Phosphoric Acid Taste Threshold Question

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Spine

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Jul 4, 2008
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Location
Guelph, ON, CANADA
Hello everyone,

I have moderately hard water where I live and I have been in the past using a lot of distilled water to dilute the bicarbonates/carbonates to an acceptable level and then adding some CaCl or CaS04 to get the calcium back up to at least 50ppm. On the last few batches I have been using my city water straight except using food grade phosphoric acid to precipitate out the carbonates from the water but I was wondering if anyone knew what the taste threshold is for phosphoric acid. I.e. If I am using about 30-35ml of 10% phosphoric acid to about 12-13L of strike water for my mash, would this level start to impact the flavour of the beer?

Thanks,
Mike
 
Nice question Mike. My brewing water is quite hard as our aquifers are in limestone shelves. I've been using phosphoric acid as well and at times I have to add quite a lot depending on the time of year so I'm interested in your question. If no one replies who has conducted an experiment I think I'd like to try a dilution/titration experiment and see at what ppm that I or someone else can detect a flavour from phosphoric acid. I'll get an eye on your post and hope that someone has already determined or has read about the threshhold level.
 
Hi Jeffrey,

The city where I live (guelph, Ontario) is entirely fed off of wells. There is no surface water at all in the City, so this gives me water of approximately 347mg/L of HCO3 which is considered "hard" by most standards. Unfortunately this level of hardness makes the water unsuitable for almost all beers but the darkest stouts :). Now on the other hand, there are 3 breweries here in Guelph (Sleemans, Wellington and F&M) that all are using city water. I have toured 2/3 breweries and I am pretty sure that most of them are not trucking water in from another source and I am also pretty sure at least these breweries are not using RO or any other forms of mechanical treatment to reduce the hardness so the only thing I can think of is that they are also acidifying their water by a commercial food grade acid or something such as acid malt.

I started acidifying my water because a home RO system is quite expensive and buying distilled water is starting to add up. I am just wondering now if I should be using a combination of acids to hit my target mash pH in the odd chance that I am exceeding the taste threshold of the phosphoric acid!
 
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