Speaker: Okay. So we're just finished our vorlof. The wort is now running clear. What we want to do is, we want to measure to make sure that we have actually had the starch to sugar conversion that we need in order to go on in order to produce something that the yeast can ferment.
The fastest and easiest way to do that is to use a tool called a hydrometer. Hydrometer is a device that is calibrated to gauge the weight of a particular liquid.
Okay. So, for example a water would have a weight of zero. It's calibrated to that weight of zero for water. As you add sugar to a substance, the weight, the density of that substance goes up, goes higher. Okay. So that's what this measures is that density, and it's specifically calibrated for sugar. So when we drop this in, we find that this gives us a reading of about 19, about 18.5 to 19 Plato which translates to in specific gravity terms translates to about 1075 roughly in specific gravity, which is a lot of sugar.
Now this is basically what's sitting inside of our middle tank, okay our mash tun, and what we are going to do, we are not going to ferment a wort that is 18.5 Plato. What we are going to do is, we are going to dilute this by running more water over the grain, washing off more sugar.
Okay. So that, in the end, we would expect to come down to a gravity of about 13 Plato for this particular beer for a pale ale.
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