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Kaiser · 03-18-2010, 04:44 PM

I have been busy over the last few weeks writing another article for braukaiser.com. This time about reducing water alkalinity by using slacked lime, which is a commonly used procedure in large scale brewing but rarely used by home brewers. Though I doubt that I’ll convince many of you to give it a try since it doesn’t work for types of high alkalinity water and it takes more preparation that dilution, building from RO water or addition of salts it is a very elegant way of treating brewing water.

This article grew rather large. As I was writing it I found a lot of information about the subject that I just had to mention as well.

Enjoy: Alkalinity reduction with lime

Kai

seanmichaleen · 03-18-2010, 05:41 PM

You really go above and beyond for your fellow homebrewer! I had recently bought lime but could not glean enough information about its use to give it a try.

Once again, thank you very much for everything you publish.

Kaiser · 03-18-2010, 07:51 PM

You’re welcome.

Quote:

Originally Posted by seanmichaleen

… but could not clear enough information about its use to give it a try

That’s what I have found too. The process is generally mentioned in home brewing books but only briefly and not detailed enough for many brewer to actually use it w/o having to rely on some existing knowledge. The good thing is that you can easily try it on small scale and gain confidence from that.

Kai

**pjj2ba** · 03-19-2010, 03:48 PM

Kai,

Nice write up. I've been using lime for at least 2 yrs now. My water is also high in Calcium so I typically don't add any back. I do add some CaSO4 in my Alt and IPAs, but that's it.

I treat my water in my boil pot. It holds 10 gal and the spigot make it easy for me to drain it off. I typically set up my water the night before I plan on brewing and it will have settled by the next morning.

One of these days I will do the experiment to see how long it takes to remove the temporary hardness simply by aerating. It works by the same mechanism as boiling - reaching equilibration with the CO2 in the air, it just takes longer. In one ref. I read, they mention this, but didn't give a time frame. I'm envisioning that if it were less than a week, then I could set up a large container with water and bubble air through it and then a week later, drain off what water I need, and then just top the reservoir off and let it bubble until the next brew day. Presumably, the more bubbles/air the faster it will reach equilibrium.

Evaporation might be a concern (concentrating other salts). I've thought about running the air through a container of RO water first before the tank to saturate it with water to minimize water loss.

One of these days I'll set up the experiment