Recent content by ajdelange

I've probably posted the answer to this question a hundred times here over the years but as I haven't done it for a while it will be good for me to review it. The method is, as for all acid base problems, to find the pH which causes the charge on the H+ ions to just balance the sum of the...

Toss the 5.2 and use a bit of sauermalz instead (or some lactic or phosphoric acid).

39 isn't that bad for that kind of beer though I would certainly prefer it lower. It can easily be lowered by dilution e.g. 1:1 with RO would get it down to around 20 which certainly should be OK. And it would also drop the alkalinity to 24. A little calcium chloride to get the chloride back up...

Yes, -32 (mEq/kg•pH) is a pretty good average number for a1 and 5.7 is a pretty good average number for base malt pHdi. If the malts you are actually using have parameters close to those you can get a pretty good estimate of pH. If they don't, you can't. This is the essence of, and one of the...

The accuracy of Gen II predictions based on accurate pHdi but inaccurate buffering data aren’t going to be that good either. That’s really the point I’d like to get across.

I can only say "possibly" but I am doubtful. After 30 minutes the die is probably pretty well cast. The best thing to do here is use this beer as a learning experience. Apparently you are doing this on purpose: boldly going where no man has (intentionally) gone before. If I'm reading that right...

I'd say go through the oxidizing filter first. This should oxidize the S- to elemental sulfur and the Fe(II) to Fe(III) which would form Fe2(OH)3 both of which would be trapped by the filter medium. Now feed the de sulfured, de ironed hard water to the softener and finally the softened iron and...

Clearly yes, but the beer won't be as pleasing as it would be were it mashed at pH 5.4 - 5.6.

Is it possible to come up with a purely empirical algorithm that gives better answers than a robust algorithm fed bad data? I suppose it might be at least some of the time. Is it possible to come up with an empirical algorithm that gives better answers than a robust algorithm fed good data? No...

There isn't. It's a quarter of a pH unit and that's usually not that significant. That's true but they generally don't care about that because natural systems don't respond to the hydrogen ion concentration. They respond to its logarithm which is why we use the pH scale instead of the hydrogen...

Please read the post carefully. You will find nothing in it that suggests that you suggested using bad malt data.

ISFET (Ion Selective Field Effect Transistor) pH electrodes have been around for quite a while now. When they first came out I thought goodby to fill and storage and cleaning solutions, broken glass and short electrode life. I figured that by now there would be no glass electrodes left on the...

That question lingers only in the minds of those who don't understand the fundamentals (I almost wrote "basics") of acid-base chemistry. Chemists in many fields (including food and beverage), and others, adjust the pH of the processes they are concerned with by mixing things with different...

It's actually a pretty simple problem if you ask for a reasonable output. The problem is that ions are in fixed proportions in the salts you can add to water so that it is very easy to ask for a profile that is not possible. Thus the problem becomes a "linear programming" problem in which a...

It is very unlikely that two people will have the same Bertillon measurements. But they sometimes, if rarely, do. Hence the Bertillon system has been relegated to history. Much the same with conductivity as a potential QC parameter. Were there any merit in it ASBC or EBC would have adopted it.