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HOMEBREW Digest #5047
HOMEBREW Digest #5047 Thu 24 August 2006
FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
Digest Janitor: pbabcock at hbd.org
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Contents:
Re: Efficiency of Color Extraction (Fred L Johnson)
Brwonstone Coincidence ("A.J deLange")
beer maps ("Peter A. Ensminger")
HomeBrewFleamarket.com ("Pat Babcock")
Competition announcement: Dayton beerfest, Sept 9 ("Gordon Strong")
Ageing Beer ("Reif and Angie Hammond")
Beers law, steam heat .... ("steve.alexander")
Beer's Law ("A.J deLange")
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Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 06:34:49 -0400
From: Fred L Johnson <FLJohnson52 at nc.rr.com>
Subject: Re: Efficiency of Color Extraction
Thanks to A.J. and Steve for their comments on extraction efficiency of
color versus sugar. I have one follow-up question. Although I do not
use Promash, because I use my own Excel brewing spreadsheet, does
Promash assume 100% extraction efficiency for predicting color? I
assume Promash does not consider coloring reactions during the boil,
etc. in predicting beer color. Correct?
Fred L Johnson
Apex, North Carolina, USA
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Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 12:35:24 +0000
From: "A.J deLange" <ajdel at cox.net>
Subject: Brwonstone Coincidence
I can't answer the question about smoked malt but find the fact that I
was also in that establishement last week quite a coincidence. I had the
Hefeweizen which wasn't bad (hefe to the point of yeast bite and served
with a lemon slice) and the Summerfest which was a little over the top
on the crystal malt but also pretty good. All I noticed about thier
grain bill was that the brewing area was decorated with sacks and sacks
and sacks of oats and I didn't see an oatmeal stout on the board.
A.J.
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Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:59:06 -0400
From: "Peter A. Ensminger" <ensmingr at twcny.rr.com>
Subject: beer maps
Greetings,
I just stumbled across an interesting Google-Map mashup for beer lovers.
See: http://beermapping.com/us-brewery-map/
A nice resource for finding beer if you're traveling. It also makes it
easy for a beer lover to zoom around the country (and waste lots of time).
Cheers!
Peter A. Ensminger
Syracuse, NY
Apparent Rennerian: [394, 79.9]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 11:46:18 -0400
From: "Pat Babcock" <pbabcock at hbd.org>
Subject: HomeBrewFleamarket.com
Greetings, Beerlings! Take me to your used beer equipment. And stuff...
Beerlings: just a reminder that the HBD's Home Brew Flea Market is still
out there. If you're looking for a piece of beer equipment, have some to
sell - or if you're looking for someone local to brew with, the Home Brew
Flea Market is your place. All non-commercial ads are free. Commercial ads
of unique items are sometimes accepted as well.
www.HomeBrewFleaMarket.com
- --
-
See ya!
Pat Babcock
HBD Director of Janitorial Services
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Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 12:44:44 -0400
From: "Gordon Strong" <strongg at speakeasy.net>
Subject: Competition announcement: Dayton beerfest, Sept 9
Entries are now being accepted for the 11th Dayton (Ohio) Beerfest. The
competition will be held on September 9th; entries are due by September
2nd. All details are on our web site:
http://hbd.org/draft/daybeerfest.html.
Quick summary: Easy online entry, no recipe, 2 bottles, $5, any type of
bottles including draft packaging, enter sub-categories as often as you want
(only top-scoring is eligible for prize in a single sub-category). All 2004
BJCP styles accepted including mead and cider. Nice wooden plaques
for category winners (ribbons for 2nd/3rd).
Gordon Strong
Dayton Regional Amateur Fermentation Technologists
strongg at earthlink.net
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 21:02:06 -0400
From: "Reif and Angie Hammond" <arhammond at comcast.net>
Subject: Ageing Beer
Greetings,
I have just returned from Alaska with 4 bottles of Alaskan Smoked Porter
(checked luggage since you can't carry liquids on anymore). I packed it in
a cooler and had to sign a perishable waiver since the airline assumed it
was fish!
I have seen the suggestions that it be aged for several years and am
wondering what the best aging conditions are for this beer (or any other
that improves with age). I can leave it at ambient in my basement (which
varies from 50 to 65, or keep it in my beer cooler at 45. Suggestions?
Something else?
Thanks,
Reif
Durham, NH
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2006 12:52:45 -0400
From: "steve.alexander" <-s at adelphia.net>
Subject: Beers law, steam heat ....
A.J deLange makes two points that interest me,
<AJ>
Furthermore, beer doesn't follow Beer's law
(that the absorbances at a particular wavelength is proportional to the
molar concentration of the absorbing substance) so that would throw off
any practical scheme for calculation of color linearly based on
quantities.
</AJ>
Well I recall a discussion of this topic on HBD several years ago, but
that particular thread didn't follow the Beer-Lambert law either ... it
generated much heat and no light at all; so let's try again.
The Beer's law or the Beer-Lambert law is a simple enough eqn that is
nicely described here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer-Lambert).
The point that bears mention is that *IF* we have a uniform
distribution of molecules in beer that merely absorb light, and
no other mechanism appears, then Beer's law must apply.
Why doesn't Beer's law apply to beer AJ ? Could you explain
the evidence and possible the mechanisms that cause this
behavior ?
<AJ>
As an example of the importance of method I've noticed that all my
recipes are appreciably lighter in color now that I am using steam than
they used to be when I used gas directly.
</AJ>
It's not surprising (to me at least) that steam heating causes far
less Maillard product formation, including melanoidins. Steam
heating has some advantages in the mash, but one problem is that
the heat transfer is fairly inefficient.
AJ - would you mind describing your steam-heating arrangement ?
Boiler & mash capacity ? Heat exchange method ? I suspect a
RIMS-like mashing system with a counterflow hot-water or steam
heat exchanger would be nice (although difficult to clean). Some
folks have successfully injected steam directly in the mash.
-S
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2006 01:36:37 +0000
From: "A.J deLange" <ajdel at cox.net>
Subject: Beer's Law
If beer contained, as Steve puts it, "a uniform distribution of
molecules in beer that merely absorb light" then Beer's law would be
followed and I think the key word in explaining why it isn't lies in the
word "merely". What I am getting at is that these coloring molecules do
not act independently of one another. Thus the probability of one
molecule capturing a photon is NOT independent of the proability that
another will. Many of the basic laws of physical chemistry depend on a
lack of particle interraction. Thus we study "ideally dilute solutions"
and "ideal gases" whose properties depend on each particle in the gas or
solution acting as if no others were there. This isn't the real world
and another part of p-chem tries to deal with the practical aspects of
deviation from this theoretical ideal (virial coefficients, Debye-Huckel
theory etc.). Note that we are talking about the Beer's law part of the
Beer-Lambert law here i.e. the part that says that the log of the
absorbtion is proportional to the concentration of the absorbing
substance. The Lambert part, that the log of the absorbtion depends on
the path length though the solution, is not in question.
I am sure that the Beer part also holds for dilute (low colored) beers.
A quickie experiment tonight with a 17.6 SRM Oktoberfest shows a pretty
good linear fit over 0 to 100% beer in distilled water in 10% increments
though we could probably argue about it as the residuals are not random.
The assertion that Beer's law is not valid is made to discourage an
analyst from diluting a very dark beer to the point where its absorbtion
is within the range of his spectrophotometer and then multiplying the
reading by the dilution factor in order to obtain an SRM value. It was
made in several articles by various authors in the days of yore and is
widely accepted but so have been other assertions that have later proven
false. I don't think I ever tried to prove or disprove it as a much
simpler way to scale to your instument which is not in question is to
simply use a narrower cuvet and that is what I have always done. I did
find a bottle of Guiness in the cooler tonight and measured its color at
54.5 SRM (I'm sure it used to be appreciably darker than that - say 80?)
using an 0.2 cm cuvet. I normally use a 1 cm cuvet for SRM measurement
(the method specifies a half inch cell but because of the Lambert law
it's trivial to convert the 1 cm reading to 1/2 inch) so I just scale
the value from the 0.2 cm cuvet by 5. If I dilute Guiness 4:1, use a 1
cm cell and multiply the SRM reading by 5 I gey 49.0 SRM so this,
though the error isn't terrible (10%) does illustrate the basic premise
i.e. the Beer law can't be used if good accuracy is sought.
On to steam: I brew in 55 gallon stainless steel chemical drums. Three
of these are equipped with copper steam coils which are hooked to a
conventional propane boiler of the sort that used to be used to heat
houses in the days of the old iron radiators and are still made today
for the replacement market in addition to which they are apparently
popular in the kitchens of crab houses. It's 299,000 BTU (input) allows
me to boil nearly 50 gallons vigorously enough to have boil overs while
still maintaining another 30 gal or so at temperature in the HLT.
Temperature control is by PID controlers with proportional output (turns
the steam on and off for a certain percentage of a preset cycle time) or
manually (flipping switches). The coils are connected to bucket style
traps which feed a pumped condensate return system. Cleaning isn't too
bad because you don't get bake-on even if the coils are operated
un-submerged. Just blasting with a hose seems to eventually free
everything up though hops petals can be a bit troublesome.
A.J.
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End of HOMEBREW Digest #5047, 08/24/06
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