polarbearbrewing
Well-Known Member
well today i was sitting in my pre-lab lecture and in this experiment, we needed to ensure that there was excess sodium hypochlorite (bleach) in the alcohol solution in order to obtain the highest yield of product and the technique we used was to place some of the solution on an iodide/starch paper and if it turned bluish-black, that meant there was still starch in the solution and we were good to go.
everyone else was just staring off into space obviously bored from the lecture but i kept thinking about how this is the same procedure used to determine whether all the starches of the mash have been converted into sugars but instead iodine is used and we are looking for the opposite result (no blue/black color)
anyways i just thought that was really interesting and cool....everyone says brewing isnt rocket science, but man there sure is some complex chemistry going down in your mash tun...maybe a little out there for some but hey what can i say im a pharmacy major and some of this nerdy science really gets me going
p.s. i got to use a $600,000 H-NMR machine today in the same experiment
everyone else was just staring off into space obviously bored from the lecture but i kept thinking about how this is the same procedure used to determine whether all the starches of the mash have been converted into sugars but instead iodine is used and we are looking for the opposite result (no blue/black color)
anyways i just thought that was really interesting and cool....everyone says brewing isnt rocket science, but man there sure is some complex chemistry going down in your mash tun...maybe a little out there for some but hey what can i say im a pharmacy major and some of this nerdy science really gets me going
p.s. i got to use a $600,000 H-NMR machine today in the same experiment