°WK or degrees Windisch-Kolbach is a unit for measuring the
diastatic power of
malt
Malt is germinated cereal grain that has been dried in a process known as " malting". The grain is made to germinate by soaking in water and is then halted from germinating further by drying with hot air.
Malted grain is used to make beer, ...
, named after the German brewer
Wilhelm Windisch and the Luxembourg brewer
Paul Kolbach. It is a common unit in
beer brewing
Brewing is the production of beer by steeping a starch source (commonly cereal grains, the most popular of which is barley) in water and fermenting the resulting sweet liquid with yeast. It may be done in a brewery by a commercial br ...
(especially in
Europe
Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located enti ...
) that measures the ability of enzymes in malt to reduce starch to sugar (
maltose
}
Maltose ( or ), also known as maltobiose or malt sugar, is a disaccharide formed from two units of glucose joined with an α(1→4) bond. In the isomer isomaltose, the two glucose molecules are joined with an α(1→6) bond. Maltose is the tw ...
). It is defined as the amount of maltose formed by 100 g of malt in 30 min at 20 °C.
Degrees Lintner is a unit used in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...
for the same purpose. The conversion is as follows:
.
334 °WK = 3.014×10
−7 Katal
The katal (symbol: kat) is the unit of catalytic activity in the International System of Units (SI) used for quantifying the catalytic activity of enzymes (that is, measuring the enzymatic activity level in enzyme catalysis) and other catal ...
References
*W. Diemair: ''Analytik der Lebensmittel Nachweis und Bestimmung von Lebensmittel-Inhaltsstoffen'', Springer Verlag, Berlin/Heidelberg/New York 1967, S. 255–256.
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Units of measurement
Brewing