HOMEBREW Digest #4511 Wed 31 March 2004


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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 Return to table of contents
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 Return to table of contents
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 Return to table of contents
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 Return to table of contents
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 Return to table of contents
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. Return to table of contents
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 Return to table of contents
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