't agree, and I wanted to ask for more. The master taught me a few skills and said that I would need them in the future. That's when I learned about the skill of burning materials. To be honest, Brother , I've never burned materials before. This time I really had no choice but to grit my teeth and try it."
Li Tongshan was silent again, and after a long while he said, "Brother Huo, I thought about what you said. I didn't suffer any loss from you. But why don't you sell the ingredients in Shandong?"
"It's not profitable to sell in Shandong. You can make more money by selling in Jiangsu and Zhejiang." Huo Chong answered decisively.
"Jiang...what, how much can it be sold for?" Li Tongshan had never even heard of the term Jiangsu and Zhejiang, so it didn't seem right to say it.
"Jiangsu and Zhejiang are Jiangsu and Zhejiang. They are south of Shandong. There are tens of millions of people there. Even if one out of a hundred people buys our materials, we can sell 100,000 pieces."
"Hehe!" Li Tongshan sneered disapprovingly.
"Brother Li, just assume that you believe me. We work day and night, how much can we produce in a year? Can we produce a thousand pieces? Even if Jiangsu and Zhejiang only buy 10,000 pieces, we will have to work for ten years. Who knows what will happen in ten years?"
Li Tongshan was silent again. Huo Chong did not urge him, but felt that he had overestimated the people of this era. Zhangdian was in Zibo, not even a county town. It was too much to expect a workshop owner here to know the geographical knowledge of Jiangsu and Zhejiang.
Thinking of this, Huo Chong tried to look at the problem from the perspective of the workshop owner, and suddenly understood what Li Tongshan expected and what he was afraid of. So Huo Chong asked: "Brother Li, I know you don't trust me. What can I do to make you trust me? Tell me."
Li Tongshan immediately replied: "I can't make the ingredients for you now. If you want to make it yourself, I have to send someone."
It seems that Li Tongshan has already thought about his bottom line, Huo Chong decisively agreed: "Yes!"
"You have to give me the money for the fine materials first."
Huo Chong immediately started bargaining, "You have to tell me how much it is first. If it's too high, I can't agree to it."
The next night, Li Tongshan brought a small worker and pushed a wheelbarrow that was creaking with fine materials to the door of Huo Chong's house. Huo Chong was ready to meet them, so he quickly unloaded the things and invited Li Tongshan and his friends in.
This time Huo Chong did not hesitate and put the miner's lamp with candles in the main hall, and the room was immediately brighter. It was much better than the oil lamp.
Li Tongshan carefully looked at the irregular lampshade for a while and couldn't help but smile bitterly, "Brother Huo, you said you have never burned materials before. This material is better than what I burn."
"Without the materials given to me by Brother Li, I would be useless." Huo Chong replied with a smile.
Li Tongshan didn't answer. He stared at the glass lampshade for a long time before turning back and saying, "Brother Huo, if this is made more regular, we can sell it."
"Can Brother Li find a buyer?" Huo Chong immediately became interested.
"Well. Brother Huo, can you cook it neatly?"
"I can only try my best. How it burns depends on fate."
"You cook it first. If you can do it well, I will ask."
So, after daybreak, the smoke from the furnace rose again in Huo Chong's yard. The apprentices turned the wheel, and through the creaking transmission device, they actuated the leather blower to input more air into the furnace.
Li Tongshan's fine material gradually melted in the crucible, and the iron rod driven by the iron transmission device kept stirring back and forth in the crucible, trying to make the molten fine material thoroughly stirred and evenly mixed.
Finally, the first pot of colored glaze was cooked. Li Tongshan's workers stared at Huo Chong and his team as they worked, and when they saw the red-hot colored glaze liquid in the crucible, they came closer. Tie Niu stood in front of the workers unhappily, and Huo Chong smiled but said nothing.
A few days ago, I tried my best to knock out a piece of iron plate that was as flat as possible. The previous lampshade was crooked. In addition to lack of experience , the lack of a flat iron workbench was also an important reason.
The iron pipe was ready, Huo Chong took the long thing and dipped it into the glass paste, and began to blow the vessel. After more than a dozen failures, the first wine bottle-shaped object was finally made.
Huo Chong just felt exhausted, but his fellow junior brothers and sisters, seeing it for the first time, all looked at the bottle from left to right and couldn't let it go.
When everyone was happy, Huo Chong saw Li Tongshan's worker looking at the bottle which was obviously much clearer than the glass made by Li Tongshan, then quietly stepped back and squatted beside the fine materials prepared by Huo Chong. He must be trying to find out some tricks from these fine materials.
Huo Chong had no experience in glassmaking, let alone preparing materials. Huo Chong had compared his own materials with those of Li Tongshan before. He found that Li Tongshan's materials were mostly silicon dioxide, but the sand he selected was much more reliable than his own.
Anyway, the sand in his house looked more like authentic sand than what Huo Chong had thought.
But no matter how much experience Li Tongshan has accumulated, it can't compare to the accumulation of modern industry. One of Huo Chong's concepts about glass products is clarifiers, and clarifiers contain arsenide, antimony oxide and the like. Huo Chong can't get any of these, and nitrates are also temporarily unavailable to Huo Chong.
What Huo Chong remembered was sodium chloride, or table salt. He added some when melting the glass, and he didn't expect it to work. But Huo Chong wouldn't talk about this kind of thing, just keep it to himself. Li Tongshan was far from the level of cooperation that Huo Chong could give him everything he knew.
The speed of firing colored glaze was getting faster and faster, and the transparency of colored glaze was getting more and more like glass. Huo Chong could only make 20 to 30 bottles a day. When the glass bottles were finally neatly stacked, Zhu Erniu came to tell Huo Chong excitedly that they could prepare to steam the wine.
Huo Chong had already made some potato maltose, but it must be said that it tasted very ordinary, not even as good as sweet potato maltose.
Use maltose to make up for the problem. After two more days of brewing, Huo Chong started to distill the wine. The smell of the distilled wine was obviously much stronger from the beginning. Halfway through the distillation, Huo Chong even felt that he smelled the long-lost smell of vodka.
Dozens of kilograms of wine came out, Huo Chong took a sip and immediately grimaced. This is alcohol!
Compared with the complex ingredients of grains, potatoes are particularly simple, and the wine brewed from them is also simple and crisp.
Zhu Erniu also drank it impatiently , and was choked to tears. He beat his chest hard, stuck out his tongue, and wiped his eyes in a very unpresentable manner. He looked a bit like a husky. After finally catching his breath, Zhu Erniu asked painfully, "What is this?"
"Shaojiu!" Huo Chong continued to maintain his naming.
Now everything is ready, except for the east wind from Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Huo Chong couldn't help but doubt his own judgment. Can this thing really be sold? In 1717, when people were not used to strong liquor, a weak person could die if he drank just one sip of the liquor.
"Second brother, let's make the wine lighter." Huo Chong backed off.
