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bachfan:
bomberqueen17:
unicornduke replied to your post “Today has been A Day and I haven’t, like, done anything. Nothing went…”
oh yeah my parents are in the midst of it because the new farm they bought has so many sugar maples on it. they’ve got a whole big set up and they’re boiling every couple of days and they can’t keep with with 750 gallons at a time - three totes. they literally have to feed the evaporator every two minutes or something ridiculous to keep it going. boils like 90 gallons of sap an hour. it is r i d i c u l o u s
My b-i-l made a whole rig out of stock tanks and tubes and such and hand-made an evaporator with cinder blocks and firewood and such, and then he did the math and realized he’d have to tap 200 trees to get any kind of economy of scale and was like. No. So… they just do personal use, and that’s it. I was trying to tell him he should get CSA members to take sap and boil it themselves and he was like yeah no.
We just finished about a 20-gallon batch and filtered it into… a quart jar. Yup. Hoo. Ok.
buttons-beads-lace replied to your post “Today has been A Day and I haven’t, like, done anything. Nothing went…”
at the moment I have to go to a thing, but I could probably sort out a “pounds of sugar per gallon” to “whatever other measurement of concentration” conversion for you later if you send me the details.
I finally managed to prevail upon my dude to look at charts and he found one. If I want a finishing alcohol by volume around 10% then I would need the brix measurement to be 18-20% sugar when I start.
I still don’t understand what the fuck brix actually means. If it is just percent of sugar then why does it have a special name? I don’t know. I don’t! And then most of the recipes talk about specific gravity. And I don’t know what those two words mean in that order. So that’s irritating as fuck, because people on brewing forums use the terms sort of interchangeably and will sometimes just throw the numbers out (”this is a batch I did at 1.06!” and I’m like what the fuck does that mean), and it makes me angry because it’s not like I’m new at this, I’ve been brewing since about 2006, but. I have apparently never done it Right, I’ve just followed recipes and got good results and made substitutions and such, but I’ve never Done Science To It so I don’t know what the fuck is going on.
Er… specific gravity just measures the relative density of stuff.
If you’ve got plain distilled water, it will have a different density – meaning it will have a different mass & thus a different weight – from sugar-containing water.
So if you measure the weight of a cup of sap and divide it by the weight of a cup of plain water, it’ll be a number different from 1.000 … and the bigger the variance from 1.000, the higher the percentage of sugar in your sap.
But because the difference in weight is so small it’s hard to measure, I understand that most folks use a special instrument to measure the specific gravity of their sap or whatever.
And according to Wikipedia, Brix was just the name of a guy who put together a table showing what specific gravity equaled what percentage of sugar.
So really Brix is actually, literally, simply just the percentage of sugar in water. why does that need a different name. because then people will use percentages and brix interchangeably. and it’s fucking complicated enough, and then. Ugh.
I am just not cut out for science because keeping this sort of thing straight confuses me. Anytime anyone says more than one number my brain just completely loses all focus and devolves into worrying about how I’m going to forget those numbers, and then I’m so derailed I can’t follow the thread of what’s being discussed. I used to be able to compensate for this and just keep up, but as I get older I just can’t.
If I didn’t have to understand this stuff to do the hobbies I enjoy so much I would just steer clear, but. It keeps coming up, inconveniently.
(Your picture was not posted)
bachfan:
bomberqueen17:
unicornduke replied to your post “Today has been A Day and I haven’t, like, done anything. Nothing went…”
oh yeah my parents are in the midst of it because the new farm they bought has so many sugar maples on it. they’ve got a whole big set up and they’re boiling every couple of days and they can’t keep with with 750 gallons at a time - three totes. they literally have to feed the evaporator every two minutes or something ridiculous to keep it going. boils like 90 gallons of sap an hour. it is r i d i c u l o u s
My b-i-l made a whole rig out of stock tanks and tubes and such and hand-made an evaporator with cinder blocks and firewood and such, and then he did the math and realized he’d have to tap 200 trees to get any kind of economy of scale and was like. No. So… they just do personal use, and that’s it. I was trying to tell him he should get CSA members to take sap and boil it themselves and he was like yeah no.
We just finished about a 20-gallon batch and filtered it into… a quart jar. Yup. Hoo. Ok.
buttons-beads-lace replied to your post “Today has been A Day and I haven’t, like, done anything. Nothing went…”
at the moment I have to go to a thing, but I could probably sort out a “pounds of sugar per gallon” to “whatever other measurement of concentration” conversion for you later if you send me the details.
I finally managed to prevail upon my dude to look at charts and he found one. If I want a finishing alcohol by volume around 10% then I would need the brix measurement to be 18-20% sugar when I start.
I still don’t understand what the fuck brix actually means. If it is just percent of sugar then why does it have a special name? I don’t know. I don’t! And then most of the recipes talk about specific gravity. And I don’t know what those two words mean in that order. So that’s irritating as fuck, because people on brewing forums use the terms sort of interchangeably and will sometimes just throw the numbers out (”this is a batch I did at 1.06!” and I’m like what the fuck does that mean), and it makes me angry because it’s not like I’m new at this, I’ve been brewing since about 2006, but. I have apparently never done it Right, I’ve just followed recipes and got good results and made substitutions and such, but I’ve never Done Science To It so I don’t know what the fuck is going on.
Er… specific gravity just measures the relative density of stuff.
If you’ve got plain distilled water, it will have a different density – meaning it will have a different mass & thus a different weight – from sugar-containing water.
So if you measure the weight of a cup of sap and divide it by the weight of a cup of plain water, it’ll be a number different from 1.000 … and the bigger the variance from 1.000, the higher the percentage of sugar in your sap.
But because the difference in weight is so small it’s hard to measure, I understand that most folks use a special instrument to measure the specific gravity of their sap or whatever.
And according to Wikipedia, Brix was just the name of a guy who put together a table showing what specific gravity equaled what percentage of sugar.
So really Brix is actually, literally, simply just the percentage of sugar in water. why does that need a different name. because then people will use percentages and brix interchangeably. and it’s fucking complicated enough, and then. Ugh.
I am just not cut out for science because keeping this sort of thing straight confuses me. Anytime anyone says more than one number my brain just completely loses all focus and devolves into worrying about how I’m going to forget those numbers, and then I’m so derailed I can’t follow the thread of what’s being discussed. I used to be able to compensate for this and just keep up, but as I get older I just can’t.
If I didn’t have to understand this stuff to do the hobbies I enjoy so much I would just steer clear, but. It keeps coming up, inconveniently.
(Your picture was not posted)
