12 replies to this topic

[3rd party JKor]

I have some acid malt. I haven't fooled around with it though.

[Malzig]

There's a brief write up on Kai's site here, but this is the chart you need:

[Malzig]

He's got this incorporated into his water spreadsheet, too.(Man, you don't get much time to edit your post, do you?)

[ThroatwobblerMangrove]

Can anyone explain this in a real working example? This diagram seems a little like an enigma to me. what are the varibles in using this malt over using just lactic acid? If I use say a pound (less/more) in a recipe, (i realize it depends on the recipe) but how can I be sure it will at least be close to the correct PH for full conversion? By the way I tried Kai's spreadsheet and thats not making much more sense either.

pick a mash thickness (pick one of the colored lines), pick an amount of pH shift (x axis), and then see what percentage of your grain bill should be acidulated malt (y axis).ETA: I've never done this but that's how I would read that graph.

[ThroatwobblerMangrove]

Ok. understood,but what would the PH shift from??? My water PH or the mash PH? If its the water PH, my water sits at around 7.3 so that would mean about 2 points which is not even on the graph here, unless I am still misunderstanding.

My guess would be the mash pH.

[ThroatwobblerMangrove]

Ok that makes sense. I was thinking in a recipe sense, in other words adding what you need before the mash. But in retrospect you really don't know how much to add until you mash in. What I usually do when checking the mash 1) is mash in,2) wait 10 mins,and then 3) check for the proper ph and then adjust accordingly. Instead of adding lactic acid, you add some cracked acid malt to adjust acid malt?

I would guess that's the way to do it but like I said - I've never done it so take this with a grain of salt.

[Stout_fan]

... (Man, you don't get much time to edit your post, do you?)

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[3rd party JKor]

Ok that makes sense. I was thinking in a recipe sense, in other words adding what you need before the mash. But in retrospect you really don't know how much to add until you mash in. What I usually do when checking the mash 1) is mash in,2) wait 10 mins,and then 3) check for the proper ph and then adjust accordingly. Instead of adding lactic acid, you add some cracked acid malt to adjust acid malt?

For commercial brewers they know what they need to add to get their pH right beforehand. For homebrewers, we adjust on the fly. If you want to try to figure out what your mash pH is going to be beforehand you can use John Palmer's Residual Alkalinity Nomograph in How To Brew to give you a ballpark estimate.

[Malzig]

What I usually do when checking the mash 1) is mash in,2) wait 10 mins,and then 3) check for the proper ph and then adjust accordingly. Instead of adding lactic acid, you add some cracked acid malt to adjust acid malt?

Correct. If you want to adjust the pH after checking it in the tun, you decide how much you want to drop the pH, then add the required weight of Acid Malt, determined by your mash thickness and grist weight. So, if you're at 1.89 qt/# and want to drop the pH by 0.2 on a 10# grain bill, you would add 3% of your grist weight, or 0.3# of Acid Malt.If you want to predict how much to use, ahead of time, you need to use Kai's spreadsheet. Start filling it out with your values and you'll probably find it pretty self-explanatory and it will probably become clear as you have fewer boxes to fill in.