Can you verify my Water thinking?

Hey Guys,

Thanks in advance for taking another look at a water report thread. I've read the Water primer sticky and just want to double check what I'm thinking.

Here is my report from Ward labs:

pH: 8.5
Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) EST, ppm: 159
Electrical Conductivity, mmho/cm: 0.26
Cations/ Anions, me/L: 2.1/2.3

All values in PPM:

Sodium, Na: 23
Potassium, K: 2
Calcium, Ca: 18
Magnesium, Mg: 3
Total Hardness, CaCO3: 58
Nitrate, NO3-N: 0.3 (SAFE)
Sulfate, SO4-S: 5
Chloride, Cl: 38
Corbonate, CO3: 6
Bicarbonate, HCO3: 41
Total Alkalinity, CaCO3: 44

After reading the primer, I'm assuming I need to take the following steps:

1) Dilute my tap water for an 8 gallon total water as so. 6 gallon tap: 2 gallons RO/DI to get to the baseline.
2) Depending on the beer:

Blonde/Pils/Heffe: add 1/2 tsp calcium chloride and add about 3% sauermalz to my grist

Roasted malt: do nothing, water should be in range after dilution.

British beers: Add 1 tsp gypsum as well as 1 tsp calcium chloride

For very minerally beers (Export, Burton ale): Double the calcium chloride and the gypsum.

I've been adding Campden tablets to basically all my heated water... 1 tablet for about 3 gallons or so (basically mash and sparge amounts, for each step)

lastly, Maybe a dumb question.. but would a water filter help avoid having to buy the RO water every time?

Thanks in advance for your time.

Looking at EZ water, looks like I can just add

.5 tsp gypsum
.5 tsp Calcium Chloride
.25 tsp Epsom Salt

To a 3 gallons of mash water without adding RO/DI water. Thoughts?

Absolutely not! No dilution required or desired. You already have the water that the Primer is instructing you to build. Yes, you will need acid for pale styles and will need more mineralization for hoppy styles, but its a great water to start with. RO water is not in your future.

mabrungard said:

Absolutely not! No dilution required or desired. You already have the water that the Primer is instructing you to build. Yes, you will need acid for pale styles and will need more mineralization for hoppy styles, but its a great water to start with. RO water is not in your future.

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Nice!! Thanks mabrungard. I was thinking a little bit of RO to bring my alkalinity below the 35ppm in the primer. Is the difference between 35 and 44 not that great?

That minor difference in alkalinity is meaningless. But for many pale beers, you will have to take the alkalinity to a point that is functionally 'less than zero' and an external acid is required. You can't brew a great pale beer with RO or distilled water without including an external acid to bring the mash pH down into a desirable range.

mabrungard said:

But for many pale beers, you will have to take the alkalinity to a point that is functionally 'less than zero'...

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The alkalinity in a Ward Labs report is measured WRT pH 4.5. It must be zeroed with respect to mash pH. For 5.4 that means about 0.8 times the water report value (perhaps a wee bit more here as water pH is high). In this case the alkalinity is 44 ~ 0.88 mEq/L and thus approximately 0.7 mEq/L of acid will be needed to take care of the water.

mabrungard said:

...and an external acid is required. You can't brew a great pale beer with RO or distilled water without including an external acid to bring the mash pH down into a desirable range.

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The malts also have alkalinity (proton deficit) WRT mash pH and additional acid is needed to overcome that. You can WAG that at 35(pHDI - pHMash) mEq/kg of malt where pHDI is the DI pH of the malt.

k.. now I'm totally lost again.

Any way you guys could dumb this down for me? or point me towards a resource that defines what you guys are talking about?

I'm trying to figure out ways to do that and have one in mind. If you had 10 gallons of water at 60 °F would you be able to figure out how much boiling water you would have to add to that to get 80 °F? If you can then I think I can explain it in the same terms that you would use to do the temperature problem.

More to the point is that the Primer assumes that you are using water with no alkalinity. The Primer is very crude as it is intended to cover as many situations as possible. As such the 35 ppm as CaCO3 cutoff for alkalinity is not hard and fast. If you tried to use the Primer's recommendations with alkalinity of 100 your mash pH's would be appreciably higher than if you use RO water and if you use it with water of 44 mash pH will be higher than with RO but not appreciably depending on the grain bill.

The real reason for #6 is that I am trying to sell people on the idea of tracking mash pH via the proton deficit concept and important part of which is understanding that proton deficit (alkalinity) can only be discussed in terms of two pH's - the one at which one starts and the one at which one finishes.

The Palmer/Kaminsky book introduces the basic concepts.

Flaviking said:

k.. now I'm totally lost again.

Any way you guys could dumb this down for me? or point me towards a resource that defines what you guys are talking about?

Click to expand...

Uh...Look at the Water Knowledge page on the Bru'n Water site. Unfortunately, brewing water is not EZ and you shouldn't use a resource that implies that it is.

AJ has simplified brewing water to a great degree, but it requires that you start with RO or distilled water. For some brewers, using that water is too much hassle or expense and for other brewers (yourself), its unnecessary.

PS: don't worry about mEq/L. It will make your brain hurt.

mabrungard said:

PS: don't worry about mEq/L. It will make your brain hurt.

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Really bad advice. Thinking in mEq/L is the first step to understanding of what is actually pretty simple. If you are given the alkalinity of your water (in the usual ppm as CaCO3) the first thing you must do is convert that to mEq/L which you do by dividing by 50. Most people can do that in their heads. Divide by 2 and shift the decimal place two to the left (44/50 = 88/100 = 0.88). This is the fundamental unit in which protons are counted and are the foundation of simplicity. Having ppm as CaCO3, dH, F°, etc is like expressing distance sometimes in furlongs, nm and or fathoms when you want to know how many meters. I have wondered since I first started fiddling with this why we stubbornly cleave to ppm as CaCO3 in this country when most people can't even tell you why we do. Inertia I suppose. While people have called me a lot of things over the years 'Eurocentric' (eccentric is not an abbreviation for ECcentric) is not one of them but I have to say that the use of mEq/L (or mVal/L in Germany) is only wise.

Anyway, once you know you have 0.88 mEq/L alkalinity you immediately know that you are going to need about 0.8 times that, 0.7 mEq/L , acid to treat it. 20L of water would require 14 mEq acid. Lactic acid at 88% strength is 11.8 N which means that each mL provides 11.8 mEq if protons. Bet you can figure out how many mL of 88% lactic it would take to get 14 mEq. 10% phosphoric is about 1 N. Bet you can figure that one out too. If you can't or if this gives you a headache you probably shouldn't be in a hobby that involves boiling liquids.

ajdelange said:

Really bad advice. Thinking in mEq/L is the first step to understanding of what is actually pretty simple. If you are given the alkalinity of your water (in the usual ppm as CaCO3) the first thing you must do is convert that to mEq/L which you do by dividing by 50. Most people can do that in their heads. Divide by 2 and shift the decimal place two to the left (44/50 = 88/100 = 0.88). This is the fundamental unit in which protons are counted and are the foundation of simplicity. Having ppm as CaCO3, dH, F°, etc is like expressing distance sometimes in furlongs, nm and or fathoms when you want to know how many meters. I have wondered since I first started fiddling with this why we stubbornly cleave to ppm as CaCO3 in this country when most people can't even tell you why we do. Inertia I suppose. While people have called me a lot of things over the years 'Eurocentric' (eccentric is not an abbreviation for ECcentric) is not one of them but I have to say that the use of mEq/L (or mVal/L in Germany) is only wise.

Anyway, once you know you have 0.88 mEq/L alkalinity you immediately know that you are going to need about 0.8 times that, 0.7 mEq/L , acid to treat it. 20L of water would require 14 mEq acid. Lactic acid at 88% strength is 11.8 N which means that each mL provides 11.8 mEq if protons. Bet you can figure out how many mL of 88% lactic it would take to get 14 mEq. 10% phosphoric is about 1 N. Bet you can figure that one out too. If you can't or if this gives you a headache you probably shouldn't be in a hobby that involves boiling liquids.

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AJ, you make me chuckle and then you prove exactly what I was trying to say. While you and I agree that mEq/L is VERY important to understand, to the layman...its just words and numbers that are barely comprehensible.

A layman wants to work with concepts and quantities that they can apply now, not pull out a reference and perform calculations. That is what software is for.

Now a poll for the rest of the audience: How many of you relish the thought of having to pull out the paper and calculator to figure this stuff out before you brew?

Do you see any reference to paper or calculator in my post?

It is necessary to know the following things to do what I did in my head:
1. mEq/L is found by dividing alkalinity by 50
2. 0.8 times that is that is the number of mEq/L of acid required
3. Multiplying required mEq/L times the number of liters to be treated gives the total mEq needed.
4. 10% phosphoric acid is 1 mEq/L and 88% phosphoric is about a dozen times that.

Here's my poll. How many would prefer to go to the computer and fiddle with a calculator or spreadsheet as opposed to doing a simple calculation in their heads? I expect the answer is "I'll do anything I have to do as long as you don't make me think!"

The answer is, of course, that there is a place for both. I would use a spreadsheet if the pH of the source water were unusually high or low. I would also use one if the strength of the lactic or phosphoric acid were different from, respectively 88% and 10%. I would also use a spreadsheet to calculate the amount of additional acid required for basemalt but that can be WAGed too as all one needs to know is that the buffering capacity of most malts is around 35 mEq/kg. I did use software to gain the insight that let me come up with this KISS procedure.

Luddites can work the whole thing as CaCO3 if they want. If alkalinity is 44 ppm as CaCO3 one needs 0.8*44 = 32.2 ppm as CaCO3 acid to neutralize it. Twenty L would require 664 parts as CaCO3 and 10% phosphoric acid's strength is about 50 parts as CaCO3/mL. Lactic (88%) is about a dozen times that.

If the layman hopes to understand any of this then he will need to be able to do computations like this without the use of software. If all he wants to do is produce beer without understanding, as, of course, many do, then he can plug numbers into spreadsheets.

In the hopes that there are some here ("In depth technical threads related to the biology and chemistry of home brewing") in search of wisdom, I reiterate that the groundwork is in the Palmer/Kaminsky book. Caution: some effort will be required.

I think the disconnect here comes from the fact that we're in the "Brew Science" forum.

I must admit that my first instinct is never to throw a layman the answer. At least not in here. We do seem to get more questions like that lately, and maybe we need a "thow a layman my water answer" sub-section... but when someone asks a question here, I always assume they really want to understand it.

Most of my background is in computer science so I don't claim to be an expert my any means, but I have a handful of chemistry background as well. When it comes to acid/base reactions like this, understanding and thinking in terms of mEq can really make the concept "click". If learning how to fish is truly the goal of the OP, I'd run, not walk, towards thinking in terms of mEq.

No disrespect to Martin.... the opposite in fact. If this were the All Grain section I'd have problem given the same response. Just a matter of perspective.