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Contents:
  Link of the week - Feb 13, 2004 (Bob Devine)
  Cidery beers ("Fredrik")
  Light and Dark Munich Malts (Robert Sandefer)
  Clinitest ("Dave Burley")
  Clin*test ("A.J deLange")
  Critique my Amber recipe? ("Pat and Debbie")
  malt source ("D. Clark")
  Five Star Ph Stabilizer ("Val J. Lipscomb")
  Reinheitsgebot it's not - part 2. ("-S")
  Reinheitsgebot it's not - part 1 ("-S")
  Re: dip tubes & Goodbye glass ("C.D. Pritchard")


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Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 23:41:00 -0700
From: Bob Devine <bob.devine at worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Link of the week - Feb 13, 2004

Want to know more about malted barley in the US?
Visit the American Malting Barley Association's website:
  http://www.ambainc.org/

If your knowledge of barley stops at "two-row" versus "six-row",
take a look at their "know your barley" page:
  http://www.ambainc.org/pub/kymbv/2003_KYMBV.htm

Bob Devine


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Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 10:07:50 +0100
From: "Fredrik" <carlsbergerensis at hotmail.com>
Subject: Cidery beers

> Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 09:59:46 -0500
> From: "Dave Burley" <Dave_Burley at charter.net>
> Subject: Cidery beers

> Fredrik does some experiments and speculation on the origin of cidery
taste in
> high sugar beers.

Hello Dave, thanks for your response!

> Lacking the experimental details, I have to ask Fredrik was the sugar in
your
> experiment dissolved in boiling water first? Sugar has various bacterial
> cultures no doubt.  I always boil a sugar syrup before I use it in a
> fermentation.

Yes I definitely boiled sugar in water first. I add it 15 minutes before end
of boil.

1) I wonder if  low temperatures may magnify the cidery notes? I did one
brew, which didn't turn out cidery at all.
That was my first brew with coopers kit + sugar. It was done at 76F :)
However it turned very high in ethylacetate, and diacetyl, but no cidery
notes that  I recall. Also my brews so far has been fairly low range of the
yeast temp range.

2) I am not yet clear on what the distincion between fructose and glucose
would be in this case, but I am assuming they both end up in the same bin in
this case? So I've plotted 3 of my own brews, boldly assuming the acetic
acid does determine the pH (bold I agree but, I have to make something up).
Plotting acetic ppm against Plato sucrose, fructose, glucose then I get this
picture.

http://hem.bredband.net/frerad/beer/cidery_ppm_P.jpg

It is interesting that the honey beer lies over the line, which has already
converted g and f. The other ones have sucrose, which is expected to be a
bit slower then as it has to be converted first?

I don't doubt I am making things too simple here, but I have to start
somewhere. I think for sure temperature and strain probably also has a large
impact, and maybe the buffering capacity of the wort. All my testing so far
has been with nottingham dry yeast. Temps has varied, but I generally stay
and the low end of the temp range. I have a feeling that there is a
balancing between ethyl acetate and acetic acid depending on the range. But
the first yeast I used with the coopers kit was the coopers dry yeast. That
brew is not in the plot btw, because I didn't measure pH in my first batch
:) I didn't even own a gravity meter.

 /Fredrik


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Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 06:20:46 -0500
From: Robert Sandefer <melamor at vzavenue.net>
Subject: Light and Dark Munich Malts

I have spent a week or so diving through the archives and exploring 
various topics: alt grists, oktoberfest recipes, Munich malt brands, etc. 
Unfortunately, I have not seen an answer to the following question:

What are the differences (if any) between the taste and usage of light 
(8L) and dark (16L) Munich malts?

A little background:
The only German Munich malt carried by my current supplier is 8L 
Weissheimer. Over the next few months, I am planning on brewing two alts, 
an oktoberfest, a bock, a dunkelweizen, and a weizenbock.

My research (archival and book-derived) leads me to believe dark Munich 
malt is best (for flavor and color) in alt and bock and is perfectly fine 
in dunkelweizens.

What affect would using 8L Munich malt with roasted malt (to adjust color) 
have on taste of a bock or an alt (especially one following Al Korzonas' 
recipe: 9 pounds Munich malt and 1 pound aromatic malt)?

Is the lighter Munich lighter in flavor as well as color? Should I order a 
dark Munich malt (e.g., 16L Durst from Northern Brewer) for the alt, bock, 
and weizen grainbills?

Answers, guesses, experiments, and suppositions welcome.
Robert Sandefer
Arlington, VA




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Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 07:16:47 -0500
From: "Dave Burley" <Dave_Burley at charter.net>
Subject: Clinitest

Brewsters:

Andy asks where he can find Clinitest kits .  I order the Clinitest tablets
from the pharmacy. The box contains the color chart and all you have to supply
is the testube and an eyedropper also available from the pharmacy.

Glad to see Clinitest is still being used other than in my brewery.

Keep on Brewin'

Dave Burley





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Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 13:32:43 +0000
From: "A.J deLange" <ajdel at cox.net>
Subject: Clin*test

Clin*test is (was) a compact realization of the Munson - Walker  method 
of determining reducing sugars. The sugars reduce Cu(II) from copper 
sulfate to the cuprous oxide and the oxide is (in Munson-Walker) 
weighed. In Clin*test you compare the depth of the reddish brown color 
produced  (Cu2O)  to a chart and get rough  quantitative information 
from that. In the related Lane-Eynon you titrate Soxhelet modified 
Fehling solution (copper sulfate and rochelle salt) with beer and 
monitor the end point with methylene blue (which goes clear when the 
oxidation state becomes low enough). The reagents aren't by any means 
in the $9 range but they aren't too bad either. You also require a 
bunsen burner, burette, beaker etc, It's not a particularly easy test 
to do (timing is important and it's hard for color blind AJ to  detect 
the disappearance of the blue against the red of the oxide) but it does 
give a quantitative answer. Details  in ASBC MOA Beer-12 or DeClerk Vol 
II p 165 et seq.

A.J.



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Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 13:13:17 -0600
From: "Pat and Debbie" <reddydp at charter.net>
Subject: Critique my Amber recipe?

Without getting into the details of my mash, in general, what do you think
about my grain bill? Any comments are welcome. According to ProMash, I get
the exact color and gravity I'm after but I'm a little worried that this
recipe will yield too much malty sweetness. Thanks for any help/suggestions.

Amber Ale - 10 gallons - 75% Efficiency
10 lb. 2-row
4.75 lb. pale
1.75 lb. honey malt
1.3 lb. crystal 60L
 .85 lb. crystal 40L
 .85 lb. Munich
 .05 lb. chocolate malt

90 minute boil
Willamette 18.8 IBU  at  60 min.
Cascade  1.7 IBU  at  30 min.
Tettnanger  4 IBU  at  30 min.
Tettnanger  1.6 IBU  at  10 min.
Tettnanger  0 IBU  at  Dry

12.3 SRM
26.1 IBU

American Ale II yeast
SRM 12.3
SG 1.052

Thanks in advance!

PMR

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Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 10:14:18 -0500
From: "D. Clark" <clark at capital.net>
Subject: malt source

Hi group,

I have been an infrequent poster, but I am a daily follower of the digest 
and have several beers and a couple of wines going most of the 
time.  Occasionally a recipe will be offered by someone, and the list of 
ingredients will include malts that are not always available in my local 
homebrew stores.( I am fortunate enough to have 2 stores within 45 minutes 
of me )  This is frustrating, especially when something sounds really 
good.  North of where I live is a wholesale malt distributer who has 
finally put out a pricelist for homebrewers, and their list of available 
malts and hops is truly impressive.  Their address 
is:  www.northcountrymalt.com .  I have no affiliation with them and I 
haven't ordered yet, but I've spoken with them a couple of times and the 
feedback has been very helpful.

I recently made a clone of Magic Hat # 9 (recipe from "Clonebrews") that 
turned out very well.  It's a tasty pale ale with apricot flavoring added 
in the secondary.  It's available on tap locally and mine was almost dead 
on except with a much better head.  The beer was great but the apricot 
flavor faded gradually as the keg was emptied over several weeks.  Why does 
this happen?  Is there a way to stabilize the flavor?  I like wit beers 
with a lot of coriander and they also lose their flavor over time.  I 
haven't bottled anything for a while, everything goes in the kegs, would 
bottling help preserve the flavors?
Anyone have any thoughts?  Later.

Dave Clark
Eagle Bridge, New York



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Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 22:50:22 -0600
From: "Val J. Lipscomb" <vlipscomb at satx.rr.com>
Subject: Five Star Ph Stabilizer


 Greetings All,

  I recently received an e-ad from Williams Brewing that featured the
subject product,described below:

"This product from Five Star Chemicals will stabilize your mash water and
lock in a pH of 5.2 regardless of your brewing water. A proprietary blend
of food-grade phosphate buffers, adding one tablespoon of pH Stabilizer
per 5 gallons of strike water will ensure a starting pH of 5.2,
optimizing the enzymatic activity of your wort. This one pound jar will
treat over 48 five gallon batches."

While I have a lot of faith in Williams and use other 5 Star products,I
am a doubter on this one. It would
be truly great if it does work. Are there any users out there? Comments,
A.J,-S,Dave B., Jeff R. or any of
the others who remember Chemistry class??? I asked Customer Service at 5
Star for comments-no reply.

Val Lipscomb-Brewing in San Antonio-where the sun spends the winter,but
not today!


Return to table of contents


Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 14:15:27 -0500
From: "-S" <-s at adelphia.net>
Subject: Reinheitsgebot it's not - part 2.

continued

Dave Burley writes ...

> Good
>biologically stable beer  was a major factor in the Hanseatic League
> trading, the German reputation for good beer and the beginning of
> organized international market development and trade since the Fall
> of Rome.

The paragraph above mixes results from 5 centuries into an erroneous
mish-mash. The Hansa traded beer from Hamburg, not Munich, mostly in
the 1600s.  The concept of biological stability awaited French L.Pasteur
and especially the Danish Emil Hansen of the Carlsberg brewery.  This
work was performed as the Hanseatic league ceased to practically exist
in the 1860s and 1870s. In the era of Hansa beer trade, biological
stability was not even understood !

Also Hansa didn't ship beer to distant points, like it's trade fort in
London (the Steelyard) .  Instead they brewed German style beers at the
fort for sale to the English.  Most likely these were the non-RHG styles of
Hamburg.

The Hanseatic League deserves it's own book, but in brief it's something of
an inter-city and international  trading guild which began around 1250 and
only completely ceased in the 1870s !  It primarily involves cities of the
Baltic and North Sea, but in the south  Munich's Hansa controlled trade in
salt (fm Salzburg) wine from Austria I assume, and fabric.  The Hansa was in
serious decline by 1500, but had a revival in the 1600s and very slow death
finalized ~1870.  Hamburg was the Hansa beer trade city not Munich and
Hamburg was never controlled by Reinheitsgebot till after unification.

Munich developed into the premier beer center later too.  In 1741 Bavarian
Benno Scharl writes a text on lager brewing, and in 1807 Gabriel Seylmeyer
took over Spaten and he and later Gaby2 use steam power to make made large
scale brewing and beer transport a reality.  The Bavarian Cloister brews
were
certainly respected, but not, I think, the object of international trade.

Bavaria was a hold-out but joined the German national union ~1870. The
Union had to make several concessions, including the general acceptance of
RHG.  This act destroyed many non-Bavarian beer styles and breweries,
caused many complaints,  and gave  Bavaria a beer trade advantage within
Germany. It's roughly akin to the US prohibition in terms of damaging the
state of German brewing.   Today the RHG cannot be enforced in Germany
by EEC regulation, so all that is needed is a German Jeff Renner-type (or
even a real Jeff Renner ) to revive these non-Bavarian non-RHG German
beer style from their 135year slumber.

Here is a very interesting  East German oriented critical view of RHG in
which he claims that the beers of the East under non-RHG Communism were/are
better than the tame RHG counterparts !   He includes the modern and
highly revised RHG text.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~patto1ro/reinheit.htm
I agree with his POV that RHG is about excessive control, not quality and
that it has destroyed a large part of the history of creative quality
brewing.

Please be sure to click on his link about "Extinct German Beer Styles".
http://www.xs4all.nl/~patto1ro/gerstyle.htm
Northern German herb and fruit beers and all manner of top fermented German
beers from various regions are documented from a 1784 source.   Jeff Renner
are you reading this ?  Someone needs to resurrect this important part of
beer history which was buried by the stupid excessively restrictive
Reinheitsgebot.

Hey - I love a great RHG compliant all malt lager, but I also like a lot of
other styles too.  I have absolutely no a appreciation or romantic
attachment to bad-old laws like RHG.  We have too many bad-new
laws that require our attention.

 -S





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Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 16:06:56 -0500
From: "-S" <-s at adelphia.net>
Subject: Reinheitsgebot it's not - part 1

Dave Burley writes ...

>Subject: Uberflussigereinheitsabout

Overflight is an understatement - it runs history together like a river of
beer on your grandmothers paisley shawl.

>Reinheitsgebot was invented to allow the local princes to control the tax
>collection by taxing malt production of which they could easily determine
>the throughput.

Hogwash - the original Reinheitsgebot(RHG) doesn't even mention malt - just
barley !!! There was no unified Germany until the 1860s 3.5 centuries later.
Bavaria from at least the 1470s to 1700, as today, encompasses the region
around Munich but not including Augsberg or Salzburg.

Here is a translation of the complete text of the *original* 1516 RHG. A
mere 7 or 8  sentences
http://brewery.org/brewery/library/ReinHeit.html
There is absolutely no mention of taxes just price caps and penalties.  You
will also note it only require beer to be made of water, hops and BARLEY !
There is no mention of malt until a revision in the 1600s.  Wheat ?malted?
was also added to the acceptable list of RHG later.  Many other *MAJOR*
revisions followed.

Clearly the original intent of the RHG has nothing to do with taxes, has
nothing to do with malt and has little enough to do with quality aside from
restricting the ingredients at penalty of forfeiture.  It's about price
ceilings and limiting ingredients.  It's argued that the restriction to
barley is
reserve wheat for baking, but there are other forces at work too.

>But so did bean beer [...] arsenic and mercury beer and [...] roosters
> So, Reinheitsgebot had a dual purpose.

Heavy metals, vegetables and poultry don't belong in quality beer, but
somehow others had no problem eliminating these w/o the RHG.  The folks in
N.Germany, Flanders & Burgundia were able to develop styles that include
raw grains, sugars and various 'spices' beyond hops and there is no lack of
quality there.  RHG stifles creativity but does not result in demonstrably
better
quality !

>The good news is the Duke got the taxes which helped him regionalize the
>government and develop currency ( which hadn't been around since Roman
> times).[...].

I'd give that explanation a huge ?MAYBE?.  Currency was not at all new;
Bavaria minted it's own (or copies of those from other regions) since from
about 1100 on, and Charlemagne tried a common currency earlier.  Perhaps
Dave is referring to the new(1495) German "common penny" which failed as a
common currency.

A little context is needed. By 1516 - the year RHG was enacted, there were
huge and revolutionary forces at work.  Gutenburg's new printing presses
were multiplying like rabbits and aside from the classics, calendars and
almanacs, the stuff coming off the presses was full of cynical satires of
politicians, princes and the Church.  'Praise of Folly' by Erasmus, 'Ship of
Fools' by Brandt, 'Letters of Obscure Men' Hutten and many less known works.
One year after RHG, Luther in 1517 posts his 95 theses in Wittenberg to the
north - condemning the Church for much the same reason as these satires.  At
about the a same time in Zurich ?and Geneva? the Anabaptists are formulating
their complaints against the Church.  The regrettable German history of
religious intolerance in this era includes blaming Jews for nearly
everything and
suggestions that all their writings be burned appear in early publication.

The last wave of plague is lifting in 1516.  In 1517 Munich celebrates the
end
of the last round of the plague at Marienplatz with Schafflertanz (coopers'
dance). Plague has hit Munich 12 times between 1349 thru 1497, (and the Jews
of Munich are blamed with attendant severe hate campaigns).

The "Holy Roman Empire" (not holy, Roman nor an empire according to
Voltaire) is an odd political creature which encompasses almost all Germanic
city-states and little else.  It's headed by MaximilianI1 out of Austria.
HR.Empire is a supra-governmental body above the level of the city-state.
By 1100 or 1200 it's actually called the HR.Empire of the German nation
(Heiliges Romisches Reich deutscher Nation) with a Kaiser(Caesar); the 1st
Reich.  By the late 1400s the HRE is falling apart, and then reconstituted
with more power to the city-states when the Reichstag conference of Dukes
and Electors meet at Worms in 1495 (Diet of Worms - more effective than
Atkins ;^) where they formalize their relationships in new ways and
establish a "common penny" for trade use.  Max1 takes actions against the
Turks and N.Italy and rebellious Swiss much of his impact is in introducing
the Italian Renaissance to Germany which is reflected in Munich
architecture.

Tho' central Europe is considerably wealthier with the population decrease
and increased trade after the worst of the plagues - it is also increasingly
humanist and rejecting of centralized power and the costs of government.
The guild system create middle class of sorts that insists on power.
Some tax revolts occur in this era.

At this time Munich was a considerable city, tho' a village by modern
standards (pop 13,500 in 1505).  Albert4 ruled Bavaria till 1508. He made
Munich the duchy capital ~1503 and residence of the rulers and started the
building of the official residence which was based in style on the
Florentine Palazzo Pitti.  His successor Wilhelm4 enacts the RHG in 1516.

There is probably a tax connection for RHG, but it's very complicated.

Cloisters traditionally were the brewers and this was still very
common ~1500, and the Cloisters are immune to taxation on beer.  Secular
commercial brewing was also common.  Spaten brewery traces it's origin to a
small 1397 Munich brewery for example.  Most skilled production outside
cloisters in this era involved guilds which divided workers in to classes of
professionals, craftsmen and laborers.  These class based systems inevitably
lead to social unrest.  The guilds also wield tremendous political power and
a monopoly over the goods.

Was Willy4 trying to extract more taxes from beer by limiting it's price ?
Hard to believe that would work.  It's a price ceiling!   Maybe he was
trying to discourage the Cloisters from making super-premium exotic beers
and charging more for these than for common beers !  Maybe he was trying to
limit the alternate use of wheat and such.  I don't know but it makes little
sense without much more detail on the competition & pricing.  In general
Cloister brewing was discouraged and disadvantaged by government in this
era since it paid no tax ... so few Kloister brews survive.

>With fewer  ingredients  to control and centralization of beer production
> [...] the beer quality improved.
>As a result of the stabilization of the product and the organization to
brew
>it, beer brewing became predictable. The brewing industry was the origin of
>modern process technology and developments in biology and  chemistry.

3 centuries after RHG perhaps, but I don't believe it..  Modern
control of the malting and kilning process didn't appear for centuries
after RHG, and nonRHG regions IMO developed equally high quality product
contemporaneously or even before RHG territory.

Also modern lager beers didn't exist widely outside Bavaria till the
mid-1800s when this magical yeast was 1/ understood to be necessary for
fermentation and 2/ this trade-secret yeast was extracted from a Bavarian
Cloister.  Modern Bavarian styles cannot generally be said to have coalesced
till 2+ centuries after RHG !  BTW lager yeast is said to have come to
Bavaria from Bohemia in the 1500s - after RHG !

 -more to follow




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Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 16:52:53
From: "C.D. Pritchard" <cdp at chattanooga.net>
Subject: Re: dip tubes & Goodbye glass

Chris Mikkelson asked how to cornie shorten dip tubes.  A Dremel MotoTool
fitted with a cut-off wheel makes quick work of this.  Finish the end with
a grinding wheel then a buffing wheel/SS compound.  

I second Chris' recommendation on using cornies as secondary fermenters.  A
cornie with a shortened dip tube and the plastic tip from a racking cane
fitted to its end makes a nice secondary fermenter.  the keg can still be
used later as a dispensing keg by fitting a piece of 1/4" ID vinyl tubing
on the end of the dip tube to restore it to normal length.  It's a tight
fit, so, heat the end of the tubing in hot water before fitting it on the
end of the dip tube.  A smidgen of keg lube helps.

- -----
Bev Blackwood asked about alternatives to glass carboys.  I use modified 5
gal. cornie kegs as primary fermenters. They are fitted with a 1/2"
blow-off port, an adjustable depth racking tube and an internal temperature
sensor and heat exchanger for cooling (or heating).  Details are at:  
http://home.highertech.net/~cdp/kegferm/kegferm.htm 

The only things I've missed after switching from glass carboys to cornies
is watching the yeast work in the primary and the brew clear in the
secondary.  






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