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


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Contents:
  Water Report ("A.J deLange")
  re: Mill Gap Setting (stencil)


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Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:20:49 -0400
From: "A.J deLange" <ajdel at cox.net>
Subject: Water Report

The advice I usually give in these cases (Jeff McNally's question his  
water report) is to grab a copy of the spreadsheet at
http://www.wetnewf.org/Brewing_articles/BURP_OCT08

and plug in the numbers. I've done that and attached it here (not for   
HBD Cc).

At the left side of the spreadsheet you'll see two red fields. The  
first indicates that this water report has a serious anion/cation  
imbalance of 12.6%. To put this in perspective you would need 0.825  
mEq/L more anion (or less cation) to have a physically realizeable  
water. Doubling of the alkalinity or an increase in sulfate to 47 mg/L  
would be required. OTOH it is very suspicious that  changing the  
reported sodium from 42.3 mg/L to 24.3 gives a well balanced (0.7%)  
profile. Is it possible that you (or the lab) fat-fingered the sodium  
report? But then sodium is hard to measure and because it has a low  
atomic weight sodium errors contribute a lot to imbalance. This is a  
lot of ifs and so its a bit hard to draw solid conclusions from such a  
report. As alkalinity and hardness are easy to measure let's assume  
those numbers are good (because they are the ones responsible for  
setting mash pH) and go forward but I'd contact the lab, tell them  
that their report is imbalanced and ask for an explanation.

The other red field at the left of the spreadsheet is informing you  
that the water is over saturated with CO2 (which you already know from  
the pH of 6). This means that allowed to stand the water will lose CO2  
and its pH increase. This is typical of well water in climates where  
the soil contains enough moisture to support bacteria (i.e. most  
everywhere except deserts).

You will note that I entered your calcium and magnesium values as  
negative numbers. This tells the spreadsheet to interpret them as mg/L  
values and in response to this input it calculates hardness of 88.55  
ppm as CaCO3. This confirms that the total hardness value on your  
report is "as CaCO3" but then again the only other units it could  
reasonably be in the US is mEq/L and the number given is outlandishly  
high for that. The same reasoning applies to the alkalinity number. In  
the US it is almost always in ppm as CaCO3 unless it is in mEq/L and  
37.5 mEq/L is outlandishly high alkalinity. Alkalinity is actually  
calculated by measuring the mEq/L and multiplying by 50. People  
sometimes get confused and multiply by 100. I only mention this here  
because doubling the reported alkalinity would better balance the  
report (though if the lab made the usual mistake the reported  
alkalinity would be twice, not half).

You will see that you have a modest residual alkalinity of 14.7 ppm as  
CaCO3 and that this will give you an expected mash pH 0.02 higher than  
a distilled water mash IOW if your grist composition gives you a  
distilled water pH of 5.7 (typical for base malt only) this water  
would be expected to give you 5.72. You can now check that the pH in  
cell w3 is the same as in C3 and start experimenting with calcium salt  
additions in cells J22 and L22 to see what their effect is on pH shift  
(cell T61). For example 200 mg/L gypsum changes the pH shift from +.02  
to  -.03 so that if your distilled water mash pH were 5.7 as before  
your pH with this water supplemented with 200 mg/L gypsum would be  
expected to be 5.67 i.e. it takes a lot of calcium to pull pH a few  
hundredths of a point and you are also increasing your sulfate. Darker  
malts or acids are a much better way to set mash pH (though forbidden  
by Reinheitsgebot but then again so is adding gypsum).

There's obviously lots more stuff you can do with this spreadsheet  
once loaded with your source water parameters. See the included  
instructions (Sheet 2) for details.

As a final comment - you probably would not need supplemental  
carbonate or bicarbonate in a stout if you used roast barley to a  
reasonable extent. The real deciding factor should, of course, be your  
test mash or what you actually measure in the mash tun. If roast malt/ 
barley is being used you can forget residual alkalinity. It takes 3.5  
mEq of calcium to neutralize 1 mEq of alkalinity. The acid in roast  
barley/malt should overwhelm this.

A.J.


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Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:12:43 -0400
From: stencil <etcs.ret at verizon.net>
Subject: re: Mill Gap Setting

On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 23:21:14 -0500, 
in Homebrew Digest #5520 (March 06, 2009)
Josh Knarr wrote:

>
>What's everyone using for their mill gap setting?
>
>Seems like .039" seems popular (or the default). 

0.080" and 0.064", in that order, in a Valley Mill.  Not too
coincidentally these dimensions correspond to AWG12 and
AWG14 solid copper wire.  I always mill and dough-in the
night before, usually using around half the computed
dough-in volume of water.  It's my belief that the long soak
of coarse grist wets more starch than a short dip of finer
grist, and sparging is easier.  Yields are satisfactory.

If I wanted to go down to 0.039" I'd use AWG18 solid bell
wire as a gage.

gds,  stencil



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