Big Monk
Trappist Please! 🍷
- Joined
- Dec 24, 2015
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- 2,192
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I would like to see what a 3 point titration curve for a malt with a pHDI of less than the 5.4 target pH looks like. It may prove to be the case that for the single titration buffer calculating method, any malt that is acidic with respect to target pH gets over corrected for as well, but this time in the opposite 'sign' direction, negating some of the acid over-addition error induced by a grists base malt(s) and other of malts with > 5.4 pHDI. This potentially beneficial error in the opposite direction would happen for those grists which contain acidic malts such as Melanoidin, Caramel/Crystal, or Deep Roasted, etc.... So for many grists the error may well be less than the calculated 0.08 pH points witnessed for the charted example seen above.
This has been troubling to me for some time. In reality, it really depends on the a2 and a3 value of the malt. In most base malts, the a2 and a3 values will be small enough that what I showed above will hold true.
Frankly, even some roasted malts and Cara malts with lower a2 and a3 will give mEq results in linear form that won’t throw major errors in required acid. A.J. has a three term Crisp 600L Chocolate malt with smaller a2 and a3 values that works quite well linearly but a three term a Briess Caramel 80L with a large a2 and small a3 that simply doesn’t quite scale to linear.