# Milk contains amylase....



## TimT (12/10/14)

I've been planning another milk brew so I've been reading around the subject lately. You know the drill about using milk: what you're interested in is lactose, an unfermentable sugar. You can buy the lactose on its own, but you'll also get a lot of it in whey, which separates out from the rest of the milk after curdling to make cheese - and it would definitely (maybe, probably, according to a few blogs I read that I can't find now) have been used as a traditional brewing ingredient. I've used it! it's good! 

Anyway, I was interested to find recently that milk contains amylase as well, so there might be added benefits in using it in the brewing process. Here's a paper on the subject, containing lots of fancy scientific jargonificating and figures that I'm not very good at understanding. Apparently the amylase levels in cheese are pretty much the same as those in milk, which (maybe, probably, who knows) suggests it disperses evenly between the curds and the whey.

The other thing is, of course, pasteurisation of milk might ruin some of the amylase.... which is why I got to that paper in the first place. It's true, it does, but by the sounds of it modern pasteurisation is very short (under a minute), whereas the amylase in milk degrades at high temperatures over a longer period of time (half an hour). So, raw milk is best, but pasteurised milk will do.

If anybody who actually understands these papers wants to read it and tell me I'm a dickhead and I'm all wrong, go ahead! 

Of course, one take away message from this paper might be you can not only use milk in brewing, but you can use cheese in brewing too. A cheese beer? Yeah, nah, I'm not going to go there. Yet. :drinks:


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## Mardoo (12/10/14)

You DO get very interesting flavor development from white cheese molds...


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## philmud (12/10/14)

So how are you planning on using the milk? In place of a mash? To supplement a mash? What kind of beer? Is it worth steeping some cracked grains in milk or a milk/water solution and doing a before:after SG comparison?


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## peas_and_corn (12/10/14)

Using milk in brewing for its amylase is like buying an apple to use as a paperweight. It might do something to help, but what's the point? Malted barley has more than enough enzymes to convert the starch into sugar.


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## TimT (12/10/14)

The other thing I should have added is the temperature at which the enzyme works according to those experiments - most starch to sugar conversion happens at around 45 degrees celsius. That's at the bottom end of the 'starch rest' other brewers talk about. (I've never really done one of those). Maybe it's not the familiar alpha amylase or beta amylase we use in brewing, but one of those ones that works at the lower temperature range. Or maybe they just work differently in milk?

Prince Imperial - they do have some figures at the linked paper but I don't know what they would mean for the use of milk amylase in brewing and/or how they would compare to the use of malted barley amylase. I was thinking of chucking whey into the mash, doing it for half hour at around 45 degrees celsius and then upping it to 65 or so for another half hour. Maybe a brown or black brew, since they seem to hold the sweet lactose flavours and creaminess better. Partly the thing is I've run out of my usual base malt; I have Munich which I _think_ could do as a base (not too crystally), but I've read that it doesn't have enough conversion power for adjunct grains. So I thought maybe some extra amylase could help matters along.

Also, the active lacto-bacilli in whey might bring a slight sourness to the mash, akin to that sourness that acidulated malts might bring. I'm not averse to this... so long as it doesn't go overboard.

Peas and Corn - I take your point, but partly my desire to do this arises out of my interest in historical brewing. I have an idea that in earlier times, when brewing science was not so exact, the addition of adjuncts that contained amylase would have been quite useful (as well as adding interesting flavours). And, as I find myself in a situation (see above) where I have a potential malt that may not have quite so much enzymatic conversion power as desired, well....


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## TimT (12/10/14)

i should also mention this here book I have - the 18th century 'Booke of Cookery' by Martha Washington (essentially her home cookery book). In it she has several recipes for 'Possets' which involve things like boiling barley in cream. This suggests to me a crude early form of custard, where the amylase in the milk enables some form of malting process to get underway. Interesting stuff....


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## MHB (12/10/14)

Tim you are a dickhead!
The first paragraph of the article says there is no Amylase in Cows milk, the test was done on Human milk.
Some of the other references found some Amylase in cows milk - from that you have composed an argument that Cows milk contains Amylase and might be good in brewing.
From paragraph 3/.. enough amylase to convert 15-20mg/100ml, so taking the 20mg as a possible to get enough amylase to make 1L of 1.040 wort (10oP) or 10%W/W sugars, so to make 100g of extract you would need the Amylase from 500L of milk
20mg = .02g, 100/.02=5,000 (as it was / 100ml) 5,000/10 = 500.

So unless your missus is much more cooperative than the average, you are going to be very hard pressed to conduct anything like a meaningful experiment.
Tim you come up with some interesting ideas, but you also engage in some remarkable flights of fancy - this I suspect is one of them. There is a real element of science in brewing, you really should learn some of it.
Mark


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## TimT (12/10/14)

No, the experiment was on cow's milk, at the head of this page they specify that the milk was supplied by the Sheffield Farm Company. The wording up to that point is a little ambiguous and perhaps it was misleading of them to mention human milk in the opening paragraph. But it's an experiment on the amylase in cow's milk.


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## MHB (12/10/14)

Moving along to page 124 where the results are




10cc (mL) can convert .002g, so 1L of milk 100*10ml could convert 0.2g of starch. to convert 100g you need 100/.2=500L of milk
Tim seriously it would take all the amylase in 500L of milk to make 100g of extract (1L @ 1.040)

There is more Amylase in in a couple of good spits - not suggesting you gob in your beer, or in 125g of malt, which is where we have been getting our amylase form for the last 10,000 years or so.
If you really want to look at traditional brewing - look at malt that's where it all started.
Mark


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## TimT (12/10/14)

Yeah, might leave the chicha experiment for another time.


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## Feldon (12/10/14)

I thought that the key feature of enzymes (eg. amylase) was that they cause a reaction in other compounds but remain unchanged themselves. Eg. enzyme molecules bump into big starch molecules and cause them to break apart into smaller sugar molecules. The enzymes are unchanged by this reaction and can do the same again when they meet up with more starch molecules. So its not a matter of how much enzyme you have but how long you put it to work?


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## TimT (12/10/14)

Yep, and that's one of the things they look at in the experiment - the longer the enzyme is active, the more starch is converted.

One other thing that comes to mind is, does the enzymatic conversion thing operate on a simple formula - so, if you have x amount of enzymes doing their thang in a brew, and then you double those enzymes to 2x, does the starch conversion double as well (all other things being simple)? Or is it more complicated than that? (Though, as Mark has helpfully pointed out here, it does look like what the enzymes in milk will bring to the party will be pretty minimal anyway.)


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## klangers (13/10/14)

Feldon said:


> I thought that the key feature of enzymes (eg. amylase) was that they cause a reaction in other compounds but remain unchanged themselves. Eg. enzyme molecules bump into big starch molecules and cause them to break apart into smaller sugar molecules. The enzymes are unchanged by this reaction and can do the same again when they meet up with more starch molecules. So its not a matter of how much enzyme you have but how long you put it to work?


All catalysts require a certain excess in order to drive the equilibrium to the product side. If you don't have enough enzymes, they will work until a certain concentration and then stop.



TimT said:


> Yep, and that's one of the things they look at in the experiment - the longer the enzyme is active, the more starch is converted.
> 
> One other thing that comes to mind is, does the enzymatic conversion thing operate on a simple formula - so, if you have x amount of enzymes doing their thang in a brew, and then you double those enzymes to 2x, does the starch conversion double as well (all other things being simple)? Or is it more complicated than that? (Though, as Mark has helpfully pointed out here, it does look like what the enzymes in milk will bring to the party will be pretty minimal anyway.)


Since it involves organic chemistry, I can almost guarantee you it's not a linear relationship. It's not my area of science but you've got me thinking and I might brush up on my brewing science.


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## TimT (13/10/14)

Ah, interesting, thanks Klangers. 

Some recipes call for you to mash the brew for hours - indeed, some traditional brewing techniques have mashes lasting days - which indicates that, provided you keep the brew in the right temperature range, you'll get more and more enzymatic action as time goes on.

I've assumed in my brew that what Mark says is correct, that any amylase action you're going to get from milk/whey will be minimal and that it's only going to provide a small amount of starch conversion as opposed to that that you're going to get from the amylase in the malted barley. Anyway, I'm cooling my brew down at the moment. So I'll be interested to see how it all turns out!


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## klangers (13/10/14)

Essentially, the enzymes act as a catalyst by reducing the activation energy of the reaction. This then speeds up the reaction in the order of a million times faster. However, as the concentration of product:reactant changes, so does the speed of the reaction. This is compensated for by having a large(r) concentration of catalyst which increases the probability of a starch molecule encountering an enzyme molecule. 

Therefore whilst it is possible to get conversion from a small amount of enzyme, you could be waiting for so long that the whole mash goes off.

Otherways of compensating for a small amount of enzyme is to increase the amount of agitation by mixing the mash around to also increase the probability of the molecules meeting.


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## MHB (13/10/14)

TimT said:


> Ah, interesting, thanks Klangers.
> 
> Some recipes call for you to mash the brew for hours - indeed, some traditional brewing techniques have mashes lasting days - which indicates that, provided you keep the brew in the right temperature range, you'll get more and more enzymatic action as time goes on.
> Snip


[SIZE=medium]Really, the longest I have ever read about was mashing in cold the night before, which does improve the yield minimally, the exception being in the manufacture of acid malt. We aren't bio-acidifying here we are talking about amylase and mashing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=medium]To say enzymes are like catalysts is an analogy and like most analogies it cant be trusted as a complete explanation. Catalysts are the domain of inorganic chemistry, things like Platinum and Nickel dust and a whole bunch of salts and oxides of metals (among others). Catalysts are generally unchanged by the reaction and unless you chose the wrong one are still there unchanged at the end of the reaction. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=medium]Enzymes on the other hand are protein structures, they do something similar to what catalysts do but its by a very different method. They are (excuse analogy) very much like a living thing, they have an energy budget (they have to get something out of the process).[/SIZE]

[SIZE=medium]They have a finite life, they will only do a certain amount of work then they denature (die). They will work slowly for a long time or fast for a short time but in the end under the right conditions they will do the same amount of work fast or slow.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=medium]The caveat being that all enzymes are different, they have ideal pH temperature and concentration requirements, some are tough and some very fragile. The Alpha and Beta Amylase contained in malt being a case in point. Beta Amylase is fragile, it won’t work for very long, it is very intolerant of temperatures above 65oC and is fairly finicky about pH. Alpha on the other hand is quite robust, works over a much larger temperature range, can cope with a much wider pH range and with higher Calcium content in the mash it can work a lot longer and harder than most people think.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]Enzymes from the material being mashed (malt) are called endogenous, if you are adding something from another source they are referred to as exogenous enzymes, you can buy both Alpha and Beta Amylase (mostly Alpha) most of these are from bacteria, mostly GM bacteria, some of the exogenous Alpha can work up to 95oC. God only knows what the ideal conditions for milk amylase would be, given you could collect enough of it to be of any use.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=medium]If you can point to any mashing process that takes days I would like to look at it, personally I think you "misinterpreted" what you read.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]There is no point in mashing for longer than the enzyme will keep working. At its activity peak for Beta Amylase 63-65oC that’s around 15-30 minutes, for Alpha 45-60 minutes in most mash conditions (may be a bit longer at lower than the peak of 72oC).[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]Any way you look at it mashing for anything over two hours is probably a waste of time.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]Mark[/SIZE]


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## TimT (13/10/14)

MHB, I'm pretty sure I've read about it in several places - mind, I am referring to traditional brewing where techniques and knowledge were more imperfect than what they are today. But here's a translated quote from an observer of the Chewsurian method of making ale (some kind of Germanic people, I suppose). I've bolded the relevant bit. 

_From the brewer of Saint Michael there escaped a continuous cloud of smoke. Malting was going on there, and the acrid smoke, occasioned by the damp brushwood which had to serve as fuel, together with the escaping steam wrapped the brewhouse completely in a dusky mantle. The brew-house, too, was built in the rudest way, low and insufficiently lighted. There, by a mighty chain, hung the huge copper brew-kettle. Its form is peculiar, and everywhere the same. In its form it most closely resembles a giant top, being from 1 1/2 to 2 arsheen high (3 1/2 to 4 1/2 feet) and at its greatest width about 1/14/ arsheen (3 feet) wide. It begins to belly out at a point above the middle. Artisans of Telaw fashion caldrons like these, their value being somewhere between 100 and 200 roubles. Laterally, this cauldron is held up by carelessly joined stone rubble, while sooty flame licked at it in front and behind.* The mash was bubbling in it at a uniform rate, and was stirred now and then. Water was conveyed from the nearby brook through a small pipe that was laid against the outer edge of the cauldron. The crushed barley that is used for the mash is coarse, and is boiled steadily for several days at an even temperature. *Then the brew is run into woolen bags, and the latter are fastened above the rim of a vat, using wooden hoops for the fastening, so that the liquid slowly runs into the vat below. The fresh brew thus made, is turbid, rather insipid, and sweetish in flavour. It is poured into tubs 3 or 4 feet high, and 2 to 2 1/2 feet wide, made of one piece (from sections of tree trunks hollowed out), basswood being mostly used for this purpose. Then the required amount of Kakhetian wild hops is added, and the liquor, well covered up, is allowed to stand for 5 or 6 days._

I found this passage in Randy Mosher's _Radical Brewing_. A longer quote is here. Given what you say, perhaps the method of mashing here involved continuously adding more water and more barley to the mash.


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## manticle (13/10/14)

Sounds like an extended decoction.
My understanding is that one of the original purposes of decoction was to degrade starches in malt that was far less modified than it is currently.


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## MHB (13/10/14)

there are several problems there
you cant mash at boiling temperatures, so I strongly suspect the "observer" wasn't an expert on brewing and had no idea what was really going on.
the one thing I can agree with you on is that, the further back in time you go the less we knew about brewing. where we come unstuck is I believe we should use knowledge to make better beer, from what I have read of your posts you appear to think the exact opposite, should we stop making good beer and try to recreate some historic and probably unpleasant brew?


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## crozdog (13/10/14)

"_*The mash was bubbling in it at a uniform rate" *_sounds like they were doing a cereal cook rather than "mashing". The poor quality malt available made terchniques like cereal cooking & decoction necessary.

My suspicion is there was more to the process that the 'observer' didn't see / wasn't told about & therefore didn't describe.

Send Randy an email - he's a great guy who will respond with his views on the 'Chewsurian method"


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## TimT (13/10/14)

And of course if they boiled for 'several days' there'd be nothing left. I think the interpretation may be that 'boil' is used as a loose term here - 'boil' meaning 'slow bubbling'.

My philosophy is this Mark - beer and ale and wine and related fermented drinks have been with us for many, many centuries. So I find it both interesting and instructive to really understand how these people that have been before us brewed and thought about their brews. One way of doing this is through trying out their techniques, or just through reading around in this area. Yes, science is incredibly useful in brewing and has helped many brewers refine their own methods. But I also think for a full understanding of brewing we need to understand the long tradition that we have come from. I love being part of that long tradition and I'm really enjoying finding out more about it


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## TimT (13/10/14)

Crozdog, done. Just put on my best coat and hat and tie and went a knockin' on Randy Mosher's virtual door. He may or may not respond (him being all very busy and important and stuff), but hopefully he will!


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## TimT (14/10/14)

Well got a mail back from Randy, who says he doesn't really have anything to add to the discussion already had, though he agrees the talk of "boiling", possibly over days, does sound suspicious and likens it to the sort of sloppy reporting you get in newspapers on a subject the journo isn't really knowledgeable about. He also mentions he's got a new book on historical brewing coming up, and would be interested in hearing back if anyone else comes up with an interesting/knowledgeable interpretation of the same passage


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## klangers (14/10/14)

"Boiling" up until recently just meant moving/bubbling/violent. eg "the sea was boiling" does not mean at boiling temperature. One has to read these passages with the context of the scientific knowledge at the time. Since they did not have thermometers, the concept of "boiling temperature" was foreign to them and an observer would unlikely be able to distinguish from ~70 degrees and 100 degrees if not experienced in the process.


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## TimT (14/10/14)

_Since they did not have thermometers, the concept of "boiling temperature" was foreign to them and an observer would unlikely be able to distinguish from ~70 degrees and 100 degrees if not experienced in the process._

Not sure I entirely agree with that. Though "boiling" has a loose meaning as well as a precise scientific meaning, the concept would have been fairly well known. There's an obvious, observable difference between simmering (bubbles moving through the liquid) and boiling (violent, rapid, constant motion of the liquid). And in order to mash early brewers had to know how to keep the liquid at a constant hot-but-not-boiling temperature (which they did in a wide variety of entertaining and creative ways). Obviously the idea of a "boiling temperature" hasn't been well defined for very long, but it's certain early brewers did know of the existence - and importance - of temperature differentials to their brew.

BTW, in my Martha Washington Cookbook, there is an instruction somewhere to hold a broth at just below simmering temperature - which Martha Washington describes as "simpering!" You can just imagine a whole array of cooking terms like that - "I sniggered the butter and sugar, then I smirked the cheese in the smirker...." etc etc.


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## klangers (14/10/14)

I totally agree that brewers (or others who worked on the process) would certainly know the difference. My point was mainly about the observer, who most likely would have little experience in the subtleties of brewing.


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## TimT (14/10/14)

Yes, either he knew little about brewing or that wasn't what he was focusing on. The observer was Gustav Radde; it's from his book "Die Chews'uren und ihr Land". Here's a little bit about him.

The other thing that interests me about that passage is that the Chewsurian brewers excluded women from their brewhouse - it was a man activity. It's an old cliche that traditionally, brewers were women. Evidently this was not true for all brewing cultures.


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## technobabble66 (14/10/14)

The way i might interpret it, having read that passage a few times, is that the author is getting his process mixed up and mislabelled.
It seems like what he's calling the Mash is actually the Boil - i.e.: the process used by the brewer involved some sort of Mashing step (not observed or recorded here) and _then the Boil was done without removing the grain_.
So the Observer is watching this huge cauldron of boiling grain, called it the wrong thing (by our modern definition) and because the pot contains grain, we're just assuming it is actually the Mash (as he's called it).
This seems confirmed by the fact that as you continue reading his description, the next stage is draining the contents into a vat where it ferments. So if it isn't the Boil he's describing then it would infer no Boil actually occurs. So if you assume the Observer's description is 100% accurate, the process avoids using either a Mash or a Boil. Unlikely for successful brewing, so it seems safe to assume the observer's missed something.
Also keep in mind what we call a Mash is well defined these days, maybe back a few hundred years they were more loose terms used differently in different regions.

So ... good luck doing your Boil with all the grains still in it. 
Hey, you'll definitely achieve Ye Olde Grainy Flavour in your historical brew!!

PS: Glad to see you're happy to throw these random ideas out there, Tim ... even if it's to generally be shot down most of the time. It's good to occasionally review history, even if it's to be re-assured thing's have improved. And there's always the off chance something good that fell away can be rediscovered (anyone heard of the Prohibition Era?).


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## TimT (14/10/14)

Maybe Techno but again not everything is revealed in the description - this boil goes on, according to the description, for several days? Like I said, that would mean there wouldn't be any brew left. In the absence of more detail I'm sticking to my extended mash theory.


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## technobabble66 (14/10/14)

Maybe boiled for several days, while adding regular top-ups with water?
It'd be very caramelised! ... Maybe to help offset the grainy flavour from the boiled grains?


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## TimT (14/10/14)

In the absence of more information what can we do but guess?

I just tried to find 'Chewsurians' by doing a little google search (almost nothing). And the listings under 'People of the Caucasus' are super-confusing. (Prepare to enter a world of Mingrelians and Lazs, of Kartvelian languages, and be extra careful not to confuse the Svans with the Zans).


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## MHB (14/10/14)

[SIZE=medium]I actually do read a lot of brewing history and do believe it can be very useful to our understanding of beer and brewing. Which is why I get so ticked off by pointless theorising and wild guesses based on little or no evidence; even worse completely wrong misinformation.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=medium]The first thermometers appeared in the early 1600’s; by the mid 1700’s (150 years before this writhing) they were quite widely available.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]You will also note that he has the hops going into the ferment rather than the kettle.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]Decoction was widely used across Europe from medieval times; it was developed to cope with the absence of thermometers and inconsistent, badly modified malt.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=medium]If you look at the batch size, I suspect that what he was observing (badly) was part of a contagious brewing operation where the decoct was being boiled, and that they were keeping the decocting pot busy.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]Reading between the lines a bit I think he was observing a bunch of piss poor, primitive, backwoods brewers making something to get drunk on. He didn’t have a clue what he was observing and scant useful information can be drawn from his observations.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]Mark[/SIZE]


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## Feldon (14/10/14)

The word 'boil' was at its roots a word for describing something that had the appearance of lumps, bumps or swellings. This meaning survives today as the name for pus-filled skin boils, and as a poetic term to describe the state of the sea or a raging torrent of water.

But boil was not originally a word used to describe the heat needed to make a liquid phase change to gas. It was used to described the appearance of the lumps and bumps (ie. bubbles) of the boiling liquid, not the heat. But by extension it has come to mean something very hot, such as ones boiling anger or the temperature on a summer day.

With regards to the word's use in the brewing text cited by Tim, it could mean the bloop, bloop type 'boiling' you see when heating up porridge. Long before the whole body of porridge gets to 100C little volcanoe-like bubbles bloop up to the surface. This is caused by the oatmeal blanketing the base of the pot trapping heat. The lowest layer of the porridge starts to boil, sending up steam-filled bubbles that erupt as lumps on the surface which can still be quite cold. Such a situation might be something the writer of the text observed.


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## TimT (14/10/14)

It is a translation, so it would be useful to see the original text too.


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## TimT (14/10/14)

Feldon - Etymology Online offers two separate etymologies for the carbuncle-type boil and for the cooking-type boil. The first they trace back to an early Germanic root ("bele" "bulia", "beule"); the second, they say, enters English through old French ("bollir", bubble, ferment, gush). The original text seems to have been written in German; I wonder what the word is that Radde uses that is translated to "boil"?


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## Feldon (14/10/14)

Slightly OT, but for those interested in learning from the past, this story was in today's Guardian.

*Belgian scientists recreate 150-year-old shipwrecked beer*

*

*

Belgian scientists have successfully recreated a 19th-century beer that was discovered during the search of a shipwreck off the coast of Finland in 2010.
The bottles had lain 50 metres underwater since 1842. The government of the autonomous Åland Islands called on researchers at Belgium’s KU Leuven’s Brewing Technology Research Group to analyse the antique brew.
Following several years of reconstruction work, a Finnish brewery is now marketing what it claims is an accurate recreation of the beer.
Stallhagen is ready to introduce the unique flavour to the international market, whilst producers in Belgium gear up to mass-produce the 172-year-old liquor with a price tag of €113 (£89) a bottle.
Brewmaster Gert De Rouck fermented a lineup of test beers using the same ingredients found in the shipwrecked bottles.
“Based on the micro-organisms in the bottles, we were able to figure out which type of yeast and bacteria were used by the beer’s 19th-century brewers. This information allowed us to trace the beer back to Belgium,” said De Rouck. _[continues]_

Link: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/oct/13/belgian-scientists-recreate-150-year-old-shipwrecked-beer


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## Feldon (14/10/14)

TimT said:


> The original text seems to have been written in German; I wonder what the word is that Radde uses that is translated to "boil"?


Further down the page you linked to was this definition of 'brew':

brew (v.) Old English breowan "to brew" (class II strong verb, past tense breaw, past participle browen), from Proto-Germanic *breuwan "to brew" (cognates: Old Norse brugga, Old Frisian briuwa, Middle Dutch brouwen, Old High German briuwan, German brauen "to brew"), from PIE root *bhreue- "to bubble, boil, effervesce" (cognates: Sanskrit bhurnih "violent, passionate," Greek phrear "well, spring, cistern," Latin fervere "to boil, foam," Thracian Greek brytos "fermented liquor made from barley," Russian bruja "current," Old Irish bruth "heat;" Old English beorma "yeast;" Old High German brato "roast meat"), the original sense thus being "make a drink by boiling." Related: Brewed; brewing.

Just a possibility.


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## TimT (14/10/14)

It'd be great if there was a historical brewing corner of this forum. I guess it doesn't warrant quite enough interest to have a separate sub-forum but it's something that lots of brewers try out a few times. And it's a wide and rich area all right. There's always a few people who will try out some gruits, or chichas, or historical porters, or whatever. My happiest old-time brewing experiments have been in the area of meads - they used to be just a word in books, and up until a few years ago there probably wasn't even one Australian pub or Bottle-O that had a mead in store. They taste absolutely magical, and they are so simple to make.

I have a bit of a standard rant about how CUB and other megabrewers have changed our perceptions of beer in ways that we don't always notice. But maybe we'll leave that for another time


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## TimT (19/10/14)

My brew's been fermenting for a few days now, about 5/6, and I just took a sample. It's down to a gravity of 1.016. Assuming it's going to stay that way, that's fairly pleasing. The lactose in the whey would have nudged it up a few points, so if that unfermentable sugar was taken out maybe it would have gone down to 1.011?

I did a preliminary mash in whey at about 45-46 degrees for half an hour, before heating up to around 64 for a second round and 67 for a third round - the idea being to get a lot of fermentables from the malt (mostly Munich) to offset the unfermentables from the whey. I think a got a bit of enzymatic action in all three mashes, though the majority of sweetness came from the second and third. As Mark observes the amylase in milk would provide fairly minimal starch-sugar conversion on its own; my hope is that in action with the enzymes in the malt it might have proved more potent.

Just gave the brew some spices and I'll let it clear up!


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## MHB (19/10/14)

How much permeate did you add in total, its about 4.8%w/v Lactose, from there you can work out exactly what the effect will be on the FG.
Mark


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## manticle (19/10/14)

I'm still a little unclear on what you're aiming to achieve Tim. If you want to see if milk amylase is capable of breaking down long chain sugars or starches, you'd surely be better off not using malt that has the capacity to self convert. Why not try and activate the amylase within some unpasteurised milk then ferment the milk itself or activate the amylase and try converting starch in a malt like biscuit?

With this brew, it just seems like you added whey with no way (pun partially intended) of telling what effect the amylase may or may not have.
On a side note re pasteurisation - I bet my underwear pasteurisation is more than enough to destroy milk amylase.


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## TimT (19/10/14)

No - I wasn't testing what the milk amylase was doing, just hoping it would add a little something to the brewing process. The main aim in the end is to have a brew that's a little creamier, and a little sweeter than it would otherwise be because of the presence of whey and lactose.


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## TimT (19/10/14)

_How much permeate did you add in total, its about 4.8%w/v Lactose, from there you can work out exactly what the effect will be on the FG._


Thanks for the figures Mark! I had searched before to try to find out how much lactose you get in whey, though hadn't been able to come to a final conclusion.

Added about 2 L whey, in a brew about 13 L in size. So it would have been about 15 per cent of the final brew.


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## TimT (19/10/14)

Would have used twice that but I ran out of whey!


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## Mardoo (19/10/14)

MHB I'm a bit curious why you chose to use the term "permeate" here instead of "whey"? Were the figures you used based on permeate? Granted it's largely a difference in process between the two (ultrafiltration vs separation by coagulation of solids), but I'm curious about why you chose your terms.


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## TimT (19/10/14)

Though by the looks of things the whey may not have made much difference to the brew, there's still a lot of unknowns. Do the sugar levels and enzyme levels vary much? I have a hunch that right now there might be more lactose, galactose, and enzyme in the milk because it's spring - calving season. Milk *tastes* sweeter at the moment. And since I'm not buying milk in industrial quantities or using it to produce mass market product like Kraft Tasty, I'm guessing it may be less bland and generic than the stuff the big dairy factories work with - ie, more natural variability. 

The galactose is another intriguing ingredient; I'm assuming that will ferment out.


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## MHB (19/10/14)

Mardoo - Largely to highlight that there isn't much difference between the two, and to wind Tim up a bit  As far as I can tell they are functionally the same.

So 2L of whey at about 5% Lactose gives you roughly 0.1 Kg of Lactose
Assuming that it all wound up in the fermenter and that's a big assumption.

0.1/13 = 0.769% Lactose (very roughly) so its adding 0.003 points to your FG.
If based on your experience with your system you anticipated an FG of 1.011, the Lactose might be pushing that up to 1.014 at the highest.
Really is too close to call. but I am tempted to suggest that you got a less attenuateive wort by mashing with whey.
If you are looking for a creaminess from the whey, I suspect most of the protein wound up in the bottom of the kettle and there isn't enough Lactose to make a real difference. better off using some Flaked Barley or Flaked Oat, gives beer a lovely velvety texture.
Mark


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## TimT (19/10/14)

I wonder if the remaining curds (I didn't reheat to make ricotta) would have gradually precipitated out, drawing some other solids with them, as the brew got more acidic? Not that I've looked much into the topic but substances used to clarify brews all seem to operate on a similar principle - as they go solid they draw other solids towards them.


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## TimT (19/10/14)

Thanks for your ongoing feedback Mark, it really does help me figure out just exactly what is going on in this here brew (and others)....


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