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As ncbrewer said, presumably your sample will have different fermentation conditions than the rest of your batch. At the very least it would be much more sensitive to the ambient temperature due to higher surface area to volume ratio. It's not really majorly flawed in some way, but I'm kind of...

In principle, you would expect a higher gravity reading, but without having more knowledge about the dissolution of lactic acid in water and bugs' metabolic pathways, there's no way for me to say for sure. Someone else probably has that knowledge though, I just meant to point out that it's a...

As far as I know, sour beers are harder to understand via gravity readings than clean beers. When we think of drops in gravity in clean beers, the assumption is that the bulk of the drop in gravity is due to sugars being replaced with ethanol. However, in sour beers a substantial amount of the...

I had the same though, although with a different fruit. Pomme/apple lambic?

Dry Irish Stout

Since it's 16g of sugar to each 40g of paste, then I would estimate its PPG as 40% of the PPG of sucrose.

I made a quite clean, delicious Berliner Weisse using lacto cultured from grain. I think using that method there are definitely other bugs that could produce off-flavors, but I think it's easier to limit oxygen and safeguard against off-flavors using a starter rather than a sour mash. With a...

Also a good point.

It definitely gives one an appreciation for the fact that there are people who get advanced degrees in brewing science.

Lots of O2 = lots of acetic acid assuming you have a large enough population of acetic acid producing microbes living in your beer to metabolize the O2 in the first place.

Thanks for your answers. I think the side discussion was also useful. Even though I knew the physical mechanisms by which the instruments worked, it's still good to have you intuitions confirmed. My question was really out of curiosity. I'm a physicist and tend to think about measurements a...

Hydrometers and refractometers measure fundamentally different things. Hydrometers measure density while refractometers measure index of refraction. The starch and the sugars they are broken down into must conserve mass, so the dissolved starch and dissolved sugars should have the same gravity...

Presumably the starch has the same mass as the maltose/dextrins/other sugars it is decomposed into by the enzymes. If the starch is really dissolved in the wort, I fail to see why it wouldn't change the gravity by the same amount as the sugars the result from their decomposition.

I think I know the answer to these question but I want to be certain. Specific gravity is only based on dissolved particles in the wort, changing its density. Is conversion necessary to alter the gravity? (I think the answer is no.) Shouldn't the starch itself change the gravity before...

Why would you be concerned about infecting your mash tun? I would think you could always pasteurize it with heat, as you did for this mash. Even if some microbe did survive, I wouldn't expect it to do much to your wort during your typical 60 minute infusion mash, and after that you boil anyway.

You are correct in all cases except that of a 25' 3/8" chiller, which was what I assumed. My mistake.

It can probably be repaired by cutting the pipe on either side of the kink and then using a fitting to reconnect the two sections. If you don't have the tools already, it'd probably just make more sense to just make/buy a new one.

Biere de garde

I've read this is widely agreed upon for a particular sour blend, maybe the Roeselare blend. I wouldn't be surprised if this was true of other yeast as well, particular some Belgian and German strains where stressing the yeast can help bring out the more expressive qualities. Additionally, for...

Cherry doppelbock.