Friday, February 4, 2011

Homebrew Digest #5787 (February 04, 2011)

HOMEBREW Digest #5787 Fri 04 February 2011


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


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Contents:
Sankey Kegs ("A.J deLange")
Message from John Palmer about water chemistry, revised spreadsheet ("Bill Pierce")


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JANITORs on duty: Pat Babcock (pbabcock at hbd dot org), Jason Henning,
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Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2011 23:51:25 -0500
From: "A.J deLange" <ajdel at cox.net>
Subject: Sankey Kegs

When I started doing larger quantities I switched over to Sankey kegs
completely. There are some advantages. They hold more beer, there is
only one type of coupler (for Sankey - if you use foreign kegs there
are several) i.e. no more requirement to maintain stocks of pin and
ball gas and liquid connectors. Parts are available at any bar supply,
Rapids, Micromatic.... You can take beer to any place that serves keg
beer. Keggerators do not have to be modified. The slim style 1/4 and
sixtel mean you have the same flexibility with respect to smaller
quantity when you want to take beer to a smaller function.

There are (surprise) some disadvantages the main one of which is that
you will have to kluge up something for cleaning. You will need a high
quality coupler equipped with pea and check valve removed and external
gas and liquid valves for filling and that same coupler will serve
for cleaning. You need to make a stand on which the keg can sit
inverted. You will also need a reservoir to hold cleaning fluid and a
hefty pump to ram that fluid up the spear as forcefully as possible.
The rig I use is pictured and described at
http://www.pbase.com/agamid/image/109220058
You'll note that compressed air (demisted) is very helpful in
balancing the input and output flow rates.


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Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2011 09:53:43 -0500
From: "Bill Pierce" <BillPierce at aol.com>
Subject: Message from John Palmer about water chemistry, revised spreadsheet

Here is a message I got from John Palmer:


"Hi Bill,
It's late and I couldn't recall how to log into the HBD. (I am getting old
before my time)
Anywho, attached is the latest version of the spreadsheet which FIXES the
alkalinity contribution problem with Chalk vs bicarbonate. I talked with a
water chemistry prof at the Univ of Washington, author of a couple textbooks
on the subject, and to make a medium story short, he explained the total
alkalinity is always conserved!
This means that if you assume dissolution of 1 gram of CaCO3 in a gallon of
wort, that equates to 264.2 ppm of CaCO3, which is 264.2 ppm of CaCO3 as
CaCO3. Meanwhile if you dissolve 1 gram of NaHCO3 in wort, you get 72.3 ppm
of Na and 191.9 ppm of HCO3 and you have to then convert that bicarbonate to
Alkalinity as CaCO3 by 50/61.

Anyway, the bottom line is that Martin was mostly right that my spreadsheet
did not account for enough alkalinity from chalk additions. But now it does
and I had my equations verified by a water chemistry professor.
I have broken out the alkalinity contribution from both chalk and baking
soda, just so people could see the difference, and changed Chloride to
Sulfate to Sulfate to Chloride because Colin Kaminski, my co-author on the
water book, has done lots of test batches and is able to say with confidence
that the range for Sulfate to Chloride Ratio is about .5 - 9.0
More chloride than double digits in the 1:2 ratio of Sulfate to Chloride and
the beer tastes salty. But sulfate can go into triple digits at 9:1 in an
IPA and taste fine (with low sodium <75ppm he says).

Gotta hit the hay, Thanks for riding herd on the HBD and please post this
for me!
Cheers,
John"


(John's revised water spreadsheet [currently only in English units; I assume
the metric version is forthcoming] is at his site:
http://howtobrew.com/section3/Palmers_Mash_RA_ver3ptO.xls)


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End of HOMEBREW Digest #5787, 02/04/11
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