The poor in culture and the rich in martial arts have always been like this.
Su Ce's family's money and food, even if added to the tenant's rent, would inevitably make ends meet. Su Ce could not accept it.
Unlike Su Ce's "little things", at this time Daqian was facing the biggest crisis since the founding of the People's Republic of China.
Since ancient times, the position of emperor has meant bloodshed and conspiracy.
Everyone is as afraid of him as a tiger.
After the Battle of the Northern Expedition, the Anbei lineage was severely hit, and some of them were suppressed by the prince's gang.
The prince is still under house arrest, and the second prince's visit to the Dingbei Governor's Mansion has caused turmoil in the court.
The princes of the Daqian dynasty were all legitimate eldest sons, so the officials in the court did not need to consider who to support, and the authority of the East Palace was also firmly established.
However, because all the relatives of the Crown Princess were imprisoned, the Crown Prince was under house arrest, the Eastern Palace was weak, and the instability of the country had a great impact.
Now the second prince can be said to be a man of his word on the grassland, and his ability to set the border may be the ladder for the second prince to ascend to the great treasure.
By this time, the court had already turned into a mess.
However, Emperor Zhao Yumin of Daqian was letting things go, as if he was also hesitant.
There is a precedent for the previous dynasties to be in chaos due to the seizure of legitimate sons. All the emperors of Daqian Dynasty were the eldest sons, and there was never any unexpected situation. The crown prince was crowned at fifteen, married at sixteen, and supervised the country at eighteen.
The East Palace governs the five eunuchs of the Nine Temples, and the prince's authority is second only to that of the emperor.
Now, each of the five eunuchs of the Nine Temples sends a minister to assist the second prince Zhao Zaixiao. Where should the prince be placed?
The situation is turbulent, and ambition will breed in everyone's heart.
Recently, Su Ce was planning something. Chang'an is close to the Qinling Mountains to the south. There are many wild fruits in the mountains. In addition, the people grow them themselves. In the golden autumn and October, all kinds of fruits are supplied to Chang'an. However, at any time, we must look at the appearance of prosperity. to abject poverty.
Su Ce asked Li Chang and other personal guards to go to the east and west cities to buy large quantities of unsold fruits.
With their status as craftsmen low, they went to Ren Yazi from the Western Market to buy five craftsmen and their families. Their status as slaves prevented them from walking in the hinterland of the empire.
However, Su Ce did not let this carpenter family enter Suzhuang. He only divided five sets of courtyards from a group of habitable houses left outside Suzhuang.
This already made these five craftsmen burst into tears of gratitude.
There are three carpenters, a winemaker, and a potter. As for the blacksmith, it is considered to have the highest status among the craftsmen, and these blacksmiths are not allowed to be privately owned, and can only be owned by civilians or as generals in the past.
Su Ce's purpose of buying fruits that no one wanted, buying carpenters, winemakers, and potters was very simple.
He wanted to make wine, and grain and wine required government documents. Su Ce could not afford this as a count, and the wine tax was extremely high, which Su Ce could not afford.
Because the cost of grain and brewing was too high, the Crown Princess's family lost their sense of proportion and embezzled grain from the official warehouse, so they also put the Prince under house arrest.
In his last life, Su Ce had nothing to do but watch videos and watch a lot of documentaries. After thinking about it, winemaking was the fastest way to make money, and it was also something he could play around with.
Su Ce's fiefdom was right next to the Wei River, and he asked carpenters to make large waterwheels, tilted cleaning troughs, buckets, rollers, and large wooden barrels.
After a set of processes, the waterwheel provides power. The fruit is first washed, then the water droplets on the surface are dried, crushed with a roller, and the pomace and juice are poured into the wooden barrel.
Then it was transported back to the winery by horse-drawn carriage. It is better to say that it is a winery than a temporary adobe yard. Anyway, there are still many adobes from the previously bulldozed adobe house.
The winemaker ordered the song, and the fruit wine was brewed for a short time. When the wine was ready, Su Ce asked the potter to apply a layer of glaze on the inner wall of the fired pottery bottle.
Everything was almost on track. Although there were still big and small problems every day, Su Ce kept watching. Wooden machines were easy to break, so Su Ce asked the carpenter to make more consumable parts and replace them at any time if they broke.
It would be better to use iron, but the salt and iron franchise is not a joke. If you buy so much iron, you will definitely be questioned.
How can you let others see your own way of making money?
In fact, these things outside are not what Su Ce really wants to sell. The core is in Suzhuang.
Some of the guards used to forge iron at home, but now they can only work as blacksmiths to make copper parts for Su Ce. They melted more than 400 copper coins and separated the impurities in the coins.
Su Ce and his personal guards took turns to go into battle, and they worked hard for more than half a month before just preparing the needed copper ingots.
Copper has very good ductility, so this is the best material Su Ce can find, but it costs a lot of money. How can it not cost money? Copper is money.
The difficulty of making copper pots and copper pipes was not what Su Ce expected. He originally thought they could be made, but no one knew he had the skills.
In the end there was no choice but to use the casting method.
Since we didn't have enough copper ingots, we had no choice but to get to this point, so we had to go for it and melted more than three hundred copper coins to finally make the distillation equipment Su Ce wanted.
It’s already the end of October when everything is ready, and shoddy work means the loss of materials.
Three out of ten wooden barrels can be damaged. The fruit is bought at a low price, and the cost is manpower, which is almost non-existent in Suzhuang.
The cloth woven by the guard's wife can no longer be used to make clothes, because Uncle Su needs to use these undyed coarse cloths.
The pulp impurities in the barrel are filtered, leaving only the newly brewed fruit wine juice. Then a fire is started, and the fruit wine juice is poured into a large seven-foot-wide copper distillation pot.
Cover the pot with a lid with a hollow copper handle, wrap it in linen cloth, smear it with batter, and seal it.
A giant ten-foot-long copper refrigeration tube is connected to the copper handle. The rough surface and thick tube wall all illustrate the poor craftsmanship of the person who made it. The copper refrigeration tube is cast in sections.
It is full of spots left by repairing holes.
However, these do not affect its use.
Everything was ready, the copper pot was heated, and soon Suzhuang was filled with an indescribable fruity and sour smell. If you asked carefully, there was also a smell of wine.
A group of guards nervously poured well water into the bell mouth above the condenser pipe. The other end was connected to the ditch in Suzhuang with a bamboo tube. The water could be kept in the ground to the west along the ditch, and they also poured the ground with their hands.
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Su Ce stared at one end of the condenser tube. This time Su Ce had put all his wealth on this extremely crude distillation equipment.
From now on, it all depends on whether Suzhuang will be mediocre or have a lot of talents.
"Tick, tick, tick..." When the transparent liquid turned from a drop to a stream, Su Ce's heart relaxed.
On the other side, Li Chang saw Su Ce waving to him and quickly turned down the heat under the copper pot.
The fire does not directly contact the copper pot. There is a copper plate in the middle that can be pulled to adjust the contact between the copper pot and the flame.
The distilled wine had a very strong smell. Su Ce got some on his fingers and smashed it in his mouth. It was quite strong.
Now the winemaker takes over. He has his own way of identifying alcohol concentration, which is experience.
Su Ce knew that Daqian's wine, made from grains without distillation, had a temperature of 20 degrees Celsius. Su Ce took a sip just now and found that it should be 40 to 50 degrees Celsius.
Pour the wine into a one-pound ceramic bottle, plug it with a wooden stopper, touch the batter to seal it, seal it with a piece of red cloth and tie it with a rope.