Table salt for brewing water

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rocketman768

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So,

In most of my beers, it has always seemed to me that they need some salt. I checked my water report for sodium, and I'm only at 7ppm. In brew your own, they say sodium helps bring out the sweet maltiness up until around 100 ppm at which point it becomes salty. Also, they say chloride is responsible for "fullness" of the beer, which I also feel is lacking.

What if I added enough table salt (sodium chloride) to bring the sodium to maybe 70 or 80 ppm? If I'm right, this is about 3-4 grams for a 5 gallon batch for me.
 
A little salt can help some styles. I suggest you try this with a few pints first. If you decide it helps, make the addition with your priming sugar.
 
i would think you want to make sure what you have is non iodized(plain) salt.

I would never add iodized salt to anything other than an icy road.

I have been using kosher salt, can I assume this is the same by volume as table salt in what it adds to NA and CL?

They are probably a little different. Kosher salt has a lot more surface area on its crystals. I would always weigh these things with a good scale.

A little salt can help some styles. I suggest you try this with a few pints first. If you decide it helps, make the addition with your priming sugar.

Hm, good thinking. I'll dissolve a pinch in one of my beers tonight and see what happens.
 
Read the brewing water chemistry section in How to Brew like 4 times before you start to mess with your water...
 
I would never add iodized salt to anything other than an icy road.
QUOTE]

That's a little extreme, considering a lot of people do cook with it, and the whole reason they started making iodized salt was to fight thyroid problems resulting from too little iodine in people's diets. Not to mention both are sold in the grocery store, right next to each other. Just in brewing you probably don't want the iodine, other cooking it would be fine.
 
Alright, so just tried this with a bottle of my recent amber ale.

I added 1 pinch of kosher salt at a time to the brew by pre-dissolving each pinch in a few teaspoons of the beer and adding it back (creates an awesome head btw). At 1 pinch, the taste was slightly different. At 2 pinches the mouthfeel was a bit thicker and the taste was slightly different again. At 3 pinches, the beer had become a little salty tasting, but the mouthfeel was incredible...very silky. What I mean by the "slightly different" is this: make a bowl of oatmeal with just sugar, then make a bowl of oatmeal with sugar and 1/4 tsp (maybe slightly less) of salt. The salt changes the way the oatmeal tastes without being salty.

Anyway, it was very interesting to see that the salt had such an impact on the way I perceived the texture of the beer.
 
Absolutely experiment with it along with all your salt combinations. I've gone up to about 60 ppm of sodium on some of my IPAs so far and noticed no negative effects and in fact those batches were great. I think higher salt may be very helpful on some styles. The best way to decide is just experiment IMO. I love this site and all the anecdotal evidence I glean here but taste is extremely subjective and our worst sense so I find the best way to figure out if something works is just try it. At some point I'll probably push the sodium even higher perhaps into the 80-100 range and see what happens there.
 
I'll try it when I bottle my Dark Mild add 13g of table salt with priming sugar.
 
Since sodium chloride is highly soluble, you can easily conduct tasting trials in a glass of your beer. The only difficulty is measuring out the tiny amount needed to produce the modest levels that are likely to be tasty.

I've brewed with somewhat elevated sodium levels around 100 ppm in a porter and it was OK. But I'm pretty sure that a lesser concentration in the 60 to 70 ppm range would be more pleasing. When we were writing the Water book, John Palmer did his own taste trials with a glass of pale ale and he felt that modest table salt additions were positive. Be aware that water becomes 'salty' tasting when the sodium concentration nears 250 ppm. That is the reason that the World Health Organization sets the advisory level for sodium at 250 ppm even though there are plenty of places in the world that have much higher sodium and salinity than that.
 
I found a German nutrition information site that listed the sodium content of some of the better-known national beers there. Many of them were much higher than I had expected... around 40-50ppm. I think Warsteiner was the highest, maybe around 80? Since then, I've been adding table salt to get me to 40-50ppm, and my beers (porters, pilsners and blondes) have been tasting pretty good. I shoot for 30ppm for hefeweizens.
 
I found a German nutrition information site that listed the sodium content of some of the better-known national beers there. Many of them were much higher than I had expected... around 40-50ppm. I think Warsteiner was the highest, maybe around 80? Since then, I've been adding table salt to get me to 40-50ppm, and my beers (porters, pilsners and blondes) have been tasting pretty good. I shoot for 30ppm for hefeweizens.

Your average 10 plato wort adds anywhere from 20-40ppm of Na depending on the base malt. If you’re adding 40-50ppm of Na and were to have your beer tested I’d bet it was closer to 80ppm-90ppm Na in the finished beer.

Malt adds a lot of minerals to beer.
 
Your average 10 plato wort adds anywhere from 20-40ppm of Na depending on the base malt. If you’re adding 40-50ppm of Na and were to have your beer tested I’d bet it was closer to 80ppm-90ppm Na in the finished beer.

Malt adds a lot of minerals to beer.

I read in a German article that they done a test themselves and determined that standard wort (12 plato, IIRC) added 10ppm. Sorry I don't have the link.
 
There’s a great MBAA podcast where the brewers at Ballast Point did a study on X number of different base malts from all over the world and published the data on the average ppm of certain ions that the base malts provided. Their study showed 20-40ppm Na. The beers that I’ve had analyzed, both my own and commercial examples would corroborate those findings.
 
Probably the worst argument for eliminating salt from brewing is the "I'm on a restricted sodium diet" argument.

The maximum recommended daily allowance of sodium (from memory) is soon to be dropped from 2,300 mg to 1,500 mg (which is 1.5 grams as sodium alone, not as sodium chloride), and you will die if you don't get somewhere around ~120 mg of sodium per day. It is a requirement of life that you consume it.

If you intentionally brew beer with ~40 mg/L (ppm) sodium due to adding table salt, then a 12 Oz beer a day with 40 mg/L sodium is only giving you 14.2 mg of sodium.

And consuming the life sustaining minimum of sodium would require the drinking of 120/14.2 = 8+ bottles of such beer per day.
 
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There is potentially way more iodine in a half TSP of Irish Moss than in a few scant grams of table salt.

Best I can tell is that iodized salt in the USA has 45 mg/Kg iodine.

Edit: I'm still searching for a reliable source that lists this information for the seaweed commonly called Irish Moss (Chondrus Crispus).

Edit #2: This source (SEE Table 2) indicates that the dried form of Irish Moss has 238 mg/Kg iodine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5302319/

If the listed source is accurate, then Irish Moss has a bit more than 5 times more iodine per gram than does iodized salt.
 
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The solubility of iodine in irish moss is probably not complete. I expect that some is organically bound. However, the iodine in table salt is completely soluble. I have no idea if their contributions are similar.

By my scale, a tsp of dry irish moss is about 2 grams. That’s a typical dose in 5 gal or 19 liters. I don’t know what that might mean for iodine contribution.
 
I usually add a quarter teaspoon of sea salt to a 2.5 gallon batch.

Not sure what this adds exactly ppm wise but it does improve the flavor.

All the Best,
D. White
 
Anyone who uses Iodophor as a no-rinse sanitizer (myself included here) is potentially consuming some measurable amount of iodine.
 
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