Why aren’t target mash and boil pH ranges included for each style in the BJCP guidelines? (i.e. Too subjective, too much work to include, etc…)
That would be solid, so would not screwing up international styles.
For the same reason that other recipe specifics aren’t stated in the guidelines. For the beer drinker, its all about where the beer ended up, not how it got there.
I suppose one could argue that pH identifies a characteristic of the beer the same as the OG, FG, ABV, IBU, SRM and ingredients list. Are these characteristics also not used by brewers?
Judges eval your beer, not its stats. I’m not aware of any hard and fast rules on pH for any beer. Some are better than others.
Edit - Other than the obvious 5.2-5.6 range that you’d use for most any beer. Past that, it’s preference.
The BJCP Guidelines are not a recipe guide. They are guidelines for judges at competition.
If someone feels strongly the guidelines should be revised in any way, they should write up those changes/styles in detail and send them to the Style Committee.
To be clear what I mean by that, if you were to send an email to the style committee and say, “please add mash pH to all the styles in the BJCP Guidelines” or “the International styles are wrong”, your email would probably get ignored.
The email should be style by style, here are the changes to that style. There are Word documents on the BJCP website where you could track changes.
It would also eliminate extract brewers
Perhaps one could argue that the BJCP guidelines are used by brewers and judges.
So you’re saying the ideal range would be the same for most beers (light, dark and in-between) so why bother including it?
Aren’t these guidelines where most brewers go to get parameters for the beers they brew such that they fit into a specific category? Or do most brewers just make a beer and then decide which category to place it in?
Extract brewers don’t benefit by checking pH?
They can’t do anything about mash pH.
There are many unspecified parameters. Mash type, mash temperature, mash thickness, fermentation temperature, pitch rate, oxygenation levels, and so on. Those are for the Brewer to figure out for the beer on her/his system with the process used. pH is just another one that the Brewer has to figure out.
The guidelines describe the finished beer, not the process to get there. The pH, indeed the entire recipe, can be whatever you want as long as the finished beer fits the guideline.
Ok, thanks guys. I’ve always thought about it backwards where the BJCP guide was a recipe guide and a “beer judging” guide.
Perhaps they could adjust boil pH or does that pretty much fall into a standard range also.
I guess a more advanced extract brewer could, but that takes the simplicity out of extract brewing. IMO simplicity is the main benefit to extract brewing.
Yeah, it kinda happens automatically with extract, especially of you use distilled water.
Because judges don’t have pH meters at the table? Sometimes I think including IBUs is a bit much since there is no way to measure that either.
Do judges actually use hydrometers or refractometers to check FG/ABV?
I know a lot of software uses BJCP guidelines to guide recipe making.