Monday, February 22, 2010

Homebrew Digest #5662 (February 22, 2010)

HOMEBREW Digest #5662 Mon 22 February 2010


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


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Contents:
Water ("A. J. deLange")
Re: water (bill keiser)
Dublin water ("Darrell G. Leavitt")
Peanut Porter ("Darrell G. Leavitt")
Post routing changed for a better Digest (Patrick Babcock)


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Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:04:25 -0500
From: "A. J. deLange" <ajdel at cox.net>
Subject: Water

RE: You can remove the temporary hardness. Acidify the water....

Acidification will remove the bicarbonate but not the hardness thus:

Ca++ + 2 HCO3- + 2 HAc ---> Ca++ + 2 CO2 + 2 H2O + 2Ac-

i.e. the bicarbonate is converted to CO2 and flies off but the calcium
remains. What you are effectively doing is replacing each bicarbonate
with Ac-, the anion of the acid i.e. changing the temporary hardness to
permanent hardness. This could be a good thing to do in, for example,
the case where you are trying to brew a Burton style ale with a water
with high temporary (carbonate) hardness but low permanent hardness.
Neutralizing the bicarb with sulfuric acid would get rid of it, leave
the calcium and increase the sulfate - all good things for a Burton
ale. It would not be a good way to treat the same water for Bohemian
Pilsner as you want low hardness, low bicarbonate (alkalinity) and low
sulfate for those beers.

To remove hardness, do the opposite: raise the pH. This results in
conversion of bicarbonate to carbonate which, as calcium carbonate is
quite insoluble will cause it to precipitate.

Ca++ + HCO3- + NaOH --> Ca++ + CO3-- + H2O + Na+ -->
CaCO3 + Na+

Here I showed lye as the base which results in Na+ ions in the water. A
better choice for base is slaked lime


Ca++ + Ca(OH)2 + 2HCO3- --> 2CaCO3 + 2H2O

because it removes temporary hardness without leaving any acid anion or
base cation behind. Lime treatment gives the same result as
decarbonation by heating (you don't have to boil - just have a means to
sparge out the CO2 such as aeration)

Ca++ + 2HCO3- --> CaCO3 + H2O + CO2

Lime treatment is preferred in larger scale operations because it is,
plainly, more energy efficient that heating to near boiling or boiling.

Note that heating and sparging with air (or steam i.e. boiling) raises
the pH by driving CO2 (gaseous form of carbonic acid) out of the solution.


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Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 06:25:01 -0500
From: bill keiser <bk2 at sharpstick.org>
Subject: Re: water

You can buy RO water at pet stores too. They sell it for aquariums.
I have my own RO filter under the sink. I used it for several years
for wine kits and beer.
I had noticed that my batches seemed to not ferment as far as I
thought they should. One of the local brew club guys suggested that RO
water is TOO pure.
I now have an inline charcoal filter on a food grade hose. I haven't
noticed the problem since then.


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Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 07:04:40 -0500 (EST)
From: "Darrell G. Leavitt" <leavitdg at plattsburgh.edu>
Subject: Dublin water

Don;
Your numbers all look good for the Dublin water (according to Promash)
except that the Bicarbonate (at 118) seems low. Promash puts Dublin
water at over 300. Will this have any noticeable effect on the final
product?

Darrell

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Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:02:28 -0500 (EST)
From: "Darrell G. Leavitt" <leavitdg at plattsburgh.edu>
Subject: Peanut Porter

Ok, this sounds odd, but if you were to try to make a peanut porter, using
"PB-2", the dried peanut powder that has most of the oil pressed out,
would you put this into the mash (in hopes of degrading some of the
proteins)?

Darrell

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Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:11:36 -0500
From: Patrick Babcock <patrick.babcock at gmail.com>
Subject: Post routing changed for a better Digest

Greetings, Beerlings! Take me to your lager...

OK! Did a little thinkering, then a little tinkering, and have
modified how the Digest gets its posting material. What it means to
you is that you might get error messages from off-hbd.org sites when
posting to the Digest. My expectation is that this will not happen;
however, you know how expectations such as that usually turn out :o)
It also may mean that some of your posts could get "hung up" off the
HBD server until one of the intrepid Janitors shake it loose from a
SPAM bucket.

What it means to The Digest is that posts will be prescreened off site
by a far more powerful SPAM detection algorithm than I have the time,
patience, and processing power to implement on the servers here.
Hopefully: a better Digest will result.

See ya!
PB


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End of HOMEBREW Digest #5662, 02/22/10
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