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HOMEBREW Digest #4511
HOMEBREW Digest #4511 Wed 31 March 2004
FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
Digest Janitor: janitor@hbd.org
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Contents:
re:Graham and a bus ("Tom M")
re: Graham Sanders & an Oz Bus/defunct law ("Steve Alexander")
Re: Doughing In (Jeff Renner)
Water compositions for styles ("Dave Draper")
North Queensland on the air! ("Dan McFeeley")
Tailoring water ("A. J. delange")
Tampa area brewers? (Paul Kensler)
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Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 01:35:54 -0500 (EST)
From: "Tom M" <tomomeier at excite.com>
Subject: re:Graham and a bus
Sad to hear Graham Sanders has been seriously injured.
Now there is a guy who is sorely missed around here, along with Doc
Pivo and the Baron of Burradoo, Phil Yates. Their light hearted
banter and sarcasm was always fun to read.
I always figured it would be a green tree frog in the toilet or a
croc that would purt Graham in a world of hurt.
In all seriousness though.. here is hoping he makes a speedy and
healthy recovery!
-Tom Meier
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Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 04:50:45 -0500
From: "Steve Alexander" <steve-alexander at adelphia.net>
Subject: re: Graham Sanders & an Oz Bus/defunct law
Dan McF writes ....
>I wanted to pass on to you that Graham Sanders was injured
>after an encounter with an Oz bus and is laid up in hospital as
> a result.
Thanks for the note Dan. I've had some great offline discussions with
Graham over the years ... a very knowledgeable and interesting fellow on
all alcoholic beverage topics and more beyond that. Apparently I forgot to
tell him that bicyclists are fair game on the roads. I was on the receiving
end of a bike-car encounter years ago, tho' less serious than Graham's ...
no amount of frame supplesse will prevent a trip to the ER [but where is
Linda Cardellini when you need her anyway ?].
The last address I have for Graham is ....
craftbrewer at bigpond.com
and I'm sure he'd appreciate some traffic when he gets home in a week or
two.
-Steve
(given the low traffic lately I'll violate my own principles and ....)
"Democracy is that system of government under which the people, having
60,000,000 native-born adult [...] to choose from, including thousands who
are handsome and many who are wise, pick out [...] to be head of state.
It is as if a hungry man, set before a banquet prepared by master cooks
and
covering a table an acre in area, should turn his back upon the feast and
stay
his stomach by catching and eating flies"
"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods"
"If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country he would
have
promised them with free missionaries, fattened at the taxpayer's expense"
"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to
get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and
submit
to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a
streetwalker"
- Henry L. Mencken
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Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 09:37:05 -0500
From: Jeff Renner <jeffrenner at comcast.net>
Subject: Re: Doughing In
"PHILIP ROBINSON" <PhilipRobinson at peoplepc.com> wrote:
>I just doughed-in the mash and it came up very clumpy. I smoothed things out
>with the paddle, but am not really satisfied with this technique. I do
>infusion mash and am looking for some advice on how to get a consistent
>dough-in.
Lumps are inevitable but you can minimize them by adding less than
the full amount of water and stirring them out. There is more shear
in a thick mash and they break up better. I press them against the
side of the kettle if necessary.
I think that adding water to grain rather than the reverse, which
some people prefer, has this advantage as well as not subjecting the
enzymes to higher temperature that occurs if you add grain to all the
water.
Jeff
- --
Jeff Renner in Ann Arbor, Michigan USA, JeffRenner at comcast.net
"One never knows, do one?" Fats Waller, American Musician, 1904-1943
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 08:39:47 -0700
From: "Dave Draper" <david at draper.name>
Subject: Water compositions for styles
Dear Friends,
In #4510 Stan Gammons asks whether it's worth the effort to
try to duplicate a particular city's or region's water
composition when making a style that originated in said
region.
My own practice is to do more or less exactly that. However,
I save myself a LOT of effort by using water from one of
those dispensing machines (at my local Whole Foods) that
produces nearly ion-free water. Then it is a quite simple
matter to add salts to this "blank slate" for whatever profile
one desires. I wouldn't bother doing it if I had to boil down,
decant off precipitate, and all that-- way too much work for
me! I fill my 5-gal sparkletts-type bottles when I do my
grocery shopping (I use 10 gal to make my 5-6 gal batches so
it's just two bottles), and at 29 cents a gallon, that adds only
three bucks to the cost of my batch.
I have been using Ken Schwartz's freeware program
"BreWater" for many years now to do this. It loads in a target
profile from a pretty good sized list, each of which
corresponds to a given city's known water content or to a
proposed profile for various styles by a range of established
brewing authorities. You tell it what salts you wish to use to
fit the profile, and it will iterate to a best-fit match to that
composition. Now, sometimes in order to do this it will call for
a very tiny amount of some salt, and in such cases I just
ignore those tiny amounts and call it "good enough." The big-
picture composition gives the desired result, in my experience
(i.e. the right amount of sulfate to accentuate hop character
for example).
Finally, it must be kept in mind that few modern commercial
breweries use untreated water from their local region
anymore. Thus it could be argued that to duplicate *current*
beers made in those places, one need not do all this. But, the
styles originated largely before such control was the norm, so
I find it perfectly reasonable to choose to compose water
compositions that come close to those where the styles did in
fact come into being lo! these many years ago. And even if
one isn't particularly interested in matching a historical
composition, doing this is a way to eliminate one more
possible surprise, since you KNOW what's in your water using
this approach. Only way to fly, IMHO.
Ken's brewing homepage where you can get BreWater is at:
http://home.elp.rr.com/brewbeer/
I have a list of profiles for brewing waters on my own beer
page at the URL in the .sig below.
Hope this helps,
Dave in ABQ
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
David S. Draper, Institute of Meteoritics, Univ New Mexico
David at Draper dot Name
Beer page: http://www.unm.edu/~draper/beer.html
I can't be bought for a mere $3.50. ---Jeff Renner
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 10:20:11 -0600
From: "Dan McFeeley" <mcfeeley at keynet.net>
Subject: North Queensland on the air!
For anyone who might be interested, the North
Queensland Craftbrewers radio show can be
downloaded for listening at:
http://oz.craftbrewer.org/Library/#Sound
Shows from August and December 2003,
January and February 2004 are archived.
Graham will be laid up for a while, so it's
hard to say when the next show will be
available.
<><><><><><><><><><>
<><><><><><><><>
Dan McFeeley
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 19:46:40 +0200
From: "A. J. delange" <ajdel at cox.net>
Subject: Tailoring water
Stan Gammons solicited experience and opinions on duplicating the water
for particular styles of beer. This was the subject of a major thread
when I first joined this august group however many years back that was
and it's an area that has continued to hold my interest so I certainly
have lots of opinions and even some experience.
First off it goes almost without saying that the major beer styles were
defined by the available water in the days before any kind of water
treatment existed (slight exaggeration - even the ancient Egyptians
treated their water). An example would be the dark beers of Munich. The
carbonaceous but soft waters there required dark malts to set mash pH
low enough that the enzymes could do their work. Compare with Burton
where the water is hard as nails but the bicarbonate concentration is
moderate. Here the calcium/magnesium react with malt phosphate to set a
reasonable mash pH without external acid and the result is the pale
ales. Now go back to Munich and move ahead in time somewhat to where
some enterprising brewer discovers (or is shown) that water can be
decarbonated by treatment with lime so that beers can be brewed on the
banks of the Isar without requiring high kilned malts. Helles is born.
Thus a (the?) most important reason to consider brewing water chemistry
is the establishment of mash pH. If you are trying to brew a dunkles
you want to use enough dark malt to give the beer the true dunkles
character and if your water is not alkaline enough to consume the acid
from the dark malt you will undershoot mash tun pH. You must,
therefore, either use more alkaline liquor or, equivalently, add
bicarbonate or carbonate to the mash tun. Which is easier? Probably the
mash tun. Which is more authentic? Probably modifying the water.
If you are going to brew a helles you can do it with more or less
nominal water or you can prepare water that resembles Munich's and then
subject that water to the same treatment that the Munich helles brewer
does i.e. remove the bicarb you just put it. Very authentic but not a
very good investment of your time.
However you do it you must deal with the mash pH question. You can do
this in several ways one of which is to mimic the brewing water of the
region and then mimic regional brewing practices which, as noted above,
may negate some of what you did in synthesizing the water. Or you can
start with very soft water and treat it to mimic the regional
breweries' post treatment liquor. Or you may brew with the water you
have available and add carbonates or acids (mineral or organic) to the
mash to try to hit the desired strike pH. Or you can add calcium salts
in the hope that reducing residual alkalinity will get the mash into
the right pH range.
After pH adjustment has been dealt with you are free to tweak
"stylistic" ions i.e. those that effect things like mouthfeel &
sweetness (chloride), hops assertiveness (sulfate), salty taste
(sodium, potassium), background bitterness (magnesium). In most cases
(i.e. most municipal water supplies) for most styles you do not need to
worry about these so long as you get the mash pH right. There are other
cases where the water quality is important. Pilsners and Helles require
soft, non alkaline water and won't taste or feel right unless some
attention is given to this. The Burton ales are another example. The
hops won't be right without a huge load of sulfate. Dortmunders will
lack that quitissential crispness if brewed with water is too soft.
I guess at this point in my brewing career I am of the opinion that the
ion profile in the mash tun is very important in producing authentic
beer styles; much more so than mimicking the actual water. One could
argue that synthesizing the actual water is more authentic, I suppose.
That said, if you seek information on how to tailor water to a
particular profile there is lots of stuff on that subject in the
archives.
A.J.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 13:40:46 -0800 (PST)
From: Paul Kensler <paul_kensler at yahoo.com>
Subject: Tampa area brewers?
Hello HBD'ers - long time, no post...
I'm moving to the Tampa, FL area in about a month -
any Tampa-area homebrewers on the HBD? I'm looking to
make contact with some homebrewing (soon to be)
neighbors...
Private emails preferable -
Thanks,
Paul Kensler
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End of HOMEBREW Digest #4511, 03/31/04
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