Collection of Water Recipes

[Malt]

An interesting collection of water recipes:

http://www.wetnewf.org/pdfs/Brewing_articles/Recipes.pdf

I'm looking for the name of the Book or Paper and specifically - Appendix J. Apparently it contains the FORTRAN program used to synthesize the recipes... or is it still "classified?"

"The individual recipies are output from the FORTRAN program of Appendix J."

 

[Yooper]

That's @ajdelange 's website. I'm sure he can tell you the deal on that.

 

[ajdelange]

An interesting collection of water recipes:

http://www.wetnewf.org/pdfs/Brewing_articles/Recipes.pdf

I'm looking for the name of the Book or Paper and specifically - Appendix J. Apparently it contains the FORTRAN program used to synthesize the recipes... or is it still "classified?"

Wow, does that go back in time! Those recipes were designed to match as well as possible (MMSE) the logs of the ion concentrations of a series of profiles collected originally by a gentleman named Dave Draper and posted on Home Brew Digest (which still exists though I'm not sure why given the traffic). The algorithm used was Simulated Annealing which is very powerful and will come up with optimum solutions for problems that can't be solved any other way. It is, for example, used to route traces on printed circuit boards. Those recipes were run on a Mac laptop of such early date that it had a black and white screen. I'd load it up at night and collect the results next morning.

None of the starting profiles had pH information (ever notice that about published profiles) so I took the approach of calculating the pH it took to get them to electrically balance. In the majority of cases that was very high meaning that the carbonate/bicarbonate content was under reported and it took lots of hydroxyl ions to balance the cation charges. So I don't put a lot of confidence in those starting profiles any more nor in their syntheses. In addition to that the recipes are all for distilled water.

In the modern world the MMSE optimization problem is done in the blink of an eye by the Excel Solver and so it is possible to put together a spreadheet that generates a recipe quickly that matches target ion concentrations to within a % or so (assuming the target ion profile is valid i.e. it balances electriacally) and to do it not only for distilled water but for any source water (DI water is just another thing to be added to the mix).

The 'book' is called 'Brewers Water Handbook' and there is only one copy on the shelf in my lab. I realized I'd never be able to bring it to publishable form until I retired and by that time it was kind of dated. If for some reason you really want to see the FORTRAN I can probably find a source file some where but there are better ways to do things now. Not to mention that the idea that to brew Munich Helles you need to reproduce the water of Munich is pretty much passe.

 

[Malt]

Thanks AJ. I've found your website full of useful information.

It's helpful to know that Simulated Annealing was the algorithm used.

I have written a solver for the Bru N Water spreadsheet, though it is fairly linear in it's approach and may benefit from such algorithms. The issue is using those algorithms in an COM/OLE automation environment such as Excel, as a third party, would be time consuming.

I've read much of your work and note that in your spreadsheets you mention using the native Excel Solver functionality. That's a good and appropriate approach if one is implementing their own spreadsheet.