Messages

1681

All Grain Brewing / Re: undissolved vs. dissolved chalk

« on: November 24, 2009, 08:26:38 PM »

What happens when the pressure is released?

The excess CO2 will come out of solution, but the chalk should stay dissolved for a while. Once you put that water into the much larger strike/brewing water volume the temporary hardness (which dissolved chalk is) will be low enough that it won't precipitate for a few days even if the CO2 gases out.

Kai

1682

All Grain Brewing / Re: undissolved vs. dissolved chalk

« on: November 24, 2009, 07:49:46 PM »

Kai, I know I've asked this before, but can you provide any recommended concentrations for creating a chalk brine? 

I have yet to find a formula that determines how much CO2 pressure is needed to hold a known amount of chalk in solution. But I know that you can get about 800 ppm CaCO3 dissolved with about 20 psi.

Kai

1683

The Pub / Re: 1000th member

« on: November 24, 2009, 07:17:46 PM »

where do you get those numbers from?

1684

Yeast and Fermentation / Re: < 48 Hr. Primary Fermentation?

« on: November 24, 2009, 07:01:15 PM »

What's the current gravity?

Kai

1685

General Homebrew Discussion / Re: Crash Cooling

« on: November 24, 2009, 02:15:52 PM »

I don't know. After keeping it cold for a week or two, I suck it out and the beer is clean and clear, however when the keg is about to kick, some yeast appears (guess they must be on the sides or something)

What you are making is a small area around the dip tube that is free of sediment. The bottom is still filled with sediment but it won't move until the beer level is low enough that it starts to wash the sediment down. This is when the keg goes empty. As a result the last and the first few glasses are the cloudy ones.

There may not be a problem with that. Especially if you don't move the keg around. I just prefer to rack the beer off the sediment into a new keg.

Kai

1686

General Homebrew Discussion / Re: Crash Cooling

« on: November 24, 2009, 02:00:11 PM »

I cold crash in a keg and suck out the sediment.

I don't think that you can suck out all the sediment in a keg. The sides of the bottom are not steep enough for all the sediment to slide towards the dip tube.

Kai

1687

General Homebrew Discussion / Re: Crash Cooling

« on: November 24, 2009, 01:01:12 PM »

The chill haze is formed by hydrogen bonds between tannins and the proline rich regions of proteins. Proline is a particularly hydrophobic (water hating) amino acids and typical for haze forming proteins. So typical in fact that some fining agents are able to use that property of haze forming proteins to selectively remove them while keeping the foam positive proteins in the beer.

As more and more proteins link with tannins the blob grows lager and larger and eventually precipitates and settles to the bottom. But since these bonds are very weak, an increase in the thermal energy in the beer (i.e. temperature increase) can easily break them and the blobs disintegrate and go back into solution. As a result the colder the beer the more bonds will form and the larger the blobs will become.

If the heating and cooling cycle repeats the bonds can get stronger and eventually so strong that warming the beer doesn’t break them and won’t re-dissolve the haze. At this point you have a permanent haze. We don’t really get this as we don’t abuse our beer as much.

To efficiently remove chill haze from a beer you need to chill it as cold as possible w/o freezing it (29-30F), let the haze settle and rack the cold beer off the sediment. You may also filter. But I feel that lagering the beer long enough is less hassle than setting up a filter.

Kai

1688

All Grain Brewing / Re: undissolved vs. dissolved chalk

« on: November 24, 2009, 08:52:42 AM »

I don’t think I can show a big benefit to using dissolved chalk at this point. Brewers have made excellent beers with undissolved chalk and will continue to do so. It’s not that using dissolved chalk is the secret to making a great Schwarzbier. Using dissolved chalk is like using naturally hard water from the tap which brings me to one question I have:

Are there brewers that noticed a difference in beer quality between a dark beer (porter, stout, RIS) that was brewed with naturally highly alkaline water vs. one brewed with water build from scratch by using lots of chalk? I doubt that there will be many who would know that but mabe some brewers with RO systems and alkaline water have brewed similar beers with both waters.

At this point I just want to encourage interested brewers to give this technique of building water a try. Just to get more experience and hopefully a better idea of the benefits and drawbacks. In particular since it is more work.

I’m especially interested in experiences with brewing. My experiments with chalk and other surces of alkalinity showed that undissolved chalk is only able to raise the pH by about 0.2 units before it “stalls”. This seem to means that if the distilled water mash pH of a RIS grist for example is 4.9, you would not be able to get it above 5.1 w/o the use of baking soda, dissolved chalk or naturally alkaline water. I know John Palmer was mentioning that you should not try to build a water with a RA of more than 250 ppm as CaCO3. The question is, what if you build the water with dissolved chalk and are able to raise the mash ph closer to 5.5. Would that improve the quality of the beer or does it not matter anyway. Maybe the malts in a RIS grist aren’t acidic enough to begin with to yield a distilled water pH of < 5.0.

I think I have to brew a RIS myself. I had one at a fellow club member’s house and it was a fantastic beer.

As always, a lot of questions remain.

Kai

1689

All Grain Brewing / Re: Water Test Kits

« on: November 24, 2009, 07:19:28 AM »

I haven't received mine yet. Since I couldn't find them in a local store I had to order them on-line. The local store has only the expensive kits that do a lot of other tests I don't need.

I think the accuracy of these tests should be good enough for brewing. You may also improve the accuracy by doubling the sample volume and the dividing the result by 2 or by using more precise means of dosing the titrant. I do the latter with the precision scale I use for measuring my salts. I zero out the scale when I have a small cup of titrant and a syringe for dosing on the scale. Once I reached the titration point I weigh it again and what's missing is the amount of titrant I used. I'll have to post this with pics and instructions. It's a fairly easy process once you see how it is done.

Kai

1690

Yeast and Fermentation / Re: Water in yeast plates?

« on: November 24, 2009, 06:09:05 AM »

I thought I had a picture of this on-line but I don't.

I use one strip of masking tape to hold the two plates together and then another strip that I tape around the bottom edge such that about 2/3 of its width stand over. I then fold that into the center which "seals" the plate. The plates are stores a plastic shoe box where they'll keep for a few month.

I don't use plates for long term storage though. Just to isolate cultures that I then streak onto a slant and/or stab in agar to make a stab culture. Plates get to easily infected due to the large exposed area when I open them.

Kai

1691

Yeast and Fermentation / Re: Water in yeast plates?

« on: November 23, 2009, 11:17:03 PM »

Yes, the water can cause the problems you mentioned. I think the water in my plates evaporates slowly through the masking tape I'm using to seal them. After a few days of storage the condensation that was in them is gone.

Kai

1692

All Grain Brewing / undissolved vs. dissolved chalk

« on: November 23, 2009, 10:38:02 PM »

I finally published the report about the use of undissolved and dissolved chalk in two batches of my Schwarzbier.

As a background. A while back I noticed that most water spreadsheets don't handle chalk additions correctly when calculating alkalinity. That sparked some experiments including the mash pH experiments that I published a while back. The result was that undissolved chalk has only a limited ability to raise mash pH. At low chalk levels (less than 300 ppm) it seemed that undissolved chalk has only half the alkalinity potential of dissolved chalk.

I wanted to test that in a side-by side and brewed one batch of Schwarzbier with chalk simply suspended in the water and the other one with half that amount of chalk but dissolved with CO2 pressure. The results can be found here:

http://braukaiser.com/lifetype2/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=132&blogId=1

I also updated my water spreadsheet to include dissolved chalk:

http://braukaiser.com/documents/water_calc_v15.xls

Going forward I plan to expand this spreadsheet based on the results of my mash experiments but I have to test that first with my own data. My intention is to make the spreadsheet versatile yet easy to use. Less commonly used or more complicated options would be further down or grayed out.

Check it out and let me know what you think. In particular where there is confusion or something is less intuitive than it should be.

Kai

1693

All Grain Brewing / Re: wort quality and water ratio question

« on: November 23, 2009, 08:18:23 PM »

I just did some digging in the literature on this and this is what I found:

Briggs "Brewing Science and Practice" : At high mash temperatures thicker mashes yield more fermentable worts while at normal mast temps thin mashes yield more fermentable worts

Narziss "Abriss der Bierbrauerei": the wort fermentability of well modified malt mashes shows little sensitivity to mash thickness.

Kunze "Technologie Brauer Maelzer": thicker mashes give more fermentable worts.

If 3 of the most respected brewing authors can't agree on this subject, how should we?

In the end, pick a mash thickness that works for a given beer and adjust the fermentability through the starch conversion rest(s).

Kai

1694

All Grain Brewing / Re: Water Test Kits

« on: November 23, 2009, 07:52:40 PM »

Look for a GH and KH test in an aquarium store. I just ordered one for 5.99 and $6 shipping I was mostly interested in the general hardness part (GH) which measured calcium and magnesium.

If you have a pH meter and hydrochloric acid (muriatic acid) of known strength you can also titrate a water sample to a pH of 4.3 and then calculate alkalinity from the amount of acid you added and the size of the water sample. I have done that a few times. But handling muriatic acid is dangerous. To make it safer I dilute it to about 0.5 % strength and use the diluted acid. Makes dosing much easier too.

Kai

1695

All Grain Brewing / Re: wort quality and water ratio question

« on: November 23, 2009, 06:08:26 PM »

gee Kai,  spoken like an imperial brewing geek

that is one of those topics I tend to chime in all the time since there seems to be so much confusion about it and it is oftentimes uses as a justification for thick mashes. For some reason home brewers are afraid of loosing mouthfeel in their beers.

Kai