z987k

Recipes 

Went to the lhbs to get some yeast today so I can brew tomorrow and came home with like $20 worth of stuff.
Anyways in an effort to increase my efficiency I was going to start messing with the pH of the mash. I know my tap water is very hard so I'm betting I'm no where near the 5.2-5.8 range I need. So I bought some litnus(sp?) strips and since they didn't have any 5.2 buffer, I bought this acid blend thing and I'm not sure that this is it's intended use so I figured I'd post here. The acid blend is sold under the ID carlson brand and it says it's a blend of citric, malic and tartaric acid. For the price I figured I'd buy it and see, since I drove 20mins in the snow anyways.

The other sweet buy I got was a pound of nugget for 9.99. Seemed like a good price. And I can use them as bittering hops in my stouts and whatnot I figured.

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Beer Style Guidelines - Kaiser's Brewing Experiments - American Society of Brewing Chemists - Journal of the Institute of Brewing

Got Trub?

Recipes 

The acid blend is something to use in meads or berry wines to balance the sweetness. It is not for adjusting your mash pH. You need a strong acid such as phosphoric, hydrochloric or lactic acid - although the latter can cause off flavours. I would check your pH with the litmus paper as well as conversion with iodine. If you are getting complete conversion there is no need to mess with your mash pH.

z987k

Recipes 

didn't think about the iodine, I can easily do that now that I picked up the gallon of iodine for sanitizing the other day. Guess I'll skip the acid this time, but test the pH anyways and if I'm not getting full conversion go ahead and order some 5.2 from AHS.

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Beer Style Guidelines - Kaiser's Brewing Experiments - American Society of Brewing Chemists - Journal of the Institute of Brewing

BigEd

Recipes 

Except in extremely rare circumstances you won't use acid to adjust a mash pH. The pH of the mash will fall into the correct range if the mineral ion concentrations in the water are a match for the malts in the mash. Get a water report from the water department that shows the mineral contents or send a water sample to Ward Lab. The link below has good basic information on what you need to know about brewing water.

http://www.allaboutbeer.com/homebrew/water3.html

skou

Recipes 

And, yes. You can use Iodophor for testing for conversion. Put a teaspoon of your mash on a saucer, and put a drop of iodophor on it If it is blue-black, you still have starch left. If it is dark brown, you're done. (Oh, don't dump it back in your mash-tun.)(Unless you like the taste of Iodophor.)

steve

shafferpilot

Recipes 

If you're getting really low efficiency, but aren't crushing your own grain; there's no amount of futsing with other stuff that will show big improvements. You really need to have control over your own crush to get efficiency up. Some HBS's do a good job of being consistent, but most are all over the place. AG without a crusher is like going to the drag race track and letting them give you a car to race. It could be a mustang; it could be a geo metro. No amount of timing the lights, or warming the tires is going to make a geo metro get down the track in under 30 seconds. Nothing.

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A great man knows that he knows NOTHING

z987k

Recipes 

well I crush my own, I'm brewing today so I'll take a pic and see what you think, but I think the crush is good.

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Beer Style Guidelines - Kaiser's Brewing Experiments - American Society of Brewing Chemists - Journal of the Institute of Brewing