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


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Contents:
  re: Phenomenology and beer - pt 2 ("Boris de Mesones")
  RE: I Miss My Homebrew Digest (pacman)
  Re: I Miss My Homebrew Digest ("Michael P. Thompson")


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Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:12:51 +0900
From: "Boris de Mesones" <demesones at gmail.com>
Subject: re: Phenomenology and beer - pt 2

I find Steve's posts very interesting because he always tries to look
beyond traditional believes questioning anything that does not square
with his own experiences, and I personally think that many traditional
brewing theories are very questionable.

Steve Alexander writes:

>Kunze (a book with too few references listed)

Mr. Kunze was born in Dresden and spent many years of his life
teaching at the brewing school in Leipzig. Maybe most of you have
noticed already that this means working in the DDR (or GDR in
English), in two words: communist Germany.

The VLB (Berlin brewing institute) worked mainly with east German
breweries during the cold war. After the fall of the Berlin wall, the
VLB agreed with Mr. Kunze to write a book with the information "he
had" from school about brewing. Being east Germany a communist
country, I guess that many foreign books were forbidden and that
books, papers and school materials written by the "regime" were
considered as self made without the influence of western ideas,
therefore they avoided references.

I still remember what my first brewmaster told me during my first
practical training in a brewpub in Berlin, he was an east German
citizen and anti-communist but did not escape the communist
propaganda, he said: -truth, is always in the books-.
Yeah ! of course, in the communist books, because most of the western
ones were forbidden. By the way, he did not accept any west German
trainee ever.

Some years ago Steve made another interesting observation about Kunzes
book and the Reinheitsgebot (purity law), saying that there were many
subtle references about brewing outside of the Reinheitsgebot in this
book. Now you know why, the DDR had no Reinheitsgebot.

Now lets write about body and viscosity. I think it is clear by now
that body is not the same as viscosity.

Recently, whilst trying to brew a beer following the "real"
reinheitsgebot of 1516, I began to add raw barley to my malt grist.
Initially i began with 20 per cent (because many brewing manuals say
is the maximum enzymes can cope) and end up using 92 per cent of raw
barley with no additional enzymes added (proving that many brewing
manuals are wrong). The filtering was a nightmare, actually, it did
not filter, but this is another story, the result was our best selling
batch ever. A beer full of glucans and very clear. The viscosity was
like thin oil, the CO2 bubbles were very small and went up in slow
motion, the head was OK. This beer had high viscosity but the body
perception was thin. I guess the paladar (sp?) was not sufficiently
"touched" in all its senses. Later I tried a 100 per cent raw barley
beer, but it did not work, it converted into porridge. Right now I am
mashing a 55 per cent raw barley Stout a la "real" Guinness. The mash
is already "thinner", less converted sugars, as with 100 per cent
malted barley.

Steve mentions Guinness stout as well. Ten years ago a German
brewmaster told me that he visited some years before the Guinness
brewery and saw that filtration took 24 hours. I guess this was due to
high doses of raw barley. Arthur began using raw barley because taxes
on malt imposed by the English were very high, I think he used much
more raw barley that they do now and the silkiness and smoothness of
the glucans has been replaced in part with nitrogen. By the way, here
in Korea malt is taxed at two hundred and sixty seven per cent.

Recently I tasted Cobra Lager beer, the UK-Indian beer brewed under
contract, I think, in Poland. I was quite surprised because it had a
similar silkiness as my heavy raw barley beers. I guess they have some
"secret" in their production process.  No wonder they have won several
prizes in Europe, the beer is excellent.

Back to my iodine test, its 30 minutes already at 65 C.

Salud and cheers

Boris de Mesones

VLB Braumeister
Jeju Brewery


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Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:36:18 -0600
From: pacman at edwardwadsworth.com
Subject: RE: I Miss My Homebrew Digest

I feel the same way.  I put brewing on hold for about three years, due  
to a lack of space and time.  I am now a homeowner with a nice garage  
and workshop, plenty of room.  The first thing I did when I decided to  
exhume and resurect my brewery was sign up for the digest.  I read the  
first few that were sent to me and was dissapointed to say the least.   
It's nothing like I remember!  One, two, maybe four posts.  I remember  
when it took two sessions to read all of them, and some were small  
novels.  I learned everything thing I know about zymurgy and  
fermentation from the Homebrewers Bible and HBD (and of course trial  
and error).  What's different now to cause such a lack of interest?   
What can we do to regenerate what we once had?



Return to table of contents


Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:01:29 -0600
From: "Michael P. Thompson" <thompson at ecentral.com>
Subject: Re: I Miss My Homebrew Digest

On Jun 19, 2008, at 9:21 PM, Request Address Only - No Articles wrote:

> Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:32:46 -0700
> From: "Dave Larsen" <hunahpu at gmail.com>
> Subject: I Miss My Homebrew Digest
>
> I was going through some archives, and I realize how much I miss my
> HBD.  There was a day it was the center of the brewing world.
> Competitions were announced. Grain mills were discussed.  Rennerian
> Coordinates were given.  We had experts such as Dr Cone come in.  We
> argued the merits of the AHA.  We fumed about Brewing Techniques.
> And, hops, boy did we talk about hops.  It used to be that if you read
> HBD, you had your finger on the daily pulse of homebrewing, even more
> than reading Zymurgy or any other publication out there.  In this day
> and age of blogs and podcast, is HBD obsolete?  I sure to miss it.

I don't miss it. I read it every day, and learn a lot from it. I  
prefer an e-mail format such as HBD rather than a blog or podcast  
myself, as I live in e-mail. A web forum or blog is something you  
have to go looking for. E-mail just appears magically in my inbox.

Now I do realize that HBD has not been very active of late. It seems  
like there should be more messages. I wonder what's going on with that?

NOTE: Based on my experience trying to send this message, a good part  
of the problem is the ancient technology used for the list server.  
Modern list software knows how to strip off multi-part messages and  
remove formatting. The HBD server is making me jump through all sorts  
of hoops trying to convince it that my plain text message is really  
plain text. Last time I tried to send a message to the list I finally  
gave up in frustration.




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