On Sun, Sep 14, 2003 at 03:11:05PM +0200, Ole Schmitto eSec Managed Security wrote: > Jeg er netop ved at afslutte mit første bryg, og kunne egentlig godt tænke > mig og kende alkohol procenten. Kan man købe en dims til dette eller hvad > gør man
Sorry, too late! The proper way to measure the alcohol content is to measure the gravity (weight/volume) of the wort before the fermentation starts, and again when it is done. The first measurement gives you basically the sugar content in the wort, and the second tells how much of the sugar(s) has been converted into alcohol. If you do not have the original gravity, you can not say anything much precise about the alcohol content. You can always try to estimate it. Was it all-grain, or extract brew? How much and what kind of grains and extracts did you use? Plug all of those into beercalc, and it will estimate your original gravity. In all-grain it all depends on your mashing efficiency, which varies a lot between setups, so it will never be very precise. You can still manage to measure the final gravity, and plug that into beercalc. That will give you some idea of the alcoholic strength. If you ask nice, maybe some of us readers will look into beercalc, and come with out best guesses. There are other ways to measure alcohol content, but either you need a good laboratory do even try, or you get very unprecise results. You can always drink one bottle, and ask a friendly police officer to send you to a laboratory to measure your blood alcohol ;-) Then repeat with a known strength of beer, and do some statistical magic... Theoretically you should be able to distill the alcohol out of your beer, and measure its volume, and/or the change in the gravity of the beer. If you do it right, you probably get a result that says your beer is between 3 and 10 percent. To quote Charles Papazian: "Relax, dont worry, have a homebrew!" You probably have a small feeling if your beer is comparable to an ultra-light or a trappist. That's all you need to know, anyway. After all, it is *so* much more important if it tastes good, and how you want to improve it for the next batch! Best regards Heikki P.S. Congratulations with your new hobby! -- Heikki Levanto LSD - Levanto Software Development <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
