Recently purchased 2 sacks of grain and received malt analysis sheets for both after some digging. The first sack is Simpson’s Golden Promise and the second is Barke Pilsner from Weyermann.
The Simpson’s sheet is fairly easy to interpret but I am stuck on the diastatic power for the barke. It reads 41.3% in Kolbach, which I have found to be in the realm of “Very good disintegration” from e-malt.com:
"The Kolbach index is the relation of the soluble protein percentage on the total nitrogen percentage. The Kolbach index permits to encode the chemical disintegration of the malt.
The scale of values is between 29 and 45%:
45 excessive disintegration and it can cause disturbances in the beer
41 very good disintegration
between 35 and 41 good disintegration
< 35 insufficient disintegration
The brewer designates in the specification the fork of tolerance of the Kolbach index."
My issue is that in trying to convert that number to °Lintner using the formula (WK+16)/3.5 results in a terrible result well below the threshold of conversion at 16.37. I know I am doing something wrong with this calculation and that the grain has plenty of diastatic power to convert; I guess I am just looking for a way to use consistent units from maltster to maltster. In trying to plug numbers into beersmith, I just want them to make sense. Any help is appreciated, I know I am likely just overthinking this.
Not an expert on this but I believe that Kolbach index (S/T) is measuring soluble nitrogen percent aka modification, while WK (and Linter) are measuring diastatic power.
The Kolbach index is the degree of modification. You can have different DP for malts with the same Kolbach index. Some malt varieties have high DP (6-row, NA 2-row), others are lower (British varieties). Degree of kilning can reduce the DP of the malt, so pils>pale ale>Vienna>Munich.
I couldn’t find the WK for Weyermann’s malts on their spec sheets online. I’m away from home, so someone else may have them somewhere. You could email Weyermann and ask.
And there you have it, I was missing something in trying to compare apples to oranges. If I’m trying to input diastatic power into beersmith then, how do I get that number from a Weyermann sheet that only list straight Kolbach (S/T)? Probably doesn’t matter much as it’s going to convert and I won’t likely be using adjuncts with it.
Without naming names, I know there was once a lot of talk about not being a good home brewer if you didn’t know your numbers and how to modify your approach as numbers changed from lot to lot. I guess I was just trying to look at it that way. Like I originally said, the Golden Promise sheet was easy to interpret and input and I knew from looking at the Barke Pilsner sheet that the 41.3% Kolbach Index number could not have been what I was looking for to input diastatic power. Thanx y’all