Dave Line's description of the process is a cracker, don't remember the exact text of it now.
Cheers Tom
Forgive any spelling errors as my typing skills aren't the best. Read and enjoy but it's a bit lengthy...............
If anyone wants to have a proper read then it's available.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Big-Book-Brewing-Dave-Line/dp/1854862359
THE BREWER'S BEDTIME STORY
"Saccharomyces and the Two Enzymes"
Alf and Betty Amylase were a couple of very nice enzymes from the Diastase family, living in the suburbs of the Grain Husks, who made their living by working in the Starch Tree Forests that surrounded their homestead. By chopping down the trees it was possible to make firewood for building fires to keep their small son, Saccharomyces, warm and healthy. Saccharomyces was a growing lad, and his parents found that the work in the forest was a full-time job.
It was an arduous existence, demanding the full co-operation of both parents. Each morning they would go out into the forest, Alf taking his big chopper, and Betty the small kindling knife.
The routine for the day was simple. Before any work commenced they both sat down and enjoyed a hot cup of coffee. Feeling refreshed, big strong Alf would then start to chop down the starch trees.
As soon as the first log was chopped off, Betty would immediately start to slice it into small pieces called maltose sticks, thus allowing Alf to carry on chopping the next log. Betty was an industrious wife, but she found that it was impossible to slice the logs up at the same rate as Alf was supplying them. She did her best to cope with the ever increasing pile of dextrin logs.
The most important stage to be attained, as far as they were concerned, was the complete dissection of the starch trees into dextrin logs. Dextrin logs would at least burn, whereas the whole tree could never be coaxed into flame, no matter how many boxes of matches were used.
Alf and Betty referred to this juncture as the Starch End Point---the stage where the non-inflammable tree was reduced to a usable fuel.
Working at their normal rate, by the time Alf had cut down the whole tree into dextrin logs, his wife had been able to slice almost half of them into maltose sticks.
From experience, the fire needed to be constructed from both logs and sticks, and the most efficient combination was a quarter logs and three-quarters sticks. Each bundle of maltose sticks would quickly catch alight and burn furiously to expend it's heat energy in a very short space of time. The inclusion of a quarter of logs gave the fire "body" and it also assisted by filling the valleys of inactivity between successive bundles of maltose.
At Starch End Point, all the wood was "burnable", but unfortunately, at this juncture, the ratio between logs and sticks did not create the best conditions for a healthy fire. The high proportion of logs meant that the fire would smoulder rather than roar into life.
The job of breaking down some of the remaining logs into maltose sticks to create a better balance was mainly the responsibility of Betty.
Alf's chopper was so large and unwieldy that it was a difficult task for him to chop the logs into minute sticks. He did try to do this once on his own, but it took the best part of two days to complete one tree. Similarly, Betty could not really be expected to slice the Starch Tree into maltose sticks with her small knife, without Alf first cutting the tree down into manageable units. It was possible, but in both cases, it was much better to work as a team to tackle the job.
The efficiency of the team was always very sensitive to the weather conditions; especially temperature. The hotter the day became, the faster Alf and Betty worked. Betty, however, found that she could not sustain the increased work rate, and after a while, her contribution diminished somewhat. Alf still produced the logs, but Betty just could not slice up so many of them into sticks. If the temperature rose too high, Betty would faint and leave Alf to do all the work himself. The result was to reduce the number of sticks available for the fire, thus diminishing the heat output.
In the colder weather the situation was reversed, since they both had to put on warm heavy clothing. Betty, nevertheless, could quite happily sit slicing up the logs without a reduction in her performance. Alf, though, found that the heavy clothing impeded his movement and his swing with the chopper. The restriction was such as to reduce the number of logs he could chop. His rate would be so slow that Betty could now keep up with him and slice each log into sticks as soon as they became available.
The moral of this story then, is: Create the best working conditions for the team, taking fully into consideration the individual preferences of the participating workers, and channel their efforts to the best advantage of the process.
Can you relate the cast to their equivalent roles in brewing? We have the Alpha and Beta Enzymes represented by Alf and Betty, the grains of Pale Malt by the Starch Trees, the dextrins and maltose sugars by he logs and sticks, and the "fermentability" of the wort by the "burnability" of the fuel.
Well if you got to the end, well done. Took me ages typing all that out.
Time for a beer
Cheers Tom
