Tuesday 20 March 2012

The appliance of science

What with malt quality being poor this year it was time to optimise my copper finings.

I used proper protafloc of course, none of that false protafloc nonsense.

  • One tablet was dissolved in one litre of boiled water.
  • Different doses of this were added to 250ml aliquots of boiled wort (1ml = 10ppm, 15ppm = 1 tablet per barrel).
  • After a swirl and 10 mins to settle the appearance was recorded and 100ml of clear hot wort decanted into fresh bottles and clarity assessed.
  • The bottles were then cooled for 20mins and left to settle overnight.
  • Finally the cold break volume and wort clarity was recorded.



As you can see I'm making do with water bottles due to a lack of laboratory equipment, and perhaps a protocol amendment is in order to take account of this. But having said that the test worked and the result was around what I expected.

3 comments:

  1. Any vesicle will work as long as they are identical.

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  2. I thought proper Milk bottles were standard. Like hen's teeth now of course.

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  3. I did have a set of identical water bottles at one point but they keep going walkies, and I think that doubling the volumes would make the volume of cold break easier to score.

    And I did have two proper milk bottles, one for hot break and one for cold break, but one broke so now the hot break goes in a glass.

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