Yes, but the point is THE BREWING COMMUNITY IS UNAWARE OF THAT! Dozens of textbooks have been written in contradiction. Thousands of breweries are operating in contradition. You are ABSOLUTELY obliged to let the rest of the brewing world know they are wrong. You obviously understand this better than any of these people do and you are absolutely morally obliged to share you knowledge with them. That you have done so here is, of course, praiseworthy, but it is not enough. Professional brewing scientists won't see it and it is important that they be prevented from further misinforming brewers. As I offered earlier, I can give you Charlie Bamforth's e-mail address. Believe me, he will want to learn of your discovery, see your data etc and can see to it that it gets published in JASBC.
Here again you know something the rest of the world doesn't. It foolishly thinks that enzymes have peak activity in a certain range of pH depending on the enzyme. Here the significance of your discovery has much wider applications than in brewing as workers in many fields (including medicine) are laboring under this misconception. It is essential that the medical community, at least, be made aware of your discovery.
I'm so upset and confused. I've been taken in for years by these pseudo scientists and didn't realize that controlling pH to reduce tannin extraction was bunk as you make clear above. But now you say it happens more at pH > 7 than below. My head is all filled with foolish notions about law of mass action and chemical potentials and that sort of stuff which I now see are all just that, stuff and nonsense. Please enlighten me here.
I can't! When I do things like what you suggest I get results that confirm what the charlatans have been saying for decades so clearly my experiments aren't being done right. I'm going to need guidance here too.
Well it's not just the home brewing world. The findings of professional brewing scientists and professional brewers pretty much mirror what the bunk homebrewing books say. There must be a conspiracy. What a disgrace!!!
OK - they say confession is good for the soul. I'm one of those bastards. I have taken money from Brewer's Publications and Elsevier for contributing to the deception of the brewing community. That's how I got to be so rich. Mea culpa, mea culpa.