Recent content by mabrungard

Shouldn't be.

Well, you're mixing units since you don't mention what the volume of beer is. But it is possible that some tasters would detect the lactate taste...and possibly disagree with the result. If you or others sense that your beers have too much lactate flavor, then you should employ something like...

If metabisulfite is added at any step prior to boiling, it will NOT result in sulfites being present in the finished beer. Heat breaks down metabisulfite.

In my opinion, adding 88% lactic at a rate of 1.5ml per gallon or less, is not going to be perceptible to most drinkers. On top of that, I find that the flavor of the lactate ion is fairly pleasant and isn't necessarily a beer killer. Remember that there are beers that are made with lacto and...

Although chlorine dioxide is different than chlorine, they both end up producing the hypochlorite ion. Therefore, you can use the treatment recommendations for chlorine when preparing that tap water for brewing use.

Sorry, chalk only dissolves slightly...even in a mash. I've had several commercial clients that tried using chalk for mashing their dark beers and they had no success in avoiding an overly low wort and beer pH. Chalk will typically increase wort pH by about 0.1 units and then stop, no matter how...

Negative RA or negative bicarbonate amounts are essentially meaningless with respect to brewing water and wort chemistry. But they do provide an accounting of the calculations employed to estimate mashing pH. You can ignore them in practice, but do strive to put your mash into a good pH.

The pH of any water sample is meaningless and it can't be used to infer calibration. As VikeMan stated; you have to use calibration solutions to assure your meter is reading correctly.

There is software that differentiates between recoverable and non-recoverable dead space?? As far as I'm concerned, any water in a dead space will eventually affect the chemistry of the overall wort by the way of diffusion. That is without regard to whether the wort is recirculated or not...

The problem with citric acid is that it does have a prominent flavor and aroma. With the small amount of acid needed, it may be possible to make that substitution and not have it affect your beer.

The purpose of a mash cap is to reduce the liquid and mash surface area that is exposed to the ambient atmosphere. Having a sealed dead space above the mash isn't the same since there is a quantity of oxygen in that trapped air...unless you completely flushed that volume with an inert gas. That...

Boiled water profiles represent what that ‘native’ water would contain if it were boiled and decanted. Yes, you can create those water profiles without boiling.

Considering that the majority of the extract won't have exited the grain kernals that early in the mash, and that the buffering system in wort is directly tied to the extract, its not anywhere near accurate to use an early pH measurement as your guide. My 20 years of brewing measurements show...

In a roasty beer, 90 ppm sodium would not be a problem at all. Sodium is very complementary in those beers. But since the OP is using the free version of Bru’n Water, it doesn’t account for the fact that the sparging water doesn’t have baking soda in it. The supporters version does calculate...

An important distinction and understanding is that the sodium that you're adding, is only added to the mashing water and that sodium content will be diluted when the mash is sparged. It should end up being roughly half that content in the finished beer. Modest Sodium content (say less than 200...