Summary of June Meet on Home Page

[Dr Jacoby]

I wrote up a summary of the recent Capital Brewers meet in W.J. Kavanaghs for anyone who is interested.

I'm also in the process of writing up a practical guide for treating brewing water which I hope to use as the basis for a talk at the next TOG event. If there are any issues you'd like covered give me a shout.

Cheers,

Peter

[Shane Phelan]

Reads very well!

[Rossa]

Nice one.

[Rossa]

Can you talk about historical brewing cities and their water too?

[Padraic]

Great write up! Thanks!

[Dr Jacoby]

Can you talk about historical brewing cities and their water too?

I can but with the following health warning. I don't intend on giving an in depth chemistry lesson on any aspect of water treatment. I wanted to confine myself to really practical advice; namely, how to read a water report, how to achieve the correct mash pH given a specific grain bill, what online calculators should be used, what is the easiest way to make pH adjustments, how to treat sparge water etc.

The thing about historical water profiles (I'll leave out mention of cities to keep Tube happy is that they can open a big can of worms. The easiest way to replicate a water profile is to build it from scratch using distilled water. In fact, in many cases, this is really the only practical solution for a homebrewer. If you start from a natural water profile and try to tweak it to match some historical profile, you may not be able to remove certain minerals without using the kind of intensive measures that go into producing distilled water or reverse osmosis water. It can also be very complicated to try and balance all the ions in the correct way. 

I think it makes more sense to ask, how can I treat my local water to ensure I get the correct mash pH and broadly match the flavour profile of the target beer style. This might involve diluting with RO or distilled water to lower alkalinity or adding bicarbonate to adjust the pH upwards. The goal in this case is not so much to match the target water profile but to produce the perfect conditions for brewing a beer of that style, broadly speaking. 

But I could, if you like, show the steps you would go through to build a water profile using distilled water?

[Dunkel]

Well done Peter. As an Official Old Fogey (even older than the Venerable DEMPSEY), this gives me a great opportunity to jump on the ol' high horse. Palate is what we taste beer with, Palette is the flat thingy an artist uses for mixing paints, and Pallet is the wooden yoke cases of Heneken are delivered on. I've seen all three used, but only the first is correct.

Now in my day ...

[Dr Jacoby]

Well spotted! But if the brewer is an artist then I reckon I can get away with it 

[Padraic]

Well done Peter. As an Official Old Fogey (even older than the Venerable DEMPSEY), this gives me a great opportunity to jump on the ol' high horse. Palate is what we taste beer with, Palette is the flat thingy an artist uses for mixing paints, and Pallet is the wooden yoke cases of Heneken are delivered on. I've seen all three used, but only the first is correct.

Now in my day ...

No one is older than Dempsey! He was around when they built the three castles on the Dublin crest! Has he told you that story?

[Brew_Diva]

Nice one Peter, enjoyed your write up and defiantly couldn't have said it better myself