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	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
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Contents:
  many things (stevea)
  Re: olive oil (Fred L Johnson)
  Yeast & bitterness ("Bill & Sara Frazier")


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Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2007 01:14:51 -0400
From: stevea <steve-alexander at adelphia.net>
Subject: many things

Raj B Aptewrites ...

> 1. shave some home-made, well-aged soap into hot water,
>   
Yes - this is the right idea, but I have concerns about oxidation
of "well aged" soap.  Oxidized FAs are toxic and flavor active.
> 2. saponify a solution by adding olive oil to water in the
> blender. titrate lye slowly, while blending, to pH 8-9.
> Blend long enough to allow complete saponification, titrate
> to pH 7 with lactic acid, and then dump into wort.
>
> I guess option 2 sounds best. Is this close to the right
> idea?
>   
Yes it is.   Unfortunately the measures are quite small.  For 5 gallon
(20liter) of wort you might choose to add about 1 gram of fatty acids,
So you'd mix about 0.38 gram of sodium hydroxide in 0.5ml of water
and use this on about 1.1 gram (1.2ml) of olive oil.   You'd probably
want to make sure the saponification was complete so perhaps
another 10% of the NaOH+H2O solution would be best.  Also consider
fresh Flax seed oil as a has far more of the poly-unsaturate
FAs.

Peter A. Ensminger notes ...
> Prices in the country's pubs look set to rise by 
> 40 per cent this year, because Germany's farmers are growing less barley 
> for beer production and more crops for biodiesel and bioethanol.
>   
I think there is a little European parochialism involved.   Estonia for
example produces lots of barley and malt and I believe that Russia is the
planets largest producer.  For some reason on the continent at least, the
idea of buying anything that isn't "local" seems a political sin.  The 
upside
is that they and their pets aren't as readily poisoned or killed defective
tires by the Chinese.  The downside is that they pay more and have less
to choose from.

Unfortunately the idea of producing fuel ethanol from grain is
boneheaded.  The net energy gain is marginal, the agriculture is not
ultimately sustainable, the impact on food prices not only impacts beer
drinkers, but more seriously the poor.  The amount of excess nitrogen
needed has very bad long term impact to the environment.   In any
case you can't produce enough excess grain to provide more than a
minor fraction of needs.

Now if you have 2 million acres of sugar cane waste ... that's a
different story.  The bio-diesel (particularly algae) make sense
and miscanthus and switch grass fuels have much better returns
than grains.   (I think I'll grow some miscanthus next year just
for grins).

I wondered for a moment if ADM was busy buying German
politicians  (I think they own them all in the US), but a web
scan reveals that a reason is that German grain farmers
have lobbied for higher prices as they've seen grain prices decline
as grain from the eastern EU members like Hungary & CzechRep
have become more available.  The folly of a government promoting
non-economic uses of grain to improve the economy is parallel to
the classic economist puzzle about the  naughty boy improving
a local economy by breaking shop windows.  It only seems
reasonable if you ignore alternative uses.


Doug Moyer ... has white floaties.
Campden's may help, but too much in a finished beer
adds a sulfur taste you won't like.   Maybe 1 tab in 5gal of
light beer.  In wine they regularly use 5 times as much.
I don't think it's a good approach.

Most likely your white-floaties are oxygen dependent and
refermentation in bottle or keg should stop them.
Actually the reason they float, or grow at the surface, is
that they need O2.  They are likely non-Saccaromyces
yeasts converting ethanol into CO2 (a guess).

 -S



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Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2007 07:26:48 -0400
From: Fred L Johnson <FLJohnson52 at nc.rr.com>
Subject: Re: olive oil

Raj is apparently considering adding free fatty acids to his wort and 
asks about using  his homemade soap made from a mixture of fats and 
silk fiber versus saponifying olive oil. I personally would go for the 
olive oil, and apparently it would not take very much of this to supply 
the yeast with the polyunsaturated fatty acids they can benefit from.  
I think it would help considerably to add some heat during the 
saponification, but Raj actually has more experience making soap than 
I. I would also consider doing this as a very dilute solution rather 
than using some recipe for making a bar of soap.

I  don't think it would be necessary to bring down the pH after the 
saponification if the amount of soap you are adding is really quite 
small as has been recommended.

Fred L Johnson
Apex, North Carolina, USA



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Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2007 10:15:23 -0500
From: "Bill & Sara Frazier" <bsfrazier at att.net>
Subject: Yeast & bitterness

Pat Casey raises an interesting point about the amount of yeast that's added 
to wort and the resulting bitterness of the finished beer.  Darrel comments 
"I guess that calculating the amount of hops to add to the second batch 
would be a challenge..."

I've always noticed while fresh wort can be intensely bitter the finished 
beer may or may not have the bitterness I've hoped for.  I've also practiced 
using the yeast cake (from a batch made with a fresh smack pack) for two 
additional beers.  So there is far more yeast available for the second and 
third fermentations.

Since yeast appears to have a big influence on the final bitterness of a 
beer it seems like a good approach would be to use a standard volume of 
yeast (from the yeast cake of a previous batch) for a new batch.  I've only 
been making beer for 20 years...why didn't I think of this before.  I 
remember Jeff Renner suggesting a certain volume of yeast slurry for fresh 
batches.  Jeff, if you read this, am I correct that you use a certain volume 
of yeast slurry instead of the whole yeast cake for fresh batches of beer? 
If so what volume do you suggest?  And, are you able to achieve the 
bitterness you desire based on amount of hops added and volume of yeast 
used? 



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