Water Adjustment - what to add?

planenut · 12-05-2009, 04:32 PM

Can you recommend some additions to make my water better for brewing?

I think I have pretty good tap water but after checking my PH and conversion efficiency on the last brew, I believe there is room for improvement.

I only had a 90.8 conversion efficiency and a pH of 4.6 according to the test strips.

I added 1 tbsp of 5.2 and 1 tbsp of gypsum to the mash tun before adding the grains. Should I have waited until the grains were in before adding the chemicals? I now believe the gypsum was a mistake based on the low PH.

According to my municipal water report:
Hardness 60ppm
Calcium 20ppm
Magnesium 2-3ppm
Bicarb ?
Sulfate 37
Sodium 22
Chloride 25
PH 8.7
Alkalinity 28ppm

Thanks for any help...

**samc** · 12-05-2009, 04:49 PM

http://home.roadrunner.com/~brewbeer/water/bw3setup.exe

Why guess? Pretty simple program to use and it has a lot of profiles available to choose from. There are other free programs around as well.

planenut · 12-05-2009, 05:37 PM

Thanks,

Trying out the software now...