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


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Contents:
  re: Crystal in American Ambers? ("jeff_ri")
  The effect of brewing water and grist composition on mash pH ("Kai Troester")


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Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2009 09:25:47 -0500
From: "jeff_ri" <jeff_ri at cox.net>
Subject: re: Crystal in American Ambers?

Hi All,

  In HBD #5623 Rowan Williams asked about crystal malt in American ambers.

  Crystal malt is not only appropriate, but pretty much needed for the 
style.

  The BJCP guidelines describe the style well in the overall impressions: 
"Like an American pale ale with more body, more caramel richness, and a 
balance more towards malt than hops (although hop rates can be 
significant)."

  I would recommend swapping the 7% wheat malt for 7% crystal 60L.  Maybe 
try it with out the roasted barley too, and up the crystal malt to 10%. 
YMMV.

  I've never used the roasted wheat that you asked about in HBD #5624.

Jeff McNally
Tiverton, RI
(652.2 miles, 90.0 deg) A.R.
www.southshorebrewclub.org





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Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2009 17:59:32 -0800
From: "Kai Troester" <kai at braukaiser.com>
Subject: The effect of brewing water and grist composition on mash pH

I'm pleased to announce that I finally finished my paper on "The effect of 
brewing water and grist composition on the pH of the mash". To this point, 
this is my most detailed work and it represents data collected in 
experiments that I conducted during most of this year:




http://braukaiser.com/documents/effect_of_water_and_grist_on_mash_pH.pdf




It all started with this discovery and blog post: 
http://braukaiser.com/lifetype2/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=128&blogId=1

When I was writing a water spreadsheet, I noticed that chalk is not 
correctly considered for its alkalinity contribution in most of the water 
spread sheets that existed out there. 100 ppm CaCO3 is assumed to add only 
50 ppm alkalinity as CaCO3. This didn't make sense to me and before I was 
going to tell others about this I thought I better run a few experiments to 
see what the actual alkalinity contributed by chalk would be. I ended up 
noticing an oddity in the mash pH resulting from water with undissolved and 
water with dissolved chalk that led me to do further investigation. But I 
didn't feel like stopping there and expanded the experiments to include the 
effects of various malts, calcium, magnesium, mash thickness and milling. 
The result is aforementioned paper.




But that paper is not intend to tell brewers how to build their water and 
calculate mash pH. At least not in understandable language. It makes a lot 
of assumptions of prior knowledge and unless you already have a good 
understanding of water chemistry in brewing it may not be of much practical 
use for you. In the following months I plan to write more practical and 
easier to understand articles which will be based on my findings during the 
experiments. I also want to update my water spreadsheet to include that data 
to allow for the estimation of the mash pH to a reasonable accuracy. Stay 
tuned for that.




Here are the new things that I found out.




  a.. The darker the lower the mash pH applies to most of the malts but 
there are a fair number of exceptions and the color ? mash pH correlation is 
rather loose

  b.. cara type and base malts provide more acidity per unit of color than 
roasted malts. This is in direct contradiction to current knowledge but 
supported by titration and mash pH experiments.

  c.. Kolbach's work on pH in brewing has been misinterpreted to some 
extend. He was talking about the pH of the cast out wort while we are 
talking about the pH of the mash. I to didn't notice that until I reviewed 
his work more closely. In particular the pH change per ppm of CaCO3 residual 
alkalinity change is not 0.0017 pH but depends mainly on mash thickness. The 
thicker the mash the lower this number is (i.e. the less the pH changes with 
residual alkalinity changes)

  d.. the concept of residual alkalinity is a valid one but the neutralizing 
power of calcium and magnesium are not necessarily constant.

  e.. Chalk not dissolved by CO2 does a very poor job of raising pH. In 
particular above an addition rate of 9g for the 7.5 gal water used in 5 gal 
batches does little to change the pH and even below that it is not as 
effective as chalk dissolved by CO2. This may explain the recommendation not 
to exceed an RA of ~250 ppm as CaCO3 when building water.

  f.. Mash thickness effects how much effect the water has on mash pH




This may be a lot to digest right now and in the coming weeks and months I 
plan to extract more practical brewing advice from that data.




Acknowledgments go to A.J. DeLange who reviewed an early draft of the paper, 
gave valuable feedback and whose work on mash pH and water chemistry helped 
build the foundation for my understanding of the subject.




Kai






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