HOMEBREW Digest #5408 Mon 01 September 2008


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	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
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Contents:
  Re: Pansy Water ("Michael P. Thompson")
  Scott/Linda Bruslind comments (Fred M. Scheer)
  Potassium Pansy Water ("A.J deLange")
  RO Installation ("Jeff Dieterle")
  Color Paper ("A.J deLange")
  Potassium Pansy Water (John & Joy Vaughn)
  Slightly Off-Topic Request... ("Lee Hiers")

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---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2008 23:00:34 -0600 From: "Michael P. Thompson" <thompson at ecentral.com> Subject: Re: Pansy Water On Aug 31, 2008, at 9:09 PM, Request Address Only - No Articles wrote: > Rather than > removing the water softener perhaps you can tap into the system in > front > of it. In well installations there is usually a drain valve for the > pressure tank which can be accessed. In any case a saddle valve (used > for connecting ice makers humidifiers, etc.) can be installed > upstream. > Another alternative, usually available in modern softeners, is a built > in bypass valve which you could operate while drawing brewing water > and > restore to its normal position when finished. SWMBO wouldn't even have > to know this has been done. You know, I wondered about that. When I was growing up, we had a water softener, but there was a separate tap on our kitchen sink for drinking water, since the softened water doesn't have a particularly pleasant taste. Even if not, the saddle valve, or needle valve would be an easy option, though I don't think they're made to turn on and off a lot, so you might want a shutoff valve somewhere in the line. It's an easy install. You just bolt the thing to a cold water pipe somewhere before the softener, then turn the needle valve until it pierces the pipe. Attach a bit of copper or plastic tubing with a shutoff valve at the end, and then open the needle back up to allow the water to flow. Fill your brewing vessel from the shutoff valve. It's like a ten-minute job and doesn't affect the plumbing at all. - -- Doras Cuil Travel--Your one-stop travel source Do you like to travel? How about wholesale, AND tax-deductible? Ask me how. http://www.dorascuil.com Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:20:56 +0000 From: fredscheer07 at comcast.net (Fred M. Scheer) Subject: Scott/Linda Bruslind comments HI: Yes, Scott, the Abstract is free when one goes to the ASBC web site. To read the full article, one needs sign in name and password.The web site you are referring to [MBAA], had nothing to do with Herr Langes beer color article, it is simple a link to a new committees web site on the MBAA web. I stated that the article from AJ was in the ASBC, not MBAA. Just a correction for you, Herr Bruslind. Cheers, Fred Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 08:37:21 -0400 From: "A.J deLange" <ajdel at cox.net> Subject: Potassium Pansy Water John asks about iron laden well water run through an ion exchanger which swaps Mg and Ca for potassium (K) rather than sodium. These exchangers may be better for you health (arguably) but they are no better for brewing in fact from the brewing perspective they are every bit as bad as sodium based exchangers. So the advice is essentially the same as given to Sam. Tap off in front, have that water analyzed and procede from there. The iron is, of course, a potential problem in this case. If it is enough that the water is cloudy or that you can taste the iron it will ruin beer and must be removed. Fortunately this is relatively easy to do. One approach is to install a separate iron removal unit in front of the water softener and tap off between the two. These are either aeration based or greensand based - see your water treatment company who will know what works best in your area. Given that the water out of the softener is adequate the iron level probably isn't that high so you probably don't need an elaborate iron unit but the first step in any of this is understanding the incoming water. If you don't want to spend the money for a separate iron unit for the relatively small volume of brewing water you can remove the iron yourself. Buy a reasonably hefty pump (such as sold at Home Depot etc with hose fittings) and a shower head or other spray nozzle of some sort. Draw the brewing water into a large vessel of some sort and then pump it out of the vessel, through the pump and shower head back into the vessel. IOW recirculate it through the shower head for say 15 minutes. This will get it well oxygenated causing "clear water iron" to oxidize and raise the pH (from loss of CO2 which wells usually have a lot of with consequently low pH) which helps the formation of insoluble ferric hydroxide. Filter the recirculated water through a layer of clean sand (play sand from HD is suitable). Ugly brown gunk (the Fe(OH)3) will be deposited on the sand and the water which runs through should be clear of iron. The sand can be washed and used for this purpose again. A.J. Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2008 08:56:34 -0500 From: "Jeff Dieterle" <djdieterle at hughes.net> Subject: RO Installation A snippet of A.J. Delang's response to the Pansy Water thread, "Another option is to install an RO device (in front of the softener) to obtain RO water for blending or for use with salt additions to approximate a desired ion profile." I thought the RO filter should be after the softener to lengthen the life of the filters in the RO unit as it would strip all(or nearly all) the minerals out of the water anyway. Another question for A.J., when diluting your brew water with tap water are the proportions of minerals reduced at the same percent as the RO addition, i.e., if I add 50% RO does the mineral content drop by half across the board. Jeff Dieterle E-mail message checked by Spyware Doctor (6.0.0.362) Database version: 5.10600 http://www.pctools.com/en/spyware-doctor-antivirus/ Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:06:39 -0400 From: "A.J deLange" <ajdel at cox.net> Subject: Color Paper Further to the kind words (thanks) of Fred and Scott: I've sent a proposed new MOA (Beer 10D) and a spreadsheet that does all the calculations (similar to the one in the current Beer 10C) off to the Technical Committee so it's in the works. What, if anything, comes out of the works remains to be seen. If anyone wants a copy of the MOA drop me a line. The spreadsheet is at www.wetnewf.org as are the slides from last year's ASBC conference at which I first presented this (although the basic idea was presented to the hombrewing community first at MCAB 4 in 2002). I also have a limited number of reprints of the paper so if anyone wants one let me know (I no longer own the copyright so I can't post it). Now what this is all about (and I've posted on it here several times before) is that ideally beer acts as if all its coloring components are in the same relative proportions to one another irrespective of how light or dark the beer is IOW all that changes is the total amount. Thus to measure the color of beer, all we need to do is know the optical absorption at one wavelength. This is the basis of SRM measurement (done at 430nm) invented shortly after WWII. A consequence of the proportionality aspect would be that the normalized (by the absorbtion reading at 430nm) spectra of all beers are the same. Thus knowing what the SRM value (proportional to the absorbtion at 430 nm) is one can reconstruct the spectrum. With the spectrum in hand, one can calculate tristimulus color for any set of viewing conditions (observer, path, illuminant). As the SRM number doesn't mean much to people in terms of what one actually sees, interest in tristimulus color is increasing in the industry. MOA Beer -10C calculates tristimulus (from the complete spectrum) for a particular set of conditions (10deg observer, illuminant C, 1 cm path) and reports it as 3 numbers (L,a,b). This is fine for the lab itself which still has the spectrum data (81 numbers) but not for anyone else who might want to know what the beer looks like in a 5 cm glass, for example. Under the assumptions above, the SRM would be more valuable for that purpose. In the real world beer coloration does not behave ideally but quite close to it. SRM carries more than 90% of spectrum information and with well behaved beers it is possible to get a surprisingly accurate tristimulus (L,a,b) color representation from just SRM. The challenge is to pick up the rest of the color variation and doing that using principal components anaylsis of the beer spectrum is what the paper is about. What this means practically is that a recent pilsner of mine which would have been reported as SRM 7.20 (by MOA Beer-10A) in days of yore or more recently as L = 90.56, a = -1.66, b = 38.37 (by MOA Beer-10C) would now be given (by the proposed MOA Beer-10D) as SRM 7.20, -0.4, 0 i.e. by tacking a couple of extra numbers which quantify the deviation of the spectrum from the ideal on after the SRM. From this set of numbers one can calculate Lab (or Luv, or RGB) for any viewing conditions e.g. 7.4 cm glass, 2 degree observer, light with a color temperature of 7523K: L=56.2 , a = 26.7, b=84.2. Miller and Stone (the guys who came up with the SRM) recognized the nearly ideal behaviour if not its full significance. They rejected any beer which deviated by more than a specified amount from the ideal as being unsuitable for characterization by the SRM (a fact that is little remembered these days). What I am doing here is completing (with, relative to 60 years ago, incredibly powerful computing and measuring resources) that little extra bit that they left undone i.e. quantifying and coding the deviation of beers they would have rejected. A.J. Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 07:35:33 -0800 From: John & Joy Vaughn <hogbrew at mtaonline.net> Subject: Potassium Pansy Water I am on a well and have iron in my water. My water conditioner uses potassium chloride and removes the iron and softens the water. What should I do with my water? Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2008 19:25:42 -0400 From: "Lee Hiers" <aa4ga at contesting.com> Subject: Slightly Off-Topic Request... Hi y'all... I'm looking for two tickets to the sold-out Asheville NC Brewgrass festival (Sept. 20) if anyone has a line on these. Sadly, I must resort to micro-brew since it has been several years since I brewed. Thanks, Lee - -- Lee Hiers "Have Dobro Will Travel" Return to table of contents
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