Balling?

Howdy, all;

While I'm aware there is a Balling scale when taking hydrometer readings -- I'm looking for a bit more of the background literature behind it.

I'm assuming there's a Dr. Balling, PhD, somewhere, but I can't find much information on his work.

For instance, in Palmer's "How to Brew" book -- Chapter 9, right above the ABV table (Table 10) at the end of the chapter -- the author writes "The following table, based on the work of Balling ..." but doesn't provide any citation or references in the Appendices. Even in other chapters' references, there's not a single 'Balling' entry.

So... who is this Balling, and what citations can I research?

Thanks in advance!

-Fionnbharr

Balling, Plato, Brix all give the amount of sugar grams in a 100gram solution (as near as I can make out from the wiki on Brix). It is named after Karl Balling and he was accurate to 3 signifigant figures, Brix to 5. from the wiki article on Brix

there is some slightly different info here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_measurement

Balling Indtil 1986 målte brygmestrene øllets ekstraktindhold i balling. Carl Joseph Napoleon Balling var professor ved den polytekniske læreanstalt i Prag og udgav en lang række videnskabelige værker om ølbrygning. Han lagde navn til måleenheden en balling. Denne måleenhed er nu afløst af plato.

My Danish is a bit rusty (that's a joke - I don't speak a word) but it's pretty clear from this that Balling was a professor at the Polytechnic Institute in Prague and that his scale was used until recently as a measure of extract content but has now been replaced by the Plato scale.

He was born in northern Bohemia on 21 April 1805 and died in Prague 17 March 1868. He was director of the Prague Polytechnic institute from 1866 - 1868.

Just do a search on his name. Lots of stuff will come up.

Balling was also instrumental in the development of the Czech Pilsner that the German brewers like Busch made so popular here in the states.

Karl Josef Napoleon Balling (April 21 1805 , the third child of Michael and Anne Balling in Gabrielahütten , North Bohemia, March 17 1868 in Prague ) was an Austrian chemist and expert in metallurgy. He was professor in Prague and published a long series of research work related to brewing. Balling was one of the founder of scientific chemistry and fermentation promoter of the development of sugar industry in Bohemia.

If you can run his wikipedia entry through Babelfish, you can learn more.

This is from an old post of mine about the history of Budweiser.

Bush and other German Brewers started looking at other styles of Beers, and came upon Karl Balling and Anton Schwartz's work at the Prague Polytechnic Institute with the Brewers in Bohemia who when faced with a grain shortage started using adjuncts, which produced the pils which was light, sparkly and fruity tasting...just the thing for American tastebuds.

Click to expand...

There's an interesting mention of him here. It mentions the title of a book of his.

ACbrewer said:

Balling, Plato, Brix all give the amount of sugar grams in a 100gram solution (as near as I can make out from the wiki on Brix).

Click to expand...

That's what I tried to say. There was another nice article on the Plato scale but some idiot decided to throw most of it away an put the remainder in the other article you mentioned. That's when I stopped writing for Wikipedia.