My wine's TA is 0.87%. What should I do 205I don't agree that these values are well within tolerance on this particular wine if the measurements are correct. I do agree with everything you say generally but if this wine really...
Question from beginner 207I live in far south Texas near Corpus Christi, and I just made my first batch of wild Mustang grape wine. I did my first...
Not exactly. How well a plate of metal disperses heat is a function of both its conductivity and its thickness. A good first-order approximation is that dispersion is proportional to conductivity*thickness.
So, for good dispersion, you need a thin layer of a highly conductive material, or a thick layer of a poorly conductive material. Too thin or too low in conductivity, and you'll get hot spots.
However, you don't want to get the material too thick, since the thicker the material is, the slower its response to a change in the input temperature (this is government by the conductivity and thickness as the metals, as well as the specific heat and density of the metal). So if you make a pot with a honkin' thick bottom to keep good uniformity, it will also be poorly responsive to changes in burner intensity. This is often more dangerous than "hot spots", since it's often hard to precisely regulate burner intensity, so if you are overheating whatever it is your are boiling-cooking, it will take some time for the material to respond to the decrease in input heat, and you'll keep over- and under-shooting the target. This make sense?
Alas, both the problem of hot spots and the problem of poor thermal response are often lumped together.
As to the original topic of comparing SS to aluminum: you can't directly compare them without knowing the thicknesses, and beware of pots that have really thick bottoms as well.
-- Richard W Kaszeta
