Announcing 'Mash Made Easy', a mash pH adjustment assistant

[darynsd]

First, thanks so much for your patience and thorough explanation! I apparently misunderstood AJ's post on measuring liquid CaCl2. BW tells me to use 5.8 gm of solution which I needed to convert into volume for MME. I totally spaced that this conversion is simply the SG... No excuse, I'm just stupid.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

First, thanks so much for your patience and thorough explanation! I apparently misunderstood AJ's post on measuring liquid CaCl2. BW tells me to use 5.8 gm of solution which I needed to convert into volume for MME. I totally spaced that this conversion is simply the SG... No excuse, I'm just stupid.

You are not stupid. You are merely learning. I'm retired, and I'm still learning (daily, and a lot).

We seem to have determined (with the aid of an independent online calculator) that MME is correct in its weight per volume method of CaCl2 solution measurement, so now lets look at BW (which I can only presume from your discussion is using a weight per weight method, as opposed to a weight per volume method). How many grams of a SG = 1.100 calcium chloride solution does BW say are required in order to yield up 5.8 grams of anhydrous calcium chloride?

 

[darynsd]

At this point I'm hesitant to make any comments about either program(!), but here goes...
It does not appear that BW spells this out directly. It says that 5.8 gm of anhydrous produces a chloride concentration of 168.8 ppm (this is at 1 gm/gal). If I change the type back to liquid, it would require 53.21 gm of solution to produce the same concentration (~9.175 gm/gal). For SG = 1.1, this should be 48.37 ml, right? Entering this into MME, it doesn't quite line up, but I'd guess (and I should clearly stop doing that) that BW is assuming Anhydrous is 96.2%, not 100%.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

At this point I'm hesitant to make any comments about either program(!), but here goes...
It does not appear that BW spells this out directly. It says that 5.8 gm of anhydrous produces a chloride concentration of 168.8 ppm (this is at 1 gm/gal). If I change the type back to liquid, it would require 53.21 gm of solution to produce the same concentration (~9.175 gm/gal). For SG = 1.1, this should be 48.37 ml, right? Entering this into MME, it doesn't quite line up, but I'd guess (and I should clearly stop doing that) that BW is assuming Anhydrous is 96.2%, not 100%.

I have no way to know what BW is doing. I would only comment that once you have liquefied it and measured its SG, it seems to me that it should be easier to volume dispense it than to weight dispense it. But that comes down to personal preference.

By definition anhydrous should mean 100%, unless roughly 4% is made up of contaminants, which is always possible. Calcium Carbonate perhaps. Or perhaps even by oven drying it is only possible to achieve about 96% purity.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

At this point I'm hesitant to make any comments about either program(!), but here goes...
It does not appear that BW spells this out directly. It says that 5.8 gm of anhydrous produces a chloride concentration of 168.8 ppm (this is at 1 gm/gal). If I change the type back to liquid, it would require 53.21 gm of solution to produce the same concentration (~9.175 gm/gal). For SG = 1.1, this should be 48.37 ml, right? Entering this into MME, it doesn't quite line up, but I'd guess (and I should clearly stop doing that) that BW is assuming Anhydrous is 96.2%, not 100%.

I perceive that there is also inherent within your thinking an intuitive presumption that volume and density are linear and thereby linearly in lock step with respect to one another. Such an ideal conception is rarely, if ever, the case for real world solutions.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

Announcing the release of 'Mash Made Easy' version 6.60 in both the Standard and Metric formats.

Change:

Modifies Pellet hops contribution to IBU's by scaling them linearly from parity with leaf at 90 minutes or more of remaining boil time to 50% more IBU contribution from pellets by 1 minute or less of remaining boil time, in accordance with finely ground pellets lupulin glands being far more readily accessible for the rapid release of their hop acids and oils with respect to remaining boil time than is the case for whole leaf or plugs. This approach to pellet hops IBU contribution is similar to that of IBU researcher Gregory Noonan.

The most common and popular presumption of pellets contributing 10% more IBU's across all boil times vs. leaf hops in conjunction with the Tinseth IBU math model is likely a fantasy of unknown origin. Glenn Tinseth has stated that he never once tested a pellet hop, and he definitively stated during a radio podcast that for pellet hop IBU contribution "All bets are off". Thus I turned to Noonan for guidance here.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

Announcing the release of 'Mash Made Easy' version 6.70 in both the standard and metric formats.

Change:

Adds the option to add your minerals to the 'Mash Only', or to both the 'Mash & Sparge', via a drop down selector cell situated in the lower right hand corner of the spreadsheet.

 

[tld6008]

Announcing the release of 'Mash Made Easy' version 6.70 in both the standard and metric formats.

Change:

Adds the option to add your minerals to the 'Mash Only', or to both the 'Mash & Sparge', via a drop down selector cell situated in the lower right hand corner of the spreadsheet.

What is the purpose of doing this? i.e all minerals in mash, minerals in mash and sparge water, minerals in mash and boil kettle. Never have gotten a good explanation.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

What is the purpose of doing this? i.e all minerals in mash, minerals in mash and sparge water, minerals in mash and boil kettle. Never have gotten a good explanation.

Some people like to add all of their minerals to the mash in order to achieve more mineral induced downward shift in their mash pH.

To me there is likely to be little overall difference between adding minerals to the sparge water or adding them to the boil kettle. At least for chloride and sulfate. So as far as I can tell you can effectively consider a sparge water mineral addition and a kettle mineral addition to be close to one and the same thing. But in the end, I'm merely responding to some user requests and attempting to give the end users of MME more of the flexibility the end users want here. Their reasoning is left up to them.

 

[ScrewyBrewer]

Some people like to treat their sparge water separately from their mash water. Some like to use a portion of their mash water for sparging and some like sparging with untreated RO water.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

Announcing the release of 'Mash Made Easy' version 6.70 in both the standard and metric formats.

Change:

Adds the option to add your minerals to the 'Mash Only', or to both the 'Mash & Sparge', via a drop down selector cell situated in the lower right hand corner of the spreadsheet.

NOTE: With apologies, I forgot to set two parameters to what I currently feel are the most optimal settings for them when I originally saved version 6.70 to my website yesterday morning. If you already have version 6.70 downloaded, simply make the following 2 changes to it, or alternately, just go to my website and download it again.

Changes:
1) Set the "Grist Buffer Multiplier" value to the fraction: 0.70
2) Set the "% of Kolbach pH shift from Ca++ & Mg++ =" value to 60 (for 60% to appear in the cell)

 

[beervoid]

NOTE: With apologies, I forgot to set two parameters to what I currently feel are the most optimal settings for them when I originally saved version 6.70 to my website yesterday morning. If you already have version 6.70 downloaded, simply make the following 2 changes to it, or alternately, just go to my website and download it again.

Changes:
1) Set the "Grist Buffer Multiplier" value to the fraction: 0.70
2) Set the "% of Kolbach pH shift from Ca++ & Mg++ =" value to 60 (for 60% to appear in the cell)

Hello just downloaded the new spreadsheet (coming from 5.20)
I saw you included citric acid into the calculations. I was wondering if you could tell me if Ascorbic Acid has the same "acidifying" power as Citric Acid. I couldn't find any information on this.
Thanks!

Spreadsheet is working great so far.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

Hello just downloaded the new spreadsheet (coming from 5.20)
I saw you included citric acid into the calculations. I was wondering if you could tell me if Ascorbic Acid has the same "acidifying" power as Citric Acid. I couldn't find any information on this.
Thanks!

Ascorbic Acid is a weaker acid than Citric Acid. You can not apply Citric Acid data to Ascorbic Acid.