Sunday, March 23, 2014

Peanut butter in water - doubling the amount

A quick experiment today around boiling peanut butter in water.  I doubled the amount of peanut butter to 56 g in 1 cup of water.  During the boil it formed a complete emulsion, as far as I could tell there was no water, it was all very foam-like.  After the boil, I transferred to a mason jar with total volume slightly more than 4 cups.  It was initially uniformly cloudy white, but then settled into the 3 layers previously observed.  The bottom layer was bigger than previously observed.

I used a baster to extract the middle layer (water) and tasted it - tasted like peanut butter, but not more so than previously.

There doesn't appear to be any major benefit of using double the amount of peanut butter, and the downside is that the greater amount of bottom sediment might mean less usable / uncloudy beer.

Previous post about peanut butter in water: Testing boiling peanut butter in water: results

Next post: Brewing a peanut butter porter - the wort

Monday, March 3, 2014

Hydrogen bonding in drugs

A member of my group, Patrick McCarren, worked on modeling the hydrogen bonds in some molecules at the Broad Institute that we screen as potential drugs.  It was part of a very nice paper which included a lot of solid experimental work:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jm500059t

It got a write up here:
http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2014/02/hiding-hydrogen-bonding-groups-in-large.html

and here:
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/02/28/computational_nirvana.php