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


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Contents:
  Re: Pansy Water ("Michael P. Thompson")
  Scott/Linda Bruslind comments (Fred M. Scheer)
  Potassium Pansy Water ("A.J deLange")
  RO Installation ("Jeff Dieterle")
  Color Paper ("A.J deLange")
  Potassium Pansy Water (John & Joy Vaughn)
  Slightly Off-Topic Request... ("Lee Hiers")


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Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2008 23:00:34 -0600
From: "Michael P. Thompson" <thompson at ecentral.com>
Subject: Re: Pansy Water

On Aug 31, 2008, at 9:09 PM, Request Address Only - No Articles wrote:

> Rather than
> removing the water softener perhaps you can tap into the system in  
> front
> of it. In well installations there is usually a drain valve for the
> pressure tank which can be accessed. In any case a saddle valve (used
> for connecting ice makers humidifiers, etc.) can be installed  
> upstream.
> Another alternative, usually available in modern softeners, is a built
> in bypass valve which you could operate while drawing brewing water  
> and
> restore to its normal position when finished. SWMBO wouldn't even have
> to know this has been done.


You know, I wondered about that. When I was growing up, we had a  
water softener, but there was a separate tap on our kitchen sink for  
drinking water, since the softened water doesn't have a particularly  
pleasant taste. Even if not, the saddle valve, or needle valve would  
be an easy option, though I don't think they're made to turn on and  
off a lot, so you might want a shutoff valve somewhere in the line.  
It's an easy install. You just bolt the thing to a cold water pipe  
somewhere before the softener, then turn the needle valve until it  
pierces the pipe. Attach a bit of copper or plastic tubing with a  
shutoff valve at the end, and then open the needle back up to allow  
the water to flow. Fill your brewing vessel from the shutoff valve.  
It's like a ten-minute job and doesn't affect the plumbing at all.




- -- 
Doras Cuil Travel--Your one-stop travel source
Do you like to travel? How about wholesale, AND tax-deductible? Ask  
me how.
http://www.dorascuil.com





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Date: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:20:56 +0000
From: fredscheer07 at comcast.net (Fred M. Scheer)
Subject: Scott/Linda Bruslind comments

HI:
Yes, Scott, the Abstract is free when one goes to the
ASBC web site. To read the full article, one needs
sign in name and password.The web site you are referring to [MBAA],
had nothing to do with Herr Langes beer color article,
it is simple a link to a new committees web site on the MBAA web.
I stated that the article from AJ was in the ASBC, not MBAA.
Just a correction for you, Herr Bruslind.
Cheers,
Fred


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Date: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 08:37:21 -0400
From: "A.J deLange" <ajdel at cox.net>
Subject: Potassium Pansy Water

John asks about iron laden well water run through an ion exchanger which 
swaps Mg and Ca for potassium (K) rather than sodium. These exchangers 
may be better for you health (arguably) but they are no better for 
brewing in fact from the brewing perspective they are every bit as bad 
as sodium based exchangers. So the advice is essentially the same as 
given to Sam. Tap off in front, have that water analyzed and procede 
from there. The iron is, of course, a potential problem in this case. If 
it is enough that the water is cloudy or that you can taste the iron it 
will ruin beer and must be removed. Fortunately this is relatively easy 
to do. One approach is to install a separate iron removal unit in front 
of the water softener and tap off between the two. These are either 
aeration based or greensand based - see your water treatment company who 
will know what works best in your area. Given that the water out of the 
softener is adequate the iron level probably isn't that high so you 
probably don't need an elaborate iron unit but the first step in any of 
this is understanding the incoming water. If you don't want to spend the 
money for a separate iron unit for the relatively small volume of 
brewing water you can remove the iron yourself. Buy a reasonably hefty 
pump (such as sold at Home Depot etc with hose fittings) and a shower 
head or other spray nozzle of some sort. Draw the brewing water into a 
large vessel of some sort and then pump it out of the vessel, through 
the pump and shower head back into the vessel. IOW recirculate it 
through the shower head for say 15 minutes. This will get it well 
oxygenated causing "clear water iron" to oxidize and raise the pH (from 
loss of CO2 which wells usually have a lot of with consequently low pH) 
which helps the formation of insoluble ferric hydroxide. Filter the 
recirculated water through a layer of clean sand (play sand from HD is 
suitable). Ugly brown gunk (the Fe(OH)3) will be deposited on the sand 
and the water which runs through should be clear of iron. The sand can 
be washed and used for this purpose again.

A.J.




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Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2008 08:56:34 -0500
From: "Jeff Dieterle" <djdieterle at hughes.net>
Subject: RO Installation


A snippet of A.J. Delang's response to the Pansy Water thread,

 "Another option is to install an RO device (in front of the softener) to
obtain RO water for blending or for use with salt additions to approximate a
desired ion profile."

I thought the RO filter should be after the softener to lengthen the life of
the filters in the RO unit as it would strip all(or nearly all) the minerals
out of the water anyway.

Another question for A.J., when diluting your brew water with tap water are
the proportions of minerals reduced at the same percent as the RO addition,
i.e., if I add 50% RO does the mineral content drop by half across the
board.

Jeff Dieterle   





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Date: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:06:39 -0400
From: "A.J deLange" <ajdel at cox.net>
Subject: Color Paper

Further to the kind words (thanks) of Fred and Scott: I've sent a 
proposed new MOA (Beer 10D) and a spreadsheet that does all the 
calculations (similar to the one in the current Beer 10C) off to the 
Technical Committee so it's in the works. What, if anything, comes out 
of the works remains to be seen. If anyone wants a copy of the MOA drop 
me a line. The spreadsheet is at www.wetnewf.org as are the slides from 
last year's ASBC conference at which I first presented this (although 
the basic idea was presented to the hombrewing community first at MCAB 4 
in 2002). I also have a limited number of reprints of the paper so if 
anyone wants one let me know (I no longer own the copyright so I can't 
post it).

Now what this is all about (and I've posted on it here several times 
before) is that ideally beer acts as if all its coloring components are 
in the same relative proportions to one another irrespective of how 
light or dark the beer is IOW all that changes is the total amount. Thus 
to measure the color of beer, all we need to do is know the optical 
absorption at one wavelength. This is the basis of SRM measurement (done 
at 430nm) invented shortly after WWII. A consequence of the 
proportionality aspect would be that the normalized (by the absorbtion 
reading at 430nm) spectra of all beers are the same. Thus knowing what 
the SRM value (proportional to the absorbtion at 430 nm) is one can 
reconstruct the spectrum. With the spectrum in hand, one can calculate 
tristimulus color for any set of viewing conditions (observer, path, 
illuminant). As the SRM number doesn't mean much to people in terms of 
what one actually sees, interest in tristimulus color is increasing in 
the industry. MOA Beer -10C calculates tristimulus (from the complete 
spectrum) for a particular set of conditions (10deg observer, illuminant 
C, 1 cm path) and reports it as 3 numbers (L,a,b). This is fine for the 
lab itself which still has the spectrum data (81 numbers) but not for 
anyone else who might want to know what the beer looks like in a 5 cm 
glass, for example. Under the assumptions above, the SRM would be more 
valuable for that purpose.

In the real world  beer coloration does not behave ideally but quite 
close to it. SRM carries more than 90% of spectrum information and with 
well behaved beers it is possible to get a surprisingly accurate 
tristimulus (L,a,b) color representation from just SRM. The challenge is 
to pick up the rest of the color variation and doing that using 
principal components anaylsis of the beer spectrum is what the paper is 
about.  What this means practically is that a recent pilsner of mine 
which would have been reported as SRM 7.20 (by MOA Beer-10A) in days of 
yore or more recently as L = 90.56, a = -1.66, b = 38.37  (by MOA 
Beer-10C) would now be given (by the proposed MOA Beer-10D) as SRM 7.20, 
 -0.4, 0 i.e. by tacking a couple of extra numbers which quantify the 
deviation of the spectrum from the ideal on after the SRM. From this set 
of numbers one can calculate Lab (or Luv, or RGB) for any viewing 
conditions e.g. 7.4 cm glass, 2 degree observer, light with a color 
temperature of 7523K:   L=56.2 , a = 26.7, b=84.2.

Miller and Stone (the guys who came up with the SRM) recognized the 
nearly ideal behaviour if not its full significance. They rejected any 
beer which deviated by more than a specified amount from the ideal as 
being unsuitable for characterization by the SRM (a fact that is little 
remembered these days). What I am doing here is completing (with, 
relative to 60 years ago, incredibly powerful computing and measuring 
resources) that little extra bit that they left undone i.e. quantifying 
and coding the deviation of beers they would have rejected.

A.J.


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Date: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 07:35:33 -0800
From: John & Joy Vaughn <hogbrew at mtaonline.net>
Subject: Potassium Pansy Water

I am on a well and have iron in my water.  My water conditioner uses 
potassium chloride and removes the iron and softens the water.  What 
should I do with my water?



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Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2008 19:25:42 -0400
From: "Lee Hiers" <aa4ga at contesting.com>
Subject: Slightly Off-Topic Request...

Hi y'all...

I'm looking for two tickets to the sold-out Asheville NC Brewgrass
festival (Sept. 20) if anyone has a line on these.  Sadly, I must
resort to micro-brew since it has been several years since I brewed.

Thanks,

Lee
- -- 
Lee Hiers
"Have Dobro Will Travel"


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