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


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Contents:
  5.2;  HBD ("A. J. deLange")
  Water profiles ("Dave Draper")


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Date: Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:50:01 -0400
From: "A. J. deLange" <ajdelan at gmail.com>
Subject: 5.2;  HBD

No, A.J. isn't too enthusiastic about 5.2. It's simply a mix of the mono 
and dibasic sodium salts of phosphoric acid. It actually buffers at 5.8 
in distilled water which has caused me to conclude that the phosphate in 
the malt is supposed to supply additional phosphate to form the buffer. 
But it doesn't seem to work. On another forum I say that it works well 
unless there is a pH meter involved. I am waiting for the first report 
from anyone who got it to do what it is supposed to do as confirmed by 
properly made pH readings.

There is a reason why it doesn't work. Buffers have low buffering 
capacity away from the pKs of the acid on whose salts the buffer is 
based. 5.2 is not near any of the pKs of phosphoric acid (the rule of 
thumb is that the difference in design pH and the nearest pK should be 
less than one.)

Now all this is discussed extensively in other fora - but not here. Why? 
After some head scratching I decided it is a question of format. To 
submit the last message in a form HBD would accept took 4 tries - line 
length etc. I had to copy the post into a text editor and insert hard 
carriage returns. That aside, it then gets posted and appears next day 
or the day after and the following day someone may respond which gets 
posted the next day. The "competition" uses what seems these days to be 
a more or less standard bulletin board format. You enter your post and 
anyone who checks in 3 seconds later sees it. If he replies, and you've 
ticked the proper box, you get an e-mail. IOW everything is immediate - 
the instant gratification that everyone wants today, So why I am 
mentioning this? In the hope that HBD might be able to get back to the 
"glory days" I mentioned a day or 2 ago by changing format. I have no 
idea what this would involve (other than the frustration, anger, 
rage.... that are part of anything that involves software). I suspect 
money would be involved.

What do the Janitors think?

A.J.




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Date: Wed, 06 Apr 2011 06:45:53 -0500
From: "Dave Draper" <david at draper.name>
Subject: Water profiles



On 5 Apr 2011 at 23:12, in #5820 Martin had this to say:

> I regret to say that the information posted on Dave's site is
> painfully incorrect.  Unfortunately, this is an example of the
> mis-information that persists on the web and in print on water and
> water profiles.  Of the non-Belgian profiles shown on that website,
> only Burton 3, Dortmund 2, Edinburgh, and Dublin 2 balance when their
> carbonate content is assumed to be bicarbonate.  Dublin 1, Edinburgh
> 2, and Munich will also balance, but only if the carbonate is input as
> carbonate.  Unfortunately, carbonate does not exist in significant
> concentration in typical drinking water. Most brewers would not
> understand the conflicts in these profiles.

Martin is of course completely correct, and this problem has been 
known for a long time.  I was merely collecting the info available at 
that time.  There have been dozens and dozens of posts over the years 
(most by AJ!) discussing how to tweak these (and other) profiles so 
that some kind of balance is achieved.  I frankly haven't had the 
energy  to capture all that...

And it was by dumb luck that my "random beer quote" that my email 
program generates for me happened to be one of AJ's...!  I don't know 
what the random quote will be until I hit Send...!

Cheers, Dave in Seabrook
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
David S. Draper, Institute of Meteoritics, Univ New Mexico
David at Draper dot Name
Beer page: http://www.unm.edu/~draper/beer.html
 ...we are usually at the mercy of gravity. ---A.J. deLange






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