Silver_Is_Money
Larry Sayre, Developer of 'Mash Made Easy'
Chemical reactions are an ionic interaction phenomenon related to dissociation and the degree to which any chemical reaction progresses both forward and in reverse (with the forward and reverse themselves being variable in degree and measure to factors such as temperature and pressure and gas phase liberation vs. solubility, etc...). Ionization (as far as beer is concerned at least) occurs only within the water portion of the constituent mix. So it matters little as to the absolute measure of a grists quantified acidity, and much as to the percentage of such acidity which is actually capable of becoming ionized within the evolving Wort during the home-brewers Mash. Intuitively, it can be conceived that the measure of the liberation of ions from the grist into mash water within an ASBC or EBC certified/specified lab environment small scale 'Congress Mash', with its specified highly pulverized grist, will not likely fully correlate to that for a typical home brew grist crush and process. But as intuition makes for bad science, this speculation requires verification and quantification via the scientific method. But as Bamforth and other brewing industry researchers have documented, 'Congress Mash' derived data quite often is not seen to scale well to larger batch levels.
Mash pH predicting software as it currently exists generally looks at the mass of the grist with due respect to its individual constituent percentages, and correlates this to 'Congress Mash' derived grist pHDI and acidity (buffering coefficient) data for each individual constituent, and then sums and scales this 'Congress Mash' derived data as if it will directly transfer to any batch size level and for any process methodology equally and fully without concern for crush, temperatures, pressures, degree of mixing, process methodology, etc... Does this rudimentary and overly simplistic means of software approach require validity evaluation leading to improvement?
Mash pH predicting software as it currently exists generally looks at the mass of the grist with due respect to its individual constituent percentages, and correlates this to 'Congress Mash' derived grist pHDI and acidity (buffering coefficient) data for each individual constituent, and then sums and scales this 'Congress Mash' derived data as if it will directly transfer to any batch size level and for any process methodology equally and fully without concern for crush, temperatures, pressures, degree of mixing, process methodology, etc... Does this rudimentary and overly simplistic means of software approach require validity evaluation leading to improvement?
