Water Adjustments and Boil Evaporation
 

Are you suppose account for evaporation (loss) when building or adjusting water?

I am using TH's Water Calculator and measured appropriatley for the mash and boil additions based on the calculations entered into the spreadsheet.

I believe I ended up with sparging 5 gallons bringing my total volume up to 7.

A one hour boil left me with 5.5 going into the fermenter.

I planned the adjustment eqating to .78 on the CL:SO ratio being on the lower end of balanced and beggining of bitter.



My hydrometer sample was extremely bitter for a 38 IBU beer.

The only thing I can come up with is that possibly I should have accounted for the 1.5 gallon loss during the boil.

? Am I on the right track?

Not that I'm aware of. The concept of building or modifying your water is to simulate a known water source (or an imaginary one). If you were a brewer in a location with a given water supply, the brew would also concentrate the ions through evaporation. Note that your CL:SO4 ratio wouldn't change either. You'd simply end up with higher concentrations of each.

It's really hard to judged a beer's finished bitterness in prefermented wort.

Thanks Bobby.. The hydro sample was from terminal gravity going into secondary, I must have mis- measured my salts some where along the line.
I'll see when it comes off of the DH's

So far in my experience, the Cl:SO4 ratio isn't going to affect raw bitterness all that much. It's more of a nuance than anything else. Higher So4 seems to clarify or sharpen bitterness while low SO4 dulls it. It may have been a hop alpha % or weight discrepancy. Maybe it just needs to mellow.