Announcing the release of 'Mash Made Easy' version 10.15

[Silver_Is_Money]

'Mash Made Easy' version 10.15 is now available for download on my website (seen below in orange) in both the USA and fully Metric formats.

The only change vs. the very short lived version 10.1* is 10.15's greatly improved cosmetics within the individual grist component addition drop-down section on the main sheet/tab. Visit my website and see the difference between them within the snapshot at the top the main website page. Well worth the completely free price of admission to the download page whereby to nab version 10.15 in my opinion. As always, MME is both free and complete. No teaser leading to a pay version.

*Note: If you missed the radical changes made to version 10.1 all-together due to its exceedingly short lifespan, please go to the announcement for 10.1 and read about the changes made vs. version 10, as they also fully apply to version 10.15

 

[Holden Caulfield]

Silver_Is_Money:

First, thanks for pulling together such a great tool.

Regarding this change:

" Version 10.1 greatly simplified grist component selection via eliminating all of the various Malted and Unmalted Barley Grain categories and simply lumping all of these together under a single drop-down called "Non Categorized" "

After playing with the latest version - does this mean that all the base malts (Pilsner, 2-Row, Pale Ale, Vienna, Munichs are now lumped together as uncharacterized with a DiPH of 5.73? How should one adjust the DiPh for these base malts as from my understanding, at the extremes, Pilsner malt is between 5.75 and 5.8 while the Munichs could be as low as 5.40.

How should the user of your tool address average estimated DiPH within these categories?

Thanks.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

@Holden Caulfield, pHDI by itself is totally meaningless. It takes pHDI combined with BC (buffering capacity, or buffer coefficient) whereby to compute mEq's.

Here is a purely hypothetical case where two base malts appear to be radically different, but in the end are not sufficiently different to make a difference.

Base malt #1: BC = 34.5 mEq/Kg.pH, and pHDI = 5.82 (some Continental Pilsner malts may sometimes roughly to perhaps for some lots perfectly resemble this)

Base malt #2: BC = 45.5 mEq/Kg.pH, and pHDI = 5.72 (some Pale or Vienna malts may sometimes roughly resemble to by random chance even identically resemble this)

But remember that if we didn't actually titrate our lots for each malt we would have zero clue as to BC. And if we didn't actually and carefully run test mashes in DI water we would also have zero clue as to pHDI. For but two malts that is four unknowns. All we would have to go on is a "general" (as in ballpark, or guess) observation that more (or for the case of Caramel/Crystal, also quite different) kilning leads to lower pHDI and greater BC in addition to darker color.

That said, lets move forward and see how different these two radically differing base malts really are under the skin.

Delta-pH = mEq/(BC x Kg.)
Lets assume 1 Kg. so Kg. drops out

Base malt #1:
mEq = (5.82 - 5.40) x 34.5 = 14.49 (14.49 mEq of acid are required whereby to move 1 Kg. to pH 5.40)

Base malt #2:
mEq = (5.72- 5.40) x 45.5 = 14.56 (14.56 mEq of acid are required whereby to move 1 Kg. to pH 5.40)

So in the end these two hypothetical malts are effectively for all practical (and beyond) purposes identical, despite one being perhaps "nominally" 1.5L and sold as Pilsner malt, and the other being perhaps "nominally" 4.25L and sold as Vienna malt. (whereas these market moving L colors are highly fake also on an individual lot basis)

Since we do not and can not know the pHDI's or BC's for any of our malts, we must (whether we, with we here being the software developers, are brave enough to openly and honestly admit to it or not) presume nominal averages massaged by a cornucopia of biases and guesses and data cherry picking, data culling, etc... throughout the math model progressions. All MME does is shed the presumption of knowledge where there isn't any, which I believe to be both open and honest, and replace it with algorithms that conform closely to presumed nominals that are by and large guesses.

If however, you somehow actually know any given grist components actual lot values for BC and pHDI, MME is rather unique in permitting you to enter these actual values as manual overrides.

All MME has done with my transition has been to cut out the biases and falsehoods and cherry picking and guesswork presumptions of the programmer as regard pHDI and BC and let a sort of AI reach for their nominalized valuations (with admitted algorithm bias) instead.

Whew, all of that said, and if you look at MME the algorithm is setting a 10L barley malt (such as perhaps a Munich malt) to 5.42 pHDI, and if you know how to set MME up and look for it, algorithm sourced BC's for individual malts are also fully capable of being openly displayed on the main page. Now we are back where we began. I.E., pHDI's without corresponding BC's are meaningless.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

Some poorly designed software (including rather popular editions at that) attempts to nigh on fix the BC and float only the pHDI. Been there and done that. pHDI's that are beyond the limits of reality are the consequence. But if the end user knows nothing and is happy.... (this I might call pulling the wool over...)

 

[Holden Caulfield]

So I think what your saying (please bear with me as my understanding of PH and buffering was learned during AP chemistry 30 years ago) is that the buffering capacity of the base malts mitigates the differences in base malt DiPHs, and given the lack of data and variability in DiPH of specific base malts, the best path is to just go with a reasonable value for the whole category, unless the exact value of the specific batch of malt is known. In other words, the PH of the mash is not very sensitive to +/- .1 differences in DiPHs of base malts?

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

So I think what your saying (please bear with me as my understanding of PH and buffering was learned during AP chemistry 30 years ago) is that the buffering capacity of the base malts mitigates the differences in base malt DiPHs, and given the lack of data and variability in DiPH of specific base malts, the best path is to just go with a reasonable value for the whole category, unless the exact value of the specific batch of malt is known. In other words, the PH of the mash is not very sensitive to +/- .1 differences in DiPHs of base malts?

Close enough. All I'm saying is that we don't likely know either value (pHDI or BC) so all we can go on is educated guesses based upon generally observed impacts due to kilning. But if we do know the values we can (and even more importantly, should) easily apply them, with the caveat that the software must accommodate manual override. How many software packages allow for this? And I'm saying that for a valid manual override we truly must know both values. Not just one value or the other. If we know one but not the other we could (and in my opinion, likely would) inflict more error into our prediction model while believing ourselves to be reducing error.

In the hypothetical example of both base malts acting as if the same, I clearly cherry picked the data inputs. They could just as easily be different enough to assuredly matter. But if we don't know this, how can we expect software to know it. Software only does what it is programmed to do. It's a lot like programming software to predict global warming, and then lo and behold we discover that such is exactly what it predicts.