FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
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Contents:
RO Water (Robert Tower)
Vienna Water ("A.J deLange")
Re: Vienna Water (mossview5)
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Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 01:55:24 -0800
From: Robert Tower <roberttower at sbcglobal.net>
Subject: RO Water
A few people have recently posted about RO water being "too pure". Sorry
to be so blunt, but my BS detector is pegging hard to the right! Will
one of our resident water chemistry members please chime in to clarify
this issue? I brew EXCLUSIVELY with 100% RO water (all grain) and rarely
have beers that don't ferment to dryness (the supposed problem of "too
pure" RO water). If I do have a beer that finishes high I can always
trace it to improper yeast handling or mash temperature issues, never
water chemistry. I like most of my beers dry (1.012 is on the high side
for me, 1.007-1.010 is more common assuming SGs below 1.055). In fact,
right now I'm drinking a "Classic American Cream Ale (think a CAP with
1056 and a week of lagering at 33 F.) that had a SG of 1.058 and
finished at 1.010. As usual it was brewed with 100% RO water with no
salts added.
This being said, I do use yeast nutrient. Previously I was using Yeastex
but due to availability issues with my suppliers, I've switched to
Wyeast yeast nutrient. To the best of my knowledge there is no calcium
in either of these nutrients. Even if it did contain some calcium, the
amount I would think to be low as I'm using it at the prescribed rate of
2 grams per 5 gallons/19 liters. The one type of beer that I do add
salts to is pale ale (both English and American styles) in which I use
Burton salts. I have not found that my pale ales exhibit any
significantly higher apparent attenuation than any of my other beers,
which would suggest that there are no chemical deficiencies in my RO
water leading to poor fermentation performance.
I began using all RO water in response to most of my beers turning out
fine except for graininess/astringency. I could taste it, and every beer
I entered into BJCP competitions came back with notes about graininess
and/or astringency. After going after all the usual suspects with no
improvement I was left with water as the problem. At first I began
introducing RO water into my brewing water in increments starting at
50/50. I found the more RO water I used, the less astringency I had.
Eventually, I went to 100% RO and the graininess/astringency completely
went away. I haven't talked to any local homebrewers who've had my
problem, even brewers getting their water from the same source (Los
Angeles has 4 or 5 different water treatment plants each supplying a
somewhat different water chemistry) so it may be the plumbing in the
house I live in (built in 1912) that's the culprit. Regardless, using
100% RO water solved my astringency problem and hasn't created any new
ones.
Anyhow, I just wanted to offer my contrary experience regarding this matter.
Bob Tower / Los Angeles, CA
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Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:40:52 -0500
From: "A.J deLange" <ajdel at cox.net>
Subject: Vienna Water
The Vienna water profile Martin posted certainly is out of whack (by
about 10 mEq/L). Wherever it came from originally, it is published in
New Brewing Lager Beer along with several other profiles (Table 7
p74). Here are the balance results at pH 7 for Vienna and the next
three in the table. The first number is the imbalance (positive
indicates too many cations and too few anions) when the calcium and
magnesium numbers are interpreted as mg/L as the ion. This
interpretation is necessary to obtain the numbers Noonan lists for
Total Hardness for each water but as you can see the imbalances are as
absurd as for Vienna. The second column is the imbalance that would be
obtained if the Calcium and Magnesium numbers are interpreted as
hardnesses i.e ppm "as CaCO3". The tabulated total hardness numbers no
longer match but balance is much better. In both cases the HCO3
column in interpreted to mean the number of mg/L of bicarbonate ion
present expresses as the ion. So perhaps the "bicarbonate" number
isn't really the bicarbonate ion concentration. The only other
reasonable candidate is that it is alkalinity but interpreting it as
alkalinity does not improve imbalance much.
Munich 2.6 -0.8
Vienna 10.3 -.6
Dortmund 10 0.8
London 2.1 -0.9
Dublin 3.2 -0.7
Clearly there is a problem here and Noonan's book isn't the only
source of invalid water profiles. I would have to estimate that out of
the dozens of water profiles I've collected over the years most are
appreciably out of balance and most of those to the cation side (i.e.
bicarbonate seems to be understated). There are several possible
reasons why profiles can be out of whack by a bit. If readers have
used Ward Labs to analyze their waters they may have noticed numbers
like 3.2/3.4 listed at the top of the page. These are the lab's cation
and anion equivalences (in mEq/L) and it is unusual that the two
numbers are within a few tenths of an mEq/L. Imbalance of this
magnitude is expected from sample handling, measurement errors, not
measuring all cations and anions etc. Those causes do not induce
errors of the magnitude we are talking about here.
So how do we proceed if we want to brew a Vienna style beer? At first
blush, you might think of simply increasing the carbonate until the
profile balances. I have data on Munich water from a sample I analyzed
myself. Its ion profile is below with Noonan's below that.
Munich Alk: 281 Ca 87 Mg 24.7 SO4 7.9, Cl 8.6 NO4 12 Na
3.1 pH 7.49 Imbal 0.3 (AJ)
Alk: 127 Ca 75 Mg 18 SO4 10 Cl
2 Na 2 Imbal
2.5 (GN)
In this case it does seem that taking Noonan's reported profile and
adding bicarbonate until balanced would get us to something that
resembles what you might expect to get in a hotel room near the
Hauptbahnhoff in modern Munich.
Trying that approach with the Noonan Vienna report results in a water
with alkalinity of 613 and RA of 435 which is off my chart and so
clearly the problem is not under-reporting of HCO3- alone. That
suggests (as Martin mentioned) that perhaps the hardness is over
reported. Vienna water is hard - they are quite proud of that - but
perhaps not as hard as Noonan's table entry. I have in my collection a
description of Vienna water which puts its Ca content at 163 its
bicarb at 243, its Cl at 39, its Mg at 68 its sulfate at 216 and its
nitrate as "trace". No sodium is specified but all other reports I
have for Vienna (including Noonan's) list 8 mg/L so lets use that in
this profile too. The resulting imbalance would be 4.4 at pH 8.3 (as
compared to 4.5 at pH 7). This profile could be balanced by increasing
bicarbonate to 504 mg/L for an alkalinity of 422 and RA of 266. These
are still whopping so I think we have to accept that either carbo or
hardness data or both are screwed up wrt to available data on Vienna
or that we don't know how to interpret the numbers.
I think that leads us to the conclusion that Vienna water is very hard
with a good amount of that hardness being permanent and low chloride.
To synthesize that water we could take the approach of building a
hard, gypseous water in full knowledge that at soon as that water hits
the HLT the carbonate which we will have to take considerable trouble
to put in will fall right out and so skip that step. So let's take my
artificially balanced profile and soften it down to about 1mEq/L
alkalinity. The lineup would then be
Alk: 53, Ca 58, Mg 41, SO4 216, Cl 39, Na 8 RA - 12
This could be synthesized by adding 2.85 g CaCl2.2H2O; 0.17 g NaCl,
3.68 g gypsum, 15.71 g epsom salts, 1.40 g chalk and 0.86 g NaHCO3 to
10 gal of water. Sparge with CO2 with stirring until chalk dissolves
and pH 8.3 is reached.
When I brew Vienna I blend mostly RO water with about 10% well water,
add some CaCl2 and use 3% sauermalz for pH control.
A.J.
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Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:26:54 -0500
From: mossview5 <mossview5 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Vienna Water
Interesting work that AJ presents. I'm concerned about the direction
that AJ has taken in
resolving the ionic balance.
The Vienna water data does not point to a significant Mg and SO4
content. None of the City's water sources have that concentration
of those ions. Additionally, those levels would likely lead to a
stronger bittering perception than the Vienna style is known for.
I find that Vienna lagers are softer and more malt focused.
For the most mineralized City source, the Mg and SO4 concs
are only 22 and 84 ppm, respectively.
Additionally, the Vienna water data does indicate significant
levels of alkalinity which suggests that the hardness is largely
temporary.
I'd still have to lean in the direction of the ionic concentrations
that I originally posted for the Vienna profile.
Ca = 75 (ppm)
Mg = 15
Na = 10
Cl = 15
SO4 = 60
HCO3 = 225
Total Hardness = 249 ppm as CaCO3
Alkalinity = 186 ppm as CaCO3
Residual Alkalinity = 149
Martin Brungard
Indianapolis, IN
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End of HOMEBREW Digest #5664, 02/24/10
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