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	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
		Digest Janitor: pbabcock at hbd.org


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Contents:
  More on rice hulls (Scott McAfee)
  Re: Perfect sterilization solution (Doug Renfrew)
  RE:  taking into account the rice hulls? ("Richard S Sloan")
  Ethanol-y taste and cidery flavors (Matt)


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Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 00:01:22 -0400
From: Scott McAfee <scmcafee at cox.net>
Subject: More on rice hulls

OK, I have to admit it: I use rice hulls every time I brew and I have no 
idea why.  Can someone please explain?  Is it mechanical (good filter 
material)?  Chemical?  Should I them at the bottom of my mash/lauter 
tun, or mix it throughout the mash?  Once upon a time after a stuck 
mash, someone recommended them to me, and I haven't had a stuck mash 
since.  Generally, I prefer science to superstition, so, what gives with 
rice hulls?

My suspicion:  My stuck mash was during one of my two wheat beers.  I 
also suspect that the hulls are supposed to migrate to the bottom when 
you circulate the wort prior to sparging.  Since I use my mash tun as my 
lauter tun, should I always use rice hulls, or only with sticky 
adjuncts?  I've got a manifold with a bunch of hacksaw slits, if that 
makes any difference.

 -Scott


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Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 09:57:12 -0400
From: Doug Renfrew <doug.renfrew at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Perfect sterilization solution

Hi, 

In response to the Perfect Sterilization Solution post, I think this
is total BS.

Here is a old (and very bad) joke a chemistry professor told me in college

Two chemistry majors walk into a bar. The bartender says to the first,
"What can I get for you?"

"H2O."

"And you," asks the bartender?

"I'll have an H20, too."

The second guy died.

For those who are not chemistry majors, the second guy ordered H2O2,
commonly known as hydrogen peroxide which is a very common
disinfectant. There is alot of BS floating around about hydrogen
peroxide claiming that it can cure cancer, AIDS, and just about
everything else. There have been deaths associated with people trying
to use it in this manner. The FDA has issued a report on it in 1989.
This company is simply just another peddler of misinformation.
Hydrogen peroxide is toxic at any concentration and is lethal in large
doses.

link to FDA
http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/NEW00122.html

Link to quackwatch
http://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/shortt.html

Here is a page of water related pseudo science. Occulus is not on here
but they should be
http://www.chem1.com/CQ/gallery.html

Doug

- -- 
- ---------------------------------------------
P. Douglas Renfrew
Graduate Student
Molecular and Cellular Biophysics Program
Dept. Biochemistry and Biophysics
Unv. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- ---------------------------------------------



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Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 09:35:00 -0700
From: "Richard S Sloan" <richard.s.sloan at us.hsbc.com>
Subject: RE:  taking into account the rice hulls?

Since I use a cooler as a mash tun, what I do is this.
I always pre-heat my cooler with hot water while I am prepping everything
else to avoid heat loss by adding strike water to a cold container. You can
toss the rice hulls in at this point. When you drain the pre-heat water,
you have pre-soaked hulls that wont affect your strike volume.

Richard Sloan
Brewing in San Diego, CA



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Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 09:52:04 -0700 (PDT)
From: Matt <baumssl27 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Ethanol-y taste and cidery flavors

Greg asks what I mean by "ethanol-y":

>OK, I'll bite.  What's an ethanol-y taste?  What real
>beer doesn't taste of ethanol?

I guess I mean a "hot" or "unmellowed" alcohol taste
and smell that I notice in young beer(especially young
high gravity beer).  To me it is even more apparent in
young cider.  I also find that (as with that tripel)
it ages out--though obviously with enough sugar it
wouldn't (pure ethanol, for instance).

I think probably this taste is related to the "cidery
flavors and sugar" thing.  Maybe when there's not
enough malt flavor to back up the alcohol you taste
mostly alcohol and it's a lot like cider.  This was
posed in some post by de Piro, and I tend to buy it,
instead of various theories involving "invertase
flavor" or increased appleish esters.  Maybe I'll do a
blind tasting of beers with various amounts of vodka
or water added and report the results.  

If someone really wanted to know if ethanol is the
sole cause of cidery flavor they could add some of
corn sugar to half a batch of wort, ferment both
halves, and then add the right amount of Everclear to
the other half batch, then compare them.  Anyone ever
done that?

I have no understanding of how or why such a flavor
would mellow but it happened with our tripel and has
been reported in the archives.  If anyone can explain
why, I'd be interested to hear.

Matt



		


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