Adjusting brewing water

sgraham602 · Sep 14, 2012

So I'm going to go down the road of adjusting my brewing water. Up until now I have been using spring water. I am planning on brewing a Porter this weekend and am going to build up my water from distilled water (once I figure out what water profile is best).

When should I add all of my additions? Should I fill up my HLT with the total water I'll need for the brew day and adjust that? Should I make individual adjustments to the mash and sparge water?

What are your techniques!

Thanks.

Yooper · Sep 14, 2012

sgraham602 said:
So I'm going to go down the road of adjusting my brewing water. Up until now I have been using spring water. I am planning on brewing a Porter this weekend and am going to build up my water from distilled water (once I figure out what water profile is best).

When should I add all of my additions? Should I fill up my HLT with the total water I'll need for the brew day and adjust that? Should I make individual adjustments to the mash and sparge water?

What are your techniques!

Thanks.

Generally, I just add the salts to the mash as that is all that is needed for me. Making a porter with lots of dark malt could mean your pH could get lower than with a lighter grainbill so make sure you use a spreadsheet (EZ water or Bru'n Water or Braukaiser.com) to see the guestimated mash pH.

kylevester · Sep 14, 2012

It's best to make up the water all at once. Your additions will be larger and the water will be consistent throughout that way. I use pH stabilizer also, both when I do bottled water and distilled water make-up, especially on dark grains to ensure I'm sparging with low pH water and not high pH (I don't own a pH meter).

mabrungard · Sep 15, 2012

kylevester said:
It's best to make up the water all at once. Your additions will be larger and the water will be consistent throughout that way. I use pH stabilizer also, both when I do bottled water and distilled water make-up, especially on dark grains to ensure I'm sparging with low pH water and not high pH (I don't own a pH meter).

Ah, you are so lucky! Using that stabilizer works perfectly in your case!

BrewinHooligan · Sep 15, 2012

I just recently started using r/o water with minerals so I am pretty new to this, but I use the EZ water spreadsheet and I adjust my mash and sparge water separately based on the amounts the spreadsheet says I need for the separate volumes. So far this method has worked extremely well

nukebrewer · Sep 15, 2012

OClairBrew said:
I just recently started using r/o water with minerals so I am pretty new to this, but I use the EZ water spreadsheet and I adjust my mash and sparge water separately based on the amounts the spreadsheet says I need for the separate volumes. So far this method has worked extremely well

This is good to hear. I've been having efficiency issues lately and I've pretty much ruled out everything but water chemistry. I downloaded the EZ water spreadsheet and will be using it to adjust RO water for my batch tomorrow. We'll see how this goes.

sgraham602 · Sep 16, 2012

should I trust the additions that Beersmith tells me? or is there a preferred calculator. Ideally I'd like to able to enter my water and the profile I am shooting for and have it spit out the additions I need to make.

Adjusting brewing water

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