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Water that has been exposed to air at atmospheric pressures has an equilibrium value of around 9 ppm dissolved oxygen. A vigorous boil can lower this to right around 1 ppm. I'm not sure exactly how long you need to boil the water to reach this level. When I've done high-gravity brews before...

Going all-grain can be a big decision. However, it's not that complicated. Some people make it out to me more elaborate than it is. FWIW, here's what I wrote about it a little while ago: http://beerandwinejournal.com/go-all-grain/ Partial mashing can be a great intermediate step to...

I agree with Mike above, you can always add water in the last few minutes of the boil if you've boiled off too much. If you have a calibrated dipstick -- I use a long-handled plastic spoon with hash marks drawn on with a Sharpie -- you can see how your volume is at any point in the boil...

It should work fine. As the previous poster mentioned, it's a fairly neutral ale strain. As such, it should would work well in almost any ale unless you needed some interesting fermentation byproducts (banana esters as in a hefe, the phenolic "spicy" kick of a Belgian ale strain, etc.). In...

If you're pitching one tube or smack pack of liquid yeast to the starter, there's no need to step up the volume. Keeping the gravity low is smart — you're raising yeast, not brewing beer. These days, I've been making my yeast starters around 1.020 (although the exact gravity is not critical as...

I'm in a similar boat with my water. I used to use bottled distilled water to dilute my tap water to under 50 ppm bicarbonate for pale beers. Later, I bought an under the sink RO water filter. Home units are slow to produce water, but are fairly inexpensive. Chris Colby Editor...

No, but it might be contaminated ;-) #PetBrewingTerminologyPeeve http://beerandwinejournal.com/its-not-infected/ Chris Colby Editor beerandwinejournal.com

Woo hoo! Wow, that is great. Chris

The statement I quoted is in a text of his, and unfortunately he doesn't give a citation. I've found that when I make brewing liquor that seems reasonable (sufficient calcium, some attempt to match alkalinity to beer color), my pH (from cooled samples) is usually around 5.6. I haven't done...

I understand that commercial brewers and homebrewers have different aims. My question was much more focused than that — I was simply asking if brewing researchers took the pH of hot wort or a cooled sample. One of my undergraduate degrees is in chemistry and, because I took an...

One more quote I dug up on line today: "Infusion mashes are best carried out at pH 5.2–5.4 (mash temperature), and so will give cooled worts with pH values of about 5.5–5.8." --Briggs, et. al., Brewing Science and Practice" (2004, Woodhead Publishing)

A little basic chemistry tells us that the pH of an aqueous solution decreases with increasing temperatures. Some tiny percentage of H20 molecules split into H+ and OH- ions (or, in more modern descriptions, H3O+ and OH- ions) and the pH decreases. (So does the pOH, the negative log of the...

Your grain will absorb some water. Figures on this range from 0.10 to 0.19 gallons per pound of grain. It's always a good idea to heat more sparge water than you need, in case your pre-boil kettle volume is low. If you calibrate a dipstick to your kettle, you can measure your boil off rate...

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. 8-) Henry's Law, one of the many ideal gas laws, gives the equilibrium condition for a gas dissolved in a liquid under constant pressure. What Henry's Law does not address is the time frame it takes to reach equilibrium. After you boil wort, most of...

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. Mashing is an extension of malting, and the only things you need to accomplish in the mash are those left undone by the maltster. (Degrading the starch in the endosperm of the grains into sugars is your main objective.). Let's take it...

If your FG was lower than expected (despite the OG being higher), then this really isn't a good candidate for dilution. Your diluted FG will be even lower and the beer will likely taste thin. Chris Colby Editor beerandwinejournal.com

Most malts these days are malted with the idea that they will be used in single infusion mash. Unless you buy undermodified malt or have some specific reason to do a step mash (such as aiming for producing a highly fermentable wort), doing a step mash is going to be extra work and can have a net...

Adding water to a beer after fermentation is sometimes called high gravity brewing or, more euphemistically, blending for volume. If you do this, you need to lower the amount of oxygen in the water as much as possible. If you don't the beer will quickly go stale. Boiling will reduce water to...

Hop utilization goes up with increasing pH and down with increasing wort gravity. Adding malt to water lowers the pH (unless your water is acidic), but your hop utilization goes up with late extract extract additions because you don't boil the hops in extremely high gravity wort. If you boiled...

Yes. It's used in chemistry and biology all the time. It just means a sample from a larger volume of something. For example, "add 10 mL aliquots of the buffer solution to each of the test tubes." Chris Colby Editor beerandwinejournal.com