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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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End of HOMEBREW Digest #5523, 03/10/09
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