pH Meters - use them or not?

HighVoltageMan! · Nov 19, 2020

Ward Chillington said:
The Dane that came up with the concept did so while working at Carlsberg Laboratories....yes that Carlsberg.

The same laboratory where Emil Hansen isolated yeast to a single strain, something we take for granted today. Prior to that multiple strains were pitched and replication of a beer from batch to batch was sketchy at best.

Beer has improve a great deal in the last +130 years. I don't believe the beer was nearly as good 150 years ago as it is today, thanks to technical advances.

Nosybear · Nov 19, 2020

Yeah, when I think how quickly breweries switched over to pure strains, makes me wonder what the whole "wild fermentation" is about. People had wild fermentations for centuries, and gave them up as soon as there was an alternative that made better beer.

GFHomebrew · Nov 19, 2020

It probably gave their beer more predicatability too.

Mark Farrall · Nov 19, 2020

Better is in the eye of the beholder though I'm sure you could say more popular. And undoubtedly the higher predictability of a single strain is important to a brewery that has just spent the huge amounts of money that the industrial breweries started spending in the early 20th century. Much more damaging to dump a batch when you're brewing at their scales.