I finally published the report about the use of undissolved and dissolved chalk in two batches of my Schwarzbier.
As a background. A while back I noticed that most water spreadsheets don't handle chalk additions correctly when calculating alkalinity. That sparked some experiments including the mash pH experiments that I published a while back. The result was that undissolved chalk has only a limited ability to raise mash pH. At low chalk levels (less than 300 ppm) it seemed that undissolved chalk has only half the alkalinity potential of dissolved chalk.
I wanted to test that in a side-by side and brewed one batch of Schwarzbier with chalk simply suspended in the water and the other one with half that amount of chalk but dissolved with CO2 pressure. The results can be found here:
http://braukaiser.com/lifetype2/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=132&blogId=1
I also updated my water spreadsheet to include dissolved chalk:
http://braukaiser.com/documents/water_calc_v15.xls
Going forward I plan to expand this spreadsheet based on the results of my mash experiments but I have to test that first with my own data. My intention is to make the spreadsheet versatile yet easy to use. Less commonly used or more complicated options would be further down or grayed out.
Check it out and let me know what you think. In particular where there is confusion or something is less intuitive than it should be.
Kai
undissolved vs. dissolved chalk
Linear Mode
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