SeanTerrill.com » writings

Things I Hate #152: Wine

webmaster — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 17:16:58 +0000

Well, maybe “hate”‘s a strong word. I’ve just never had a wine that I’d prefer over a good beer. I’ll keep trying though. You know, for science.

What I do hate is the wine industry. Bunch of namby-pamby grape gropers whose bottles collect dust and who spit instead of swallow. Which is why my interest was piqued by a blog post (What the Wine Industry Can Learn from Craft Beer) suggesting that craft beer-style innovation would be a boon to the wine industry. It’s a good read; check it out.

What the article fails to address is the fundamental difference between beer and wine consumers. Beer drinkers fall into two fairly distinct categories: craft beer drinkers and non-craft beer drinkers. Wine drinkers also fall into two categories: expensive wine drinkers and inexpensive wine drinkers. The difference is that cheap wine drinkers want the same products as the expensive wine drinkers, just lower-cost versions. Economies of scale dictate that the craft wineries charge higher prices, whether their product is substantially different or not. This would be especially true for any winery bold enough to test-market a small batch of something truly innovative.

Besides, what does innovation look like in the wine industry? Fermenting Pinot with a Chardonnay yeast? Scandalous. The problem isn’t that genuine innovation is impossible, but that it’s undesirable. Of course a vintner could make a Passionfruit Pinot Grigio. It just isn’t clear that anyone would want it.

Craft brewers are innovators for the simple reason that craft beer drinkers don’t feel beholden to tradition, whereas wine – at least wine as we know it – is nothing but tradition. Demand drives supply, and the consumers who are amassing five-figure cellars full of craft wines value tradition. Seriously unconventional wines aren’t impossible, but the market is certainly unproven. The shoe is on the other foot. If craft wineries do succeed in creating this new market, it will be by emulating the brewers they’ve spent the past few centuries turning up their noses at. And that’s a thought that any beer drinker should love.

Then again, what do I know? I hate wine.

Refractometer Calculator

webmaster — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 01:33:09 +0000

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, but kept finding excuses to put off. It uses the simplified cubic polynomial derived in Refractometer FG Results. Please visit that post for more information.

Zymurgy

webmaster — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 21:46:17 +0000

If you don’t have a subscription, you might want to pick up the May/June issue, which should be hitting newsstands right about now. And maybe let them know which article interested you?

How weird is it that I'm considering framing this?

Refractometer Estimates of Final Gravity

webmaster — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 01:05:27 +0000

A refractometer is one of the most useful tools a brewer can have. It allows for near-instantaneous measurements of specific gravity, without having to compensate for or adjust sample temperature or withdraw a large volume of wort/beer (a significant concern at homebrew scales). There are a few issues associated with accurately using a refractometer for brewing, though. First, a refractometer does not actually measure specific gravity, or sugar content. Instead it simply projects a line through a reticle, and relies on the fact that the refractive index of the fluid will move a line up and down the reticle. For a simple sucrose solution (the refractometers common to homebrewers are “borrowed” from the wine industry) the refractive index depends only on the sugar content and the temperature. Automatic temperature correcting (ATC) refractometers use a bimetal strip to cancel out the temperature variable (within a given range), meaning that the reticle can be marked directly in units of sugar content. Brewers’ wort, however, is not a sucrose solution, and so a “wort correction factor” must be applied. Generally this is done by dividing the refractometer reading by 1.04.

The second, more intractable problem with using a refractometer to determine specific gravity is that once fermentation begins, the beer becomes a three-part solution: sugars, water, and alcohol. There is no longer fidelity of measurement – that is to say, there can be more than one specific gravity that will correlate to the same refractive index. Generally speaking, however, only one of the potential data points will be sensible for a real beer. Making that assumption, it should be possible to develop a correlation between the measured refractive index and the actual gravity of the beer, as long as the alcohol content can be estimated. This means that if both pre- and post-fermentation readings are taken, the FG can be predicted. Various software packages and websites incorporate tools to do just that, all of which seem to use the same correlation:

FG = 1.001843 – 0.002318474*RI_i – 0.000007775*RI_i² – 0.000000034*RI_i³ + 0.00574*RI_f + 0.00003344*RI_f² + 0.000000086*RI_f³

Where RI_i and RI_f are the initial and final refractive indices, respectively, in wort-corrected degrees Brix.

I took pre- and post-fermentation readings of ten beers, with OGs ranging from 1.036 to 1.103, using both a refractometer and hydrometer. In every case the refractometer correlation provided an FG that was lower than the hydrometer reading, by anywhere from 0.5 to 8.5 “gravity points” (1000*(SG-1)). The mean discrepancy is 5.1 points. The main variable of concern seems to be the attenuation of the beer; the greater the attenuation, the larger the discrepancy. The results are plotted below.

Note that the discrepancy is zero at about 58% attenuation (71% apparent attenuation). I have no information on who originally developed the correlation, but my supposition is that they only tested worts with about this degree of fermentability. A logarithmic curvefit provides a reasonably good (R² ≅ 0.7) approximation for the offset that is needed; by adding this correction factor to the standard correlation, the maximum discrepancy for this dataset is reduced to only 2.1 points, and the average to 0.1 points. Unfortunately, the resulting equation is a bit unwieldy:

FG = (1.001843 – 0.002318474*RI_i – 0.000007775*RI_i² – 0.000000034*RI_i³ + 0.00574*RI_f + 0.00003344*RI_f² + 0.000000086*RI_f³) + 0.0216*LN(1 – (0.1808*(668.72*(1.000898 + 0.003859118*RI_i + 0.00001370735*RI_i² + 0.00000003742517*RI_i³) – 463.37 – 205.347*(1.000898 + 0.003859118*RI_i + 0.00001370735*RI_i² + 0.00000003742517*RI_i³)²) + 0.8192*(668.72*(1.001843 – 0.002318474*RI_i – 0.000007775*RI_i² – 0.000000034*RI_i³ + 0.00574*RI_f + 0.00003344*RI_f² + 0.000000086*RI_f³) – 463.37 – 205.347*(1.001843 – 0.002318474*RI_i – 0.000007775*RI_i² – 0.000000034*RI_i³ + 0.00574*RI_f + 0.00003344*RI_f² + 0.000000086*RI_f³)²))/(668.72*(1.000898 + 0.003859118*RI_i + 0.00001370735*RI_i² + 0.00000003742517*RI_i³) – 463.37 – 205.347*(1.000898 + 0.003859118*RI_i + 0.00001370735*RI_i² + 0.00000003742517*RI_i³)²)) + 0.0116

In order to spare anyone who might be interested some trouble, I’ve put together a simple spreadsheet that will calculate FG using both the old and new correlations, in addition to attenuation and ABV. If you end up using it for a significant number of batches, please share your results.

Update: 20 July 2010

I’ve since refined the FG correlation, using a more mathematically rigorous method. I leave the original post up for transparency’s sake, but if you’re looking for an FG calculator, please check out the new post.

Update: 07 Apr 2011

I’ve tweaked the correlation and posted some results from other brewers, as well as an updated spreadsheet: Refractometer FG Results

Spreadsheet download:
fg_calculator.ods | fg_calculator.xls

Yeast Pitching Rate Results

webmaster — Sun, 09 May 2010 19:34:31 +0000

Background

The ale yeast pitching rate generally recommended by commercial brewers is one billion cells, per liter of wort, per degree Plato. Assuming a 25% loss in viability prior to re-pitching results in the rule of thumb of 0.75 billion/L-°P. However, yeast products designed to inoculate at this level are not available on the homebrew scale. Directly pitching a vial or pack of commercial yeast without a starter results in about half of the recommended pitching rate. The effects of under-pitching are varied, but generally held to be undesirable. Wyeast Laboratories, for example, states that under-pitching can cause “excess levels of diacetyl, [an] increase in higher/fusel alcohol formation, [an] increase in ester formation, [an] increase in volatile sulfur compounds, high terminal gravities, stuck fermentations, [and an] increased risk of infection”.

Among home brewers, however, the effects of under-pitching are less universally agreed upon, with some brewers maintaining that under-pitching has no impact, or at least no negative impact, on the final product. Many others pitch multiple yeast products, or make starters prior to brewing, in the belief that it will result in better beer. To test these assertions, a controlled experiment needed to be conducted.

Experimental Setup

In order to provide a reasonable baseline for comparison, I brewed six gallons of an American Amber Ale, targeting a BU:GU ratio of about 0.5. The idea was to come up with a middle-of-the-road representation of a style that would be accessible to most craft beer drinkers. After chilling, the wort was split into two plastic bucket fermenters, with one pitched at 0.73 billion cells/L-°P (“control”), and the other at 0.29 B/L-°P (“under-pitched”), which is roughly the pitching rate that would result from using a month-old smack pack in a five gallon batch. Since the cell counts used to calculate the pitching rates are based on slurry volume rather a true count, the associated error is high – I would suggest ±10%. More complete information on the beer brewed and the yeast propagation procedures can be found in the experiment proposal and yeast ranching posts, respectively.

Seventeen sample sets of three bottles each were distributed to home brewers from Oregon to Florida. One (presumably) broke in transit and was not delivered, and there was one non-respondent. The 15 effective sets resulted in feedback from 37 individual tasters. Twenty-three received “Set 1″, which contained two controls and one under-pitched sample, with the remaining fourteen having “Set 2″, with two under-pitched beers and one control. All sets were labeled only as “A”, “B”, and “C”, resulting in a blind triangle test. Aside from being recruited via a topic on a brewing forum, no effort was made to establish the participants’ credentials with regard to brewing or judging beer. I’d like to think they can therefore be considered a representative sample of the (online) home brewing community.

The chief difficulty associated with collecting impressions from such a widely divergent group of respondents is converting them into unambiguous numerical data. My first thought was to have each taster complete a standard BJCP Scoresheet, but there were several obvious problems with that method. First, filling out the scoresheet can be a daunting, time-consuming task, especially considering that most respondents were not BJCP judges and would probably be completing it for the first time. Second, since by design it addresses only a single beer, a minimum of three sheets per “judge” would be required. Finally, since it lacks room for additional, comparative questions, at least one additional sheet, for a total of four, would be required. In order to minimize the amount of paper and the time commitment required, I laid out a simple feedback form, loosely based on the BJCP scoresheet, which was distributed to all participants.

In order to obtain objective, internally consistent data, two different methods were used. First, the volunteers were asked to perform two simple, quantifiable tasks: identify the control and under-pitched beers; and express a preference for one or the other. In addition to providing these definitive, binary answers, each respondent was also able to share more detailed impressions about appearance, aroma, flavor, and mouthfeel. The descriptive adjectives used were then compiled by means of a simple frequency count. In order to simplify the dataset as much as possible, some descriptors were combined – first, variations on the same root word (“malt” and “malty”, e.g.), then words with substantially similar meanings (“hot” and “solventy”, e.g.).

Personal Observations

My personal tasting notes for the two beers should be taken with a grain of salt, since they don’t represent a blind tasting, but the photographs are so dramatic that I thought they should be included. The photos show, left and right, the under-pitched and control beers. The first photo was taken two minutes after the beers were poured; the second after they had been drunk over the course of about 35 minutes.

The under-pitched beer is slightly lighter in color (10.5-11 SRM instead of 12), and has minimal head retention or lacing when compared to the control beer. The aroma is malty with a slight hot alcohol character, whereas the control has a perfumy, floral hop aroma, with the malt more subdued. The under-pitched beer has a vaguely spicy or vegetal off-flavor, particularly in the aftertaste, and a slightly solventy finish. The control also has a peppery or spicy taste (which I would attribute to the use of Munich malt), but a lingering citrus flavor predominates. The mouthfeel of the under-pitched beer is thin and astringent compared to relative fullness of the control, although it’s difficult to make a fair comparison due to the difference in head retention. The control may have a very slightly more compact, “stickier” yeast sediment.

Results

As a means of gauging fermentation performance, a refractometer reading was taken every twenty-four hours after pitching. The difference in the time required to start and finish fermentation is striking.

The control beer not only exhibited faster fermentation to begin with, but reached terminal gravity approximately twice as fast as the under-pitched fermenter. This provides a clear rationale for the use of higher pitching rates in commercial breweries, where fermenter time is extremely valuable. It could also point to a potential advantage for the higher pitching rate in allowing the yeast to out-compete any contaminating microbes.

Of the 30 tasters who attempted to differentiate the beers, thirteen were able to do so, with nine tasters correctly identifying the beers. This seems to support a hypothesis that there is a difference between the beers – if the three samples were truly indistinguishable, ten respondents could be expected to differentiate the beers, and five identify them.

Since the results follow a binomial distribution (a given sample is either identified or not, with no middle ground), the probability that these results are purely due to chance can be assessed. Given a random distribution, 13 of 30 respondents (or more) would be expected to differentiate the samples about 16.6% of the time. Based on these results, one can conclude, with 83% confidence, that the two beers do in fact taste different.

But what, specifically, are the differences between the beers? In addition to the more subjective descriptors I’ll get to in a bit, we can make a reasonable inference from the 13 tasters who correctly differentiated the samples. If the beers tasted different, but those differences revealed nothing about their identities, we would expect half of the 13 to guess correctly; in fact, the probability that nine or more would guess correctly is only 13.3%. This leads me to believe that at least some of the flavors generally associated with under-pitching – increased esters, fusel alcohols, diacetyl, acetaldehyde, etc. – are in fact present.

Twenty-four of the participants expressed a preference for one beer over the others, with the control being preferred sixteen to eight. When weighted appropriately for the number of samples, the control beer was preferred by 54.9% of tasters. Interestingly enough, this would seem to suggest that while the beers almost certainly are different, there is no consensus about which is better. Simply put, nearly half of people prefer under-pitched beers. An argument could be made, though, that only the opinions of the participants who actually differentiated the samples should be considered. And the data would seem to bear that out. Five of the differentiating tasters preferred the under-pitched beer; however, fully eight of the thirteen tasted Set 2, and when weighted accordingly they overwhelmingly prefer the control, 65.8% to 34.2%.

It is also worth noting that the first half of the respondents (those who tasted the beers after four weeks in the bottle or less) also preferred the control about two to one. So it’s entirely possible that additional conditioning time can reduce the off-flavors that result from under-pitching, but another controlled experiment, with the date of the tasting as a variable, would be needed to satisfactorily answer that question.

Finally, we come to the subjective tasting results. I think the above image largely speaks for itself, so I won’t elaborate too much further. The ten most common descriptors for the control beer are:

    1: Malty
    2: Hoppy
    3: Bitter
    4: Fruity
    4: Sweet
    6: Estery
    6: Smooth
    8: Thin
    9: Solventy
    9: Clean
    9: Dry
    9: Cidery

For the under-pitched beer, they are:

    1: Bitter
    2: Malty
    3: Hoppy
    4: Astringent
    5: Fruity
    5: Estery
    5: Solventy
    8: Clean
    9: Smooth
    9: Thin

Based on the relative frequencies of some words, I think one can reasonably conclude that the under-pitched beer was perceived to be more bitter, more astringent, more solventy, less sweet, and – bizarrely – cleaner than the beer using the standard rate. Obviously, the increased perception of negative characteristics makes a persuasive case for the use of higher pitching rates.

Summary

No difference in attenuation was observed, but fermentation in the control finished twice as quickly.
Under-pitching negatively impacts head retention and lacing.
There is a 43% chance that an “average” home brewer will be able to distinguish between under-pitched and standard-pitched ales.
There is a 30% chance that he will be able to identify which beer is which.
Overall, home brewers exhibit no strong preference for either beer.
Among tasters who can differentiate the two beers, the standard pitching rate is preferred nearly two to one.
The control beer was described as malty, hoppy, bitter, fruity, and sweet.
The under-pitched beer was described as being more bitter, more astringent, more solventy, less sweet, and cleaner than the control.

Summary of the Summary

Using a starter makes better beer.

Download the full dataset:
pitchrate_experiment.ods | pitchrate_experiment.xls

Science: It Works, Bitches

webmaster — Sat, 01 May 2010 14:18:17 +0000

Suffice it to say that I’m not so wild about religion. I have nothing against funny hats, and some of the music is very nice; it’s just that blind adherence gives me the willies. I fully acknowledge a continuum of harm, but psychologically, chemically speaking, there’s no difference between getting up earlier than you want on a Sunday and driving a bus into a coffee shop. What really bothers me, though, is the idea that there are inherent limits within which only religion can provide valid answers. If history has taught us nothing else, it’s that the contemporary monotheistic god is a god of the gaps. Every few years – sometimes spectacularly, but more often by fits and starts – science ratchets down the boundaries of the unknown and supposedly unknowable. Science works. Indeed, the scientific method is the only reliable means of problem-solving yet discovered, and quite possibly the only means there is.

So why are massive areas of human experience, arguably the most important ones, held to be outside its purview? Why do questions of right and wrong automatically default to answers based on musty tomes of poorly-understood, frequently-mistranslated non sequiturs? Can a rational, scientific approach instead give us a basis for morality? Of course it can.

Objectivism provides us with the crudest first-order approximation of this concept: the choice that minimizes harm is the right one. One can easily conjure up a decision for which it fails (there may be a logical case to be made for the death penalty over life imprisonment, for example, even though it requires one death instead of none) but in most day-to-day situations it holds up just fine. “Thou shalt not kill” isn’t going anywhere.

Anyway, it’s nice to see that I’m not alone in this. One of these years I really have to see if I can wrangle an invitation to TED.

It is the position, generally speaking, of our intellectual community that while we may not like this – we might think of this as wrong in Boston or Palo Alto – who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags? Who are we to say even that they’re wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way?

Who are we NOT to say this?

Way to Go, Steve-o

webmaster — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:58:24 +0000

Why does Apple only stand up and say, “this is what we’re doing, and this is why” every year or two? When they do, it usually makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Thoughts on Flash

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

Build a Better Stirplate

webmaster — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 05:35:24 +0000

It probably isn't necessary to stir Iodophor.

OK, so the world probably won’t be beating a path to my door. But there’s a right way to do it, and a wrong way – and a lot of home brewers are doing it the wrong way.

The basic idea behind these homebrew stirplates is to control the speed of a motor (computer case fans being a cheap and accessible source) by varying the supply voltage. The best way to do it would actually be using pulse width modulation via a microcontroller, but I didn’t have one on hand, and energy efficiency probably isn’t a major concern for most people interested in powering a motor drawing around a couple watts. The simplest way to provide voltage adjustment (though not regulation, which I’ll get to in a second) is simply to put a resistor in series with the motor, which is what a lot of home brewers do. The problem with that (aside from the engineer in me hating the kludginess) is that electronic components are sold on profit margins more frequently associated with Wal-Mart stores, and are therefore made of plastic. If you have one lying around, or pick one up at Radio Shack, it will typically be rated 0.5 W, sometimes less. We’re going to be sinking around 12 V • 150 mA = 1.8 W into it. It will melt.

So, the bare minimum takeaway here is to use a potentiometer rated for at least 2 W continuous power. A better, or at least more elegant, solution is to incorporate some actual voltage regulation. Which brings us to one of the most useful components ever invented, the LM317 adjustable voltage regulator. The LM317 is capable of providing anything from 1.25 to (V_in – 1.7) V with good regulation (±1%), using only two resistors to set the output voltage:

V_out = 1.25(1 + R₂/R₁)

The basic schematic for the LM317. Note the potential problem with the value of R1.

Replace R2 with a potentiometer and you have a nifty little 1.5 A adjustable power supply using only three components. A couple filter capacitors probably aren’t necessary for our purposes, but they’re cheap insurance. The only downside to the LM317 as a regulator is that it’s inefficient; any excess current is dissipated in the regulator as heat. Again, that could be up to 1.8 W in this application. The most common regulator package is a TO-220, which can only safely dissipate around 1.5 W. So a heat sink is definitely a good idea. The LM317 has a built-in thermal shutdown, though, so you might be able to get away without a heat sink if you’re careful not to run the fan at very low speeds. If you do sink it, be aware that the tab on the TO-220 package is tied to V_out – so be careful to avoid shorts. In the photo of the internals, you can see that I sealed the heat sink bolt with heat shrink tubing just to be safe.

Technically, an LM317 can have a minimum load current as high as 10 mA, although most will be much lower. That puts the maximum value of R1 at about 120 Ω (10.4 mA). Note that the datasheet specifies 240 Ω because it’s lifted from the specs for the LM117, which tops out at 5 mA. It’s also worth noting that I’m using a 220 Ω resistor simply because I had a 2.5 kΩ pot and didn’t feel like buying another. Do as I say, not as I do.

Circuitry aside, the rest of the build is pretty easy. I had a plastic kitchen container that happens to be the perfect size for my 1 gallon starter jugs. I bought a pair of neodymium rare earth magnets, which are simply adhered magnetically to the hub of the case fan. At 4 pounds of lift each, they aren’t going anywhere. If the fan was attached directly to the container, the magnets would make contact with its surface, so you’ll need some sort of spacer. I used roughly 5 mm lengths cut from a plastic drinking straw. The magnets and the power supply both came from American Science and Surplus, and the only other thing I needed to buy was a stir bar: $6 on eBay. If you’re going to use your stirplate with a convex-bottomed vessel, it might be worth noting the type of stir bar that works for me. It’s 1″ x 3/8″ with a ring.

The stirplate internals. Blue LEDs optional but awesome.

The complete parts list would be:

Project box or other plastic container
12 VDC power supply (at least 300 mA to allow for power spikes on startup)
PC case fan
Mounting hardware for fan
LM317T
TO-220 heat sink
120 Ω resistor
1 kΩ potentiometer
Knob for potentiometer
0.1 μF ceramic disc capacitor
1 μF electrolytic capacitor
2 rare earth magnets
Magnetic stir bar

Plus wire, solder, perf board, etc. If you’re a tinkerer you probably already have some of this stuff on hand. Even if you had to buy everything online and pay shipping, it would only cost about $30. Tayda Electronics is a great source for components. Avoid Radio Shack like the plague.

Now that I’ve gotten off my lazy ass and put this thing together, I’ll be updating my aeration experiments with one last trial, to test my assertion that frequent shaking and a stirplate are equivalent.

Yeast Ranching and You

webmaster — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:38:09 +0000

With all the writing I’ve been doing about yeast lately, I thought it would probably be a good idea to outline my general yeast propagation and storage procedures. There’s an enormous variation, both philosophically and technically, among homebrewers – from directly pitching a smack pack to acid washing and storage in -80°C freezers. My own techniques are based on two sometimes contradictory goals:

Emulate professional brewers’ procedures whenever possible, in an endless pursuit of better beer.
Minimize the expense of brewing, in terms of both time and money.

#1 precludes simply throwing in a smack pack and hoping for the best, and #2 precludes buying new yeast every time I brew. So I find myself a reluctant yeast rancher. There are many ways of storing yeast, and all of them have been tried by other home brewers at one time or another, so I’m not going to go into details here. Suffice it to say that the cheapest and easiest is to store yeast slurries in an ordinary refrigerator. If you’re going to be using the yeast within a few weeks, you can even harvest it directly from the fermenter and re-pitch into the next batch. I don’t really brew often enough for that to be practical, and I also worry about the strain of repeated high-gravity fermentations causing mutations, so I propagate solely in un-hopped 1.030 starter wort. In effect, this means I’m always pitching first-generation yeast, although I’ll probably start over every few dozen batches anyway, just for peace of mind.

Except for when I’m starting a new strain from a smack pack, the cycle begins and ends with a 100 mL glass jar that’s stored in my beer fridge. It’s pretty important to get a reasonable estimate of the number of cells in the starting population; any errors here will be compounded throughout the rest of the process. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to assume the slurry is a cylinder 3 mm in height and 6 cm in diameter. It’s almost exactly a month old, so the viability should be about 75%. Assuming a density of 4.5 billion/mL, there should therefore be about: π(3 cm)²(0.3 cm)(4.5 billion/mL)(0.75) = 29 billion viable cells. That’s enough that I’m going to step up only twice. For an older slurry (fewer than about 10 billion cells), I would do a three-stage propagation.

Unless poor planning or a heavy brewing schedule have drained my supply, I do all my propagations using the tail runnings from a previous mash that I store in the freezer. This is the ultimate cost-cutting measure; as I continue to use a particular strain, the yeast cost per batch approaches zero. These particular tail runnings are from a doppelbock, so they’re darker than usual. Since I’m going to be decanting the starters, that isn’t a huge issue – and this is being pitched into a stout anyway. For a very light beer I would have to plan ahead, or bite the bullet and buy some DME. They’re also higher-gravity than usual, at about 7°P (1.028). Ordinarily the tail runnings would end up closer to 3-5°P (1.012-1.020) and need to be boiled down by about half.

For the first stage I’m going to use 500 mL. (When building up from an older slurry I would start with 200 mL, then 500.) The chief drawback to using the MrMalty calculator for this kind of thing is that it won’t deal with starter volumes smaller than 1 L – presumably because that’s roughly the minimum size needed to get significant growth out of a smack pack. So for the first stage, I use the Wyeast calculator instead. As you can see, it predicts that my 500 mL starter will produce about 137 million cells/mL, or 68 billion total. So it’s basically back up to the cell count of a smack pack.

Now I can move back to the MrMalty calculator, manually setting the viability to 68%. For this particular beer, I therefore need roughly a 2.5 L starter. I’m using the “continuous aeration” setting, not because I am aerating continuously – only as much as foaming allows – but because that’s the setting that most closely matches my own slurry measurements, adjusted for 1.030 wort. My highly sophisticated aeration setup consists of an “Elite 800″ model aquarium air pump, with two 0.45 μm syringe filters in series, and a disposable plastic air stone. I like the disposable stones because they produce very fine bubbles, and can be thrown away instead of trying to sanitize the microscopic pores. The stainless steel nut is there to keep the air stone from floating to the top of the starter.

Be sure to allow enough time – 3-4 days per stage – to have the yeast ready by brew day. After each stage, I refrigerate the starter overnight, then decant as much liquid as possible, both to remove the alcohol and to maximize the surface:volume ratio. The whole idea here is to keep the yeast as healthy as possible, and avoid any potential long-term complications. Before cooling the final stage, though, I resuspend the yeast and pour off 100 mL of the starter into a jar. This keeps a protective layer of beer over the yeast for storage, and ensures you won’t select a substantial number of mutants that are either more or less flocculent than the population as a whole. The jar is then sealed, labeled with the strain, number of “generations”, and the date, and placed in the fridge for next time. Yeast stored this way can be revived and built back up to a pitchable population after well over a year.

Because I know you’re curious, the yeasts I’m currently keeping on hand are:

Wyeast 1028 London Ale (Worthington White Shield)
Wyeast 1056 American Ale (Sierra Nevada)
Wyeast 1084 Irish Ale (Guinness)
Wyeast 1272 American Ale II (Anchor Liberty)
Wyeast 2035 American Lager (August Schell)
Wyeast 2206 Bavarian Lager (Weihenstephan 206)
Wyeast 3787 Trappist High Gravity (Westmalle)
Wyeast 3864 Canadian/Belgian Ale (Unibroue)
Wyeast 3944 Belgian Witbier (Celis White)

With these nine strains I feel I can brew just about anything (at least anything I brew regularly), without having two that would be substantially similar.

Things I Hate #56: Valet Carry-On Baggage

webmaster — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:51:58 +0000

Three of the four words on this tag are lies.

On my recent trip to New Orleans, given that I was only traveling for four days, and not a women, I only needed to pack one bag. I elected to take only a carry-on – an easy decision given that checking luggage costs one-fourth as much as the actual ticket. The only problem was that everyone else came to the same conclusion, and so I was forced (yes, literally) to check my bag in the jetway, while almost everyone else carried one of their two bags onto the plane. They didn’t care about that argument; next time I’ll know to bring a second, decoy bag.

The problem basically is this: even with my tax dollars, the airlines are apparently unable to turn a profit. So they decided to start charging people to check bags. Consequently, everyone stopped checking bags. So now there is no longer enough room on the plane for all the carry-on luggage. Especially when the plane is full – or, technically, more than full. (Sidebar: How hard is it to count the fucking seats, and only sell that many tickets?) Of course, two of my four flights were actually not full; once we all got seated the overhead compartments were totally empty. They didn’t care about that argument either. From which I’m forced to conclude that this policy has nothing to do with the bags themselves.

The simple solution would be to return to the status quo and allow people to check bags for free. But that doesn’t help keep your company from hemorrhaging money, so the airlines decided to go a different way. Now they make passengers wait in a freezing jetway, in the hopes that some will just pony up the cash to avoid the hassle. I call that a shakedown. The airline calls it “valet carry-on service”.

This is not a “carry-on” bag. I wanted it to be a carry-on bag, but you wouldn’t let me. It’s a checked bag.
This is not “valet” service. A valet is someone who parks your car for you, not someone who walks up and takes your car away before you can park it yourself. Actually, there is an automotive analogy for that situation, but it isn’t valet service. It’s carjacking.

Fuck you, “valet” “carry-on” baggage.

Original RI (°Bx):
Final RI (°Bx):
Wort correction factor:
(Default: 1.040)