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HOMEBREW Digest #5625
HOMEBREW Digest #5625 Sun 01 November 2009
FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
Digest Janitor: pbabcock at hbd.org
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Contents:
re: Crystal in American Ambers? ("jeff_ri")
The effect of brewing water and grist composition on mash pH ("Kai Troester")
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Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2009 09:25:47 -0500
From: "jeff_ri" <jeff_ri at cox.net>
Subject: re: Crystal in American Ambers?
Hi All,
In HBD #5623 Rowan Williams asked about crystal malt in American ambers.
Crystal malt is not only appropriate, but pretty much needed for the
style.
The BJCP guidelines describe the style well in the overall impressions:
"Like an American pale ale with more body, more caramel richness, and a
balance more towards malt than hops (although hop rates can be
significant)."
I would recommend swapping the 7% wheat malt for 7% crystal 60L. Maybe
try it with out the roasted barley too, and up the crystal malt to 10%.
YMMV.
I've never used the roasted wheat that you asked about in HBD #5624.
Jeff McNally
Tiverton, RI
(652.2 miles, 90.0 deg) A.R.
www.southshorebrewclub.org
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Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2009 17:59:32 -0800
From: "Kai Troester" <kai at braukaiser.com>
Subject: The effect of brewing water and grist composition on mash pH
I'm pleased to announce that I finally finished my paper on "The effect of
brewing water and grist composition on the pH of the mash". To this point,
this is my most detailed work and it represents data collected in
experiments that I conducted during most of this year:
http://braukaiser.com/documents/effect_of_water_and_grist_on_mash_pH.pdf
It all started with this discovery and blog post:
http://braukaiser.com/lifetype2/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=128&blogId=1
When I was writing a water spreadsheet, I noticed that chalk is not
correctly considered for its alkalinity contribution in most of the water
spread sheets that existed out there. 100 ppm CaCO3 is assumed to add only
50 ppm alkalinity as CaCO3. This didn't make sense to me and before I was
going to tell others about this I thought I better run a few experiments to
see what the actual alkalinity contributed by chalk would be. I ended up
noticing an oddity in the mash pH resulting from water with undissolved and
water with dissolved chalk that led me to do further investigation. But I
didn't feel like stopping there and expanded the experiments to include the
effects of various malts, calcium, magnesium, mash thickness and milling.
The result is aforementioned paper.
But that paper is not intend to tell brewers how to build their water and
calculate mash pH. At least not in understandable language. It makes a lot
of assumptions of prior knowledge and unless you already have a good
understanding of water chemistry in brewing it may not be of much practical
use for you. In the following months I plan to write more practical and
easier to understand articles which will be based on my findings during the
experiments. I also want to update my water spreadsheet to include that data
to allow for the estimation of the mash pH to a reasonable accuracy. Stay
tuned for that.
Here are the new things that I found out.
a.. The darker the lower the mash pH applies to most of the malts but
there are a fair number of exceptions and the color ? mash pH correlation is
rather loose
b.. cara type and base malts provide more acidity per unit of color than
roasted malts. This is in direct contradiction to current knowledge but
supported by titration and mash pH experiments.
c.. Kolbach's work on pH in brewing has been misinterpreted to some
extend. He was talking about the pH of the cast out wort while we are
talking about the pH of the mash. I to didn't notice that until I reviewed
his work more closely. In particular the pH change per ppm of CaCO3 residual
alkalinity change is not 0.0017 pH but depends mainly on mash thickness. The
thicker the mash the lower this number is (i.e. the less the pH changes with
residual alkalinity changes)
d.. the concept of residual alkalinity is a valid one but the neutralizing
power of calcium and magnesium are not necessarily constant.
e.. Chalk not dissolved by CO2 does a very poor job of raising pH. In
particular above an addition rate of 9g for the 7.5 gal water used in 5 gal
batches does little to change the pH and even below that it is not as
effective as chalk dissolved by CO2. This may explain the recommendation not
to exceed an RA of ~250 ppm as CaCO3 when building water.
f.. Mash thickness effects how much effect the water has on mash pH
This may be a lot to digest right now and in the coming weeks and months I
plan to extract more practical brewing advice from that data.
Acknowledgments go to A.J. DeLange who reviewed an early draft of the paper,
gave valuable feedback and whose work on mash pH and water chemistry helped
build the foundation for my understanding of the subject.
Kai
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End of HOMEBREW Digest #5625, 11/01/09
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