Grinder12000

Recipes 

One of the problems with using Calcium Sulfate additions to your water is by doing so you add a lot of Sulfate.

Palmer advocates using half Calcium Sulfate and half Calcium Chloride when you are attempting to lower the PH for lighter beers.

Why not just use Calcium Chloride. Or is it the same reason - then you would get too much Chloride.

__________________
Grinders Island Brewery - Pipeline (Batch #)

Primary #1 Hair of the Arm West Coast Blaster - don't ask(89)
Next up - Award winning Dbl Chocolate Stout Batch #4 (90) On deck - Zythos Pale Ale(91) and then Weizenbock(92)

Oldsock

Recipes 

It depends what your water is like and what you are brewing. Sulfate is great for hoppy beers, not so great for delicate/malty beers. Chloride is less noticeable, but like anything too much and it will detract from the flavor of the beer. If your water is high in chloride already, I would add calcium sulfate and visa versa for water high in sulfate. Hope that helps.

__________________
Check out The Mad Fermentationist for my adventures in fermentation (cheese, bread, ginger beer plant, and of course plenty of funky beer).

Tonedef131

Recipes 

Different styles require different water. I build all my water from RO and spent a good amount of time one day figuring out how much of each salt to add to 15gal of water to build the perfect profile for each style of beer. I would say the least used one was table salt because you typically want the calcium in addition to the sodium and the chloride. But I used a great deal of gypsum and calcium chloride to find the right balances.

As for your direct question certain profiles have very high sulfates. For example Burton on Trent water has 725ppm of sulfate in the water but only 25ppm of chloride. So if you were trying to hit their calcium level of 295ppm and did so only with calcium chloride, your chloride level would be over 500ppm. So you can use gypsum to help with the calcium levels and nail that sulfate content, then throw in a pinch of calcium chloride to balance the calcium and chloride levels perfectly.

jbock220

Recipes 

Tonedef131: What was your calculation for your pilsner? I just made one with purified water (10gal) and put in 2tsp gyp at mash and 1 tsp gyp at boil. I'm curious what you use on yours and your thoughts on how mine (derived from a BYO article on American Pilsners) should turn out.

ThreeDogsNE

Recipes 

Tonedef: is that information published anywhere? I would love to see it. I have been thinking of doing the same thing. My city water can come from any of 3 sources that feed our grid, each with a different profile. I can have a brew come out well one time, then not taste right the next, and I suspect the water is the uncontrolled variable that is making the outcome too random. I would be thrilled not to reinvent the wheel in the process of doing this. Would you mind to post your tables, or point me to someone who has?