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HOMEBREW Digest #4870
HOMEBREW Digest #4870 Fri 14 October 2005
FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
Digest Janitor: pbabcock at hbd.org
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Contents:
Re: Post your location (Bev Blackwood II)
Re: Post your location (Brian McGovney)
RE: Comments re HBD 4866 (Boris de Mesones)
re: Post Your Location (Billy Oaks)
Rennerian Coords ("Rowan Williams")
Re: Post your location (Jeff Renner) (Jim Stansell)
Why cock ale ? ("steve.alexander")
Question: how to pick/separate hops ? ("steve.alexander")
Tasting kit, pH meters ("Dave Burley")
RE: Post your location ("Benjy Edwards")
Spiking, pH meters ("A.J deLange")
2005 Brewgrass Festival ("Bridges, Scott")
Rennerian (Bill Velek)
location (Linda Owens)
Re: pH meter (3rbecks)
Re: Beer "flavor spikes" (Dylan Tack)
Post Your Location... ("Pat Babcock")
BIER in Endicott, NY ("Dave and Joan King")
Re:Post your location (Charlie Cook)
yeast- ale or lager ("eric")
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Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 22:13:34 -0500
From: Bev Blackwood II <bdb2 at bdb2.com>
Subject: Re: Post your location
Houston, Texas.
Everyday reader, erratic poster. :-)
Plug: The 22nd Annual Dixie Cup - Sparge Wars: Return of the Fredi
gets started this Sunday with judging at Saint Arnold Brewery. Last
online entry count was 900+ so we're well on our way to being the
largest single site homebrew contest in the known universe!
You should join us! Fred Eckhardt, Sam Calagione (Dogfish Head),
Brian Dunn (Great Divide) and John Palmer (How to Brew) will speak.
It'll be a good time.
October 21-22, 2005
-BDB2
Bev D. Blackwood II
Brewsletter Editor
The Foam Rangers
http://www.foamrangers.com
[1082.9, 220.2] Apparent Rennerian
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 20:55:53 -0700
From: Brian McGovney <brian.mcgovney at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Post your location
Brian McGovney
Strand Brewers' Club
Redondo Beach, CA
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 13:00:45 +0900
From: Boris de Mesones <demesones at gmail.com>
Subject: RE: Comments re HBD 4866
stencil wrote:
>does snake wine still trickle through the border??Would it be
possible, Boris, to get a recipe for, say, a two-snake barleywine?
You have to go to China to find snake drinks, here in Korea people eat
funny things but do not eat everything that moves :-)
Last week I found a Spanish 1.888 beer recipe that uses veal knuckles
as an ingredient, if somebody wants to gibe it a try, i will translate
it.
The cobra-shaped beerpull is the standard Oriental Brewery tap
(Belgian owned), you can find it here everywhere. In Spain the Damm
brewery has a similar tap.
Bill Velek wrote:
>"TinyURL"?:-) Instead of posting a long link and asking people to
patch it together
Good idea, however after reading other comments on this, I have the
feeling that the best thing to do is to post it using both formats.
>Also, since I can't read
Korean, is that just a pilot brewery setup, or for a pub-brew, or what?
?It looks like pretty small equipment for a commercial venture.
This is a 2 hl pilot brewery built for the research department of a
Korean University, the idea behind was to build it from scratch with
local parts and welded at the corner welding shop. It was a bit of a
nightmare to find all the proper parts and quality craftsmanship. The
university wants to develop a special beer recipe using local
ingredients.
Cheers
Boris de Mesones
Korea
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 22:13:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: Billy Oaks <billyoaks at yahoo.com>
Subject: re: Post Your Location
Hi, My name is Billy Oaks, and I'm a lupomaniac.
Grayslake, IL
[214.5, 272.6] Apparent Rennerian
Secondary: Who Farted? Ale (Two Hearted clone)
Primary: Trey Bidet Imperial IPA (Rogue I2PA)
On Deck: Pliney the Elder Clone
In my mug: Bigfoot
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 23:00:28 -0700
From: "Rowan Williams" <rowan at canberrabrewers.org>
Subject: Rennerian Coords
Greetings from the land of Oz!
[9588.6, 261.5] AR (statute miles)
Cheers,
Rowan Williams
Canberra Brewers Club
Australia
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 06:20:45 -0400
From: Jim Stansell <jim.stansell at comcast.net>
Subject: Re: Post your location (Jeff Renner)
Jim Stansell
Okemos, MI
[41.5, 313.1] Apparent Renerian
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 08:02:07 -0400
From: "steve.alexander" <-s at adelphia.net>
Subject: Why cock ale ?
Peter A. Ensminger" <>
Subject: cock ale
>I've been interested in making a "cock ale" for many years, [...]
>
- -----
>A "Cat's Meow" recipe for cock ale, [...]
>cock ale is of the barley wine type."
====
Of course Cat's Meow isn't the source for this recipe. I
think it came from some 18th century source, and I don't recall
any cooking of the bird (yak!). And I think it was a whole
well crushed cock per barrel.
So what does a well crushed bird in the fermenter do ? This
has puzzled me, and for a long time I thought it was a joke,
or a purposely misleading false recipe. Maybe not !
Is there an ion exchange from the bone calcium in the acidic
conditions ? Dubious I think.
Any remaining blood will add far too much iron ... if anyone
has tasted beer made from water with iron you'll know how bad
this is.
The mass of protein, even given a tiny bit of yeast protease,
is unlikely to make a big impact on yeast FAN availability, I
suspect.
Lipids ! That's the ticket. High levels of FAs and sterols
from the bird could be used by the yeast and reduce the oxygen
req, while improving fermentation performance. Chicken lipids
should be a very good yeast-growth addition to a barleywine.
A whole chicken (cleaned) might add 300gm of fat, (~50gm/5gal)
and the majority (~70%) are the unsaturated fats(UFAs) desired
for yeast growth. That's not an irrational amount of UFAs to
add to the fermenter.
If you *really* must make a meat-beer I'd suggest chicken skins.
Because of the yeast mechanism for FA ingestion I think you'd
want to directly expose the yeast to the fatty tissue, no sack.
Don't count me in. I don't even like veggie beers, and cock
ale is straight out.
====
If you are seriously interested in the potential advantages of
this method without the yuk-factor, think fatty-acids and
sterols. A neutral tasting veggie oil (canola, corn) are
better as they contain no saturated fats. Vitamin D is a sterol
that can be used by brewing yeast. I did some experiments on
yeast growth a number of years ago using both of these and
they do very nice things for yeast growth.
I've just recently read some papers where various forms of
linoleic acid were added to a fermenter at 6gm/L; that's
~100gm in 5gal or roughly double the cock ale amount.
weird, but fwiw,
-S
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 08:29:13 -0400
From: "steve.alexander" <-s at adelphia.net>
Subject: Question: how to pick/separate hops ?
OK, well thanks to Mark Kellums I have a bumper crop of hops this year,
and a
several weeks ago I cut the whole bines, a foot or two above ground
level, and
hung these in my garage to dry. Over the past 10 days I judged these dry
enough and started picking off the cone/flowers. My problem is that
this is very
time consuming.
One approach I tried last year was to strip the dry leaves and flowers
over a
chicken wire grating and rapidly removes the heavy bines. The
problem is that it then takes forever to sort the flowers from the dry
leaves.
A somewhat better approach is to hand pluck each flower and toss it into a
bucket. This seems to take roughly 2 hours per 5gal bucket of loose hop
cones. Still too slow. At this rate I've probably got a 15-20 hour task
ahead of me.
I'd be very appreciative of any advice for a faster picking strategy.
-S
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 09:11:41 -0400
From: "Dave Burley" <Dave_Burley at charter.net>
Subject: Tasting kit, pH meters
Brewsters:
Steve Laycock visited a brewery and was given a tasting class.
He asks what can be easily obtained to do more of this. For several years I
used to teach a beer appreciation class one semester and a beer making
course next semester at Rutgers Univ night school (always to packed houses)
and then we had our "bar exam" as a last class. As a part of these classes
we had an ooops! night of tasting doctored beers. I usually used Bud as it
was most familiar to class members, so they could easily spot something
wrong (or maybe it was part of a classic beer's profile), Bud's low flavor
profile (to be polite) didn't interfere.
Being a chemist, I had a full kit of tastes, but some readily available
things are distilled white vinegar(acetic acid) and diacetyl (butter flavor
from the flavorings section of your super market) that are useful. More may
come to mind. I'd like to hear of more things others have discovered on
various shelves. I think the BJCP has(or had) a listing?
- -----------------------
Steve also asks about pH meters. The most important thing you should
remember is that most electrodes only last about a year. I make sure I soak
mine in an electrode storage solution (saturated potassium chloride in most
cases) and not in buffer or certainly not distilled water. This will prolong
the lifetime and make sure it is ready to be used when I am. Above all never
let it dry out. If you are getting funny results when you first use it,let
it soak for 1/2 hour and recalibrate it. I use small medicine bottles to put
my buffer solutions in during the time I am using the pH meter. This
minimizes the amount of solution I need, since I always throw it out when I
am finished. The buffers are phosphate solutions and bugs love to eat them.
NEVER pour used buffer solution back into the main bottle and replace the
buffers yearly. Write on the bottle the date when you bought it.
Temperature compensation is a big factor in the precision (Tcomp typically
allows 0.01) of the instrument as well as accuracy. I have one that
measures both pH and T and is temperature compensated I got from Beer,beer
and more beer I think,or maybe Presque Isle Winery. It also gives you a
choice of single or double point calibration and a relecable electrode.
Look at pricing and decide if having a replacable electrode is worth the
cost or just buy a new complete meter. Some meters, like some models of
Hanna, actually require you to have two buffer solutions of 4.01 and 7.01.
The meter determines the slope of the electrode response (which is always
changing over the electrode lifetime) and calibrates itself.
Ask yourself why you need a pH meter anyway. Consider narrow range
multistriped pH paper (about half the price of a new electrode and
unbreakable and lasts a long time in a plastic baggie in the dark) for all
but the dark beers.
Keep on Brewin',
Dave Burley
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 09:19:51 -0400
From: "Benjy Edwards" <rdbedwards at hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: Post your location
Benjy Edwards
Columbus, Ohio
www.boathousebrewery.com
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 13:25:26 +0000
From: "A.J deLange" <ajdel at cox.net>
Subject: Spiking, pH meters
Many of the off flavor compounds are relatively common chemicals like
ethyl acetate, amyl acetate, acetaldehyde, sodium metabisulfite, the
higher alcohols and can be obtained from chemical supply houses. The
problem here is that even a few hundred millilitres of diacetyl, for
example, while they will serve for a lifetime of education sessions can
be quite expensive. There is a company called FlavorActiv that makes up
kits for exactly the purpose under discussion i.e. training brewers to
recognize flaws. In these kits the various off flavors are incorporated
into little capsules which are dissolved in beer or water before being
tasted. Again, the problem is that these kits are quite expensive. I
believe they now make a sort of junior kit at a more reasonable price in
the hope of selling it to clubs (as opposed to megabreweries which was
clearly the target market, base on price, for their original offering).
There have been several postings and articles on how to dope up beer to
emphasize some of the off flavors. For example, simply putting a bottle
of Bud out in the sun for 20 minutes gives a powerful representation of
what the "skunked" (mercaptan) flavor/aroma is all about. Putting a
corner of a Campden tablet in some beer gives a representation of
sulfitic and so on. A search of the archives should turn some of thes
posts up.
On to pH meters. The technology has certainly improved since I first
started writing about these here on HBD but the basics of pH measurement
in brewing remain the same. The first issue is that of ATC (automatic
temperature correction) and it is probably well to start out by
restating that there are two temperature related phenomena with respect
to pH. The first is that the true pH of wort changes by a tenth or a
couple of tenths of a point between near boiling and room temperature.
The second is that the response of a pH meter electrode is a function of
temperature. ATC deals with only the second of these phenomena. It
relieves the operator of having to do the temperature correction
calculations necessary to determine the pH from the raw meter reading.
Nearly all meters sold today have ATC. The first issue leads to endless
confusion and debate as to what temperature an actual publish pH reading
might have been taken. In the professional brewing world all pH readings
are taken at room temperature. This is for the very practical reason
that the sample is usually taken from the brewhouse to the lab to be
processed. There is also a second consideration and that is that probe
life can be extended manyfold if the probe is never subject to the
stress of thermal cycling between high and low temperatures. My
recommendation is that all pH readings be taken on cooled samples.
pH electrode life is limited. Sealed electrodes eventually run out of
electrolyte, junctions plug, the sensing glass gets coated with protein
and while junctions and glass can be cleaned to extend the life there is
a limit to how long you can keep an electrode going. I'd say 2 years is
a good showing. Using free flowing junctions can help with respect to
the junction problem (which is the most common) but eventually poisoning
of the bulb will get you even in those cases. A cleaner with proteolytic
enzymes is a big help in brewing applications where proteins are a big
problem.
Never put a calomel (mercuric chloride) electrode into your mash tun or
any other vessel containing beer you will drink (not that calomel
electrodes are likely to be found any more).
A new twist on pH measurement is the ISFET (ion selective field effect
transistor) probe. These are lots more rugged than glass, can be stabbed
into meat (for example), dropped without breaking, cleaned with a
toothbrush and stored dry. I have limited experience with them (sample
size: 1) and found it to be a great way to go with the only problem
being that the thing died after about 18 months. I don't know if that's
typical but would certainly hope for better as they are quite expensive.
On buffers: Make up fresh buffers frequently and calibrate often. The
newer meters are great in that they store calibration date, time, slope
and offset and you can see how your electrode is doing historically so
you can determine how often you should calibrate. I'd say at least once
a day. More often should not be necessary. If you brew once a month then
I certainly fresh buffers for each brew session is justified though you
can use the same buffers for calibration of the meter for the
measurements in the fermenter. If you brew once a week you can probably
safely use the same buffers for at least 2 weeks. It depends on how
accurate you want your measurements to be.
Probabaly getting close to the size limit here.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 10:15:58 -0400
From: "Bridges, Scott" <ScottBridges at sc.slr.com>
Subject: 2005 Brewgrass Festival
Are any HBD'ers attending the Brewgrass fest in Asheville, NC next weekend -
10/22? This will be my 4th time. SWMBO and I both love Asheville, and any
excuse for a weekend there is a good one. The mountains of WNC are
spectacular this time of year. In case some of you aren't familiar with it,
it is a combination beer and bluegrass festival. This is a large time with
first rate bluegrass music. No affiliation, just anxiously waiting for next
weekend!
Check it out.... http://www.brewgrassfestival.com/
Cheers,
Scott
Brewing (not lately) in Columbia, SC
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 09:19:21 -0500
From: Bill Velek <billvelek at alltel.net>
Subject: Rennerian
Doug Renfrew wrote:
Carrboro, NC
[6921.7, 14] Apparent Rennerian
I see you live in North Carolina (USA), but I didn't realize that it was
so far away ;-) I'm _guesstimating_ that, at 6,921 miles and a bearing
of only 14 degrees from Jeff, you must be visiting Russia or something
like that, ... or else you made a mistake computing Rennerian; I don't
have a globe, so I don't know where your coordinates place you.
Cheers.
Bill Velek, Greenbrier, Arkansas (USA)
[670, 226] Apparent Rennerian
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 09:48:51 -0500
From: Linda Owens <lkowens at uiuc.edu>
Subject: location
Linda Owens
Champaign, IL
[276.2, 238.3] Apparent Rennerian
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 11:25:34 -0500
From: <3rbecks at sbcglobal.net>
Subject: Re: pH meter
I'm currently using a Piccolo meter from Hannah. It's done a real good job
for me for about 4 years, but the probe needs to be replaced about every
year at a cost of $50.
Rob Beck
Kansas City
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 13:23:04 -0500
From: Dylan Tack <dylan at io.com>
Subject: Re: Beer "flavor spikes"
> From: "Steve Laycock" <slaycock at discoverynet.com>
> we are interested in knowing if there is a source for other "flavor"
> concentrates that can be purchased in moderate quantities and used
> in our sampling.
The BJCP study guide has a section on doctoring beer with readily
available materials:
http://www.bjcp.org/study.html#drbeer
A company called FlavorActiV sells flavor standards for beer, but
they don't come cheap:
http://www.flavoractiv.com/
I noticed they are now marketing an "enthusiast" kit for craft brewers
and homebrew clubs. The price is 95 pounds (about US $170). It has
some interesting flavor standards that aren't covered by the BJCP
guide (including "baby vomit" and "sweaty socks").
-Dylan
Iowa City, IA
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 18:33:45 -0400
From: "Pat Babcock" <pbabcock at hbd.org>
Subject: Post Your Location...
Greetings, Beerlings! Take me to your lager...
The perennial request that folks post their location is out!
I'm currently about 6 feet above and 20 feet southeast of the HBD server.
:o)
- --
See ya!
Pat Babcock in SE Michigan
Chief of HBD Janitorial Services
http://hbd.org
pbabcock at hbd.org
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 19:38:18 -0400
From: "Dave and Joan King" <dking3 at stny.rr.com>
Subject: BIER in Endicott, NY
Oops, forgot to put my "location" down last append. We're here Brewing In
the Endicott Region (BIER), near Binghamton, NY, midway between Syracuse and
Scranton.
Dave King, BIER, [396.1, 89.1] Apparent Rennerian
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 20:35:20 -0400
From: Charlie Cook <boxerrocks at cablespeed.com>
Subject: Re:Post your location
Charlie Cook
Chief Cook and Bottle Washer
Boxer Rock Brewing
Laingsburg, Michigan
[51.8, 310.8] Apparent Rennerian
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 19:46:05 -0600
From: "eric" <zeee1 at nebonet.com>
Subject: yeast- ale or lager
Hello all
I remember reading that the "true" definition of wether a yeast is ale or
lager is not if it is top or bottom fermenting, but if it can convert a
certain sugar. Can anyone help here?
Eric
------------------------------
End of HOMEBREW Digest #4870, 10/14/05
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