jgardner6

Recipes 

Should I add salts to equal my target ppm for the preboil or post boil. (ex. I need 50 ppm, I add 50 ppm to the 6 gallon preboil or add less than 50 ppm to hit my 5.5 gallon after boil amount). Basically do the salts boil off with the water?

Sorry I kind of repeated myself, just trying to get my point across.

cactusgarrett

Recipes 

Add salts to the pre-boil. The idea is that you're matching the water profile of the city that brews the beer. So, if you're targeting a profile that has 50ppm Ca, that means that city's breweries use 50ppm Ca water to mash and sparge with.

That's the simple answer. Of course i can give you more detail, but water chemistry is a slippery slope...

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~~ Malted barley wants to become beer. ~~

HenryHill

Recipes 

The aim is mainly with regard to the mash water, specifically mash pH. But hardness will have an effect with regard to hop harshness, so sparge water making up the remainder of the required boil volume is also a concern.

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boredatwork

Recipes 

The advice I heard is add an appropriate amount for the volume of your mash, and the add the remainder for the full pre-boil volume to the wort once in the boil kettle.

The Pol

Recipes 

This guy is exactly right.

Add the appropriate salts to your mash, add the sparge water salts to the BK prior to the boil.

If you arent adding PH adjusters like lactic acid to your water, then you may still want to use something like Buffer 5.2

cactusgarrett

Recipes 

+1. Mash additions for pH purposes, and boil additions for overall flavor profile.

__________________
~~ Malted barley wants to become beer. ~~