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Contents:
Brewing Water Tools ("A.J deLange")
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Date: Sat, 2 Apr 2011 11:55:11 -0400
From: "A.J deLange" <ajdel at cox.net>
Subject: Brewing Water Tools
Yes, HBD was, in its glory days, the place
to go for water profile data and discussion.
IIRC it really got kicked off when Dave
Draper published a set of water profiles for all
the famous brewing spots in the world
e.g. Pilsen, Munich, Dublin... There had, of course,
been discussions about water chemistry
prior to that but I remember this list because it
occurred to me, new to all this at
the time, that I could write software that would
calculate the salt additions that could be
added to low ion water to produce those profiles
and I did that. I'd load up my Mac of the
era with a set of profiles and kick it off
before I went to bed at night and by next
morning, I'd have the recipes. They are still
on my website at www.wetnewf.org. I think
there are 21 of them and, if you believe in
the profiles, they are still valid.
In the course of doing this I noted a few
important things about the profile collection
(to which I have added from other sources
over the years). First, pH is never given.
Second, there is no consistency in how
bicarbonate is reported. Third,
no hypothesis
about what the number labeled
"bicarbonate" or "carbonate" means
will give, in the
majority of cases, an electrically
balanced ion profile unless one assumes a
ridiculously high pH. IOW, most of the
profiles list more cations than anions and
one can only balance them by raising the pH
to the point where there are enough OH-
ions to effect the balance. Fourth, when
nature puts bicarbonate into water she does
so by dissolving limestone with carbonic
acid so that if one wants to simulate a
particular carbonaceous water he must do
the same. Thus all the profiles I generated
call for a certain amount of carbon dioxide.
Naturally people back then did not want
recipes based on distilled water -
they wanted to know how much of what to
add to their water to duplicate the
water of the Isar. Sounds like an obvious
job for an Excel (which everyone has)
spreadsheet and those have proliferated.
Just do a search on "water spreadsheet"
on the net and you will find several of
them to choose from. The emphasis today
seems to be not so much on how much of
what to add to get Isar as it is to predict
mash pH and this is, of course, very
important and the water chemistry is a big
part. None of the spreadsheets of which
I am aware (except mine) models alkalinity
correctly. If a spreadsheet isn't asking
you what the pH of the source water is
and what you want the pH of the treated
water to be and isn't giving you the opportunity
to add CO2 (not that you would want to
be bothered with that in most cases) then
it isn't modeling the carbonate chemistry
correctly. However, there is some good
news. If source and target water pH is
less than 8.3 you can get away with
approximations and that's a good thing.
If you download and compare some of the
spreadsheets to mine (also at wetnewf)
you will see how much complexity complete
modeling requires. One caveat with the
spreadsheets: if a spreadsheet advises the
addition of calcium carbonate or sodium
bicarbonate to mash or water don't do it.
See Step 5 in the list below
As we get older and wiser our philosophy
about things changes. Today, as noted
by an earlier poster, the tendency is not
so much to duplicate the water of the Isar
(if you could you would have to know how
the brewers treated it, if at all when they
made their beers in order to achieve an
"authentic" Helles or Bock) as it is to produce
a good beer. That turns out to be much simpler
than duplicating Isar water with the CO2
bottle requirement, complex calculations.
The procedure is:
1. Start with the lowest mineral content
water you can. RO systems are now relatively
inexpensive and produce low enough mineral
content unless you have really nasty feed water.
2. Add enough calcium chloride
(food grade from LHBS) to get the calcium content up to
around 50 ppm.
3. If brewing from Pilsner base malt add
3% sauermalz to the gist, and if from ale malt
1.5%. In very dark beers don't use sauermalz.
Other acids can be used in place of sauermalz
but . sauermalz is just easy to estimate
(1 % for each 0.1 pH drop desired) easy to measure
out and available from most HB suppliers.
4. Check mash pH! Use a meter.
The strips read consistently low. This is extremely
important. pH should be around 5.4
5. If mash pH is too high then add more acid.
If it is too low then add base (carbonate,
bicarbonate, slaked lime). This is the only
situation in which base should be added to
mash. You will have less of a chance of
undershooting (low pH) if you add the sauermalz
in portions only adding the later portions
if the meter reading shows them to be necessary.
If increasing mash pH then add only small
amounts of alkali, stir, wait and remeasure.
This will get you a good beer. Now it is
up to you to figure out how to make it better.
Find out whatever you can about the style
you are interested in. If you know that the beer
you want to brew is traditionally brewed
with high sulfate water then brew this beer
again substituting gypsum (food grade from
LHBS) for some of the calcium chloride and
brew it again. If the beer you are shooting
for tastes salty (Export), add some
(non iodized) table salt. Etc. Take careful
notes and keep experimenting. Only you can
decide what combination of salts give you
the flavor character you desire. But you must
have proper mash pH. Get that right and
proper pH will be realized throughout the rest of
the process. Let it go too high and all
flavors become flat and the beers dull.
In summary I think I am saying, despite
all the effort I have put into understanding
the chemistry so that I can match a profile
to fractions of a percent that you should
forget about profiles except as a general
source of information about the water from
which a beer was originally brewed. There
is tons of discussion of this at various
places on the net. Search "brewing water".
So what do you need?
1. A source of low ion water. Cheap RO
unit from home improvement store or reef aquarium
supplier. Or, if you want to see if I'm
telling the truth or not before spending money on
one of those, RO water from the health
food store. If you are blessed with something like
Portland water, you don't need RO.
2. Calcium chloride, calcium carbonate
(you won't use it often), calcium sulfate (gypsum).
All should be food grade. LHBSs have these
in small quantities and they are not expensive
3. Sauermalz or lactic or phosphoric acid
or, if you live in the UK, CRS (a blend of food
grade hydrochloric and sulfuric acids).
All from the HBS.
4. A pH meter. This is the biggie for many.
Decent ones are now available for less than
$100 but that's still an appreciable outlay
for many. Don't use the strips. They will
trick you into adding salts when you don't
have to.
5. Knowledge. This is the tough one. There
is a lot of misinformation floating
around out there and the only way to
separate wheat from chaff is to understand
enough of the actual chemistry. I have
(again at the wetnewf site) a couple of
monographs on alkalinity and a paper on
what is involved in establishing mash tun
pH. These cover the ground but may be a
"drink from a fire hose" for someone just
starting out. If so, and you are motivated
enough, get a basic chemistry text, learn
the fundamentals (about atoms, molecules,
ions, moles, equivalents etc.)
and then bore in on law of mass action
and chemical equilibrium (the part of
the course we all hated in college).
If they name it as such, the
Henderson-Hsselbalch equation is the
powerhouse in brewing water chemistry
(it's used to calculate how bicarbonate
behaves). This is usually thoroughly
discussed in biochemistry texts.
A.J.
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End of HOMEBREW Digest #5818, 04/03/11
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