First time building water

So I moved to a new house and it has water softners. I found a cheap source of RO water and plan on building my water up from there. I'm new to this but have a basic understanding and know that I should try to keep the additions as simple as possible.

I plan on brewing a blonde tonight and have come up with these additions and would appreciate feedback.

5 gms CaCl2
3 gms CaCO4
Possibly 1 gm NaHCO3 (not even sure this is necessary since this is a pale beer but I figured that a little sodium would help round out the sweetness I guess (read it from John Palmer))

This I would think would make for a slightly malty beer right? Since Ca is higher than SO4 (almost a 2:1 ratio)?

Let's say in the future I made a dark beer and needed to increase HCO3. would it be better to use baking soda or chalk when working with RO water? or maybe some combination of the two?

Thanks for your help in advance. Just want to make sure I'm on the right track and don't screw up this beer.

Cam

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f128/brewing-water-chemistry-primer-198460/


_

As mentioned above, visit the Water Primer first. Its geared toward building simple brewing water from RO or distilled water and is a good place to start. When you want to move on from that point, look at the information contained in Bru'n Water.

Depending on your water supply, you might find that it could be used for brewing. I recommend that if the unsoftened water still tastes good, you should consider revising the plumbing of your water softener so that it feeds only your water heater. That is really the only equipment that you really want to protect with a water softener.

camneel83 said:

5 gms CaCl2
3 gms CaCO4

Click to expand...

I used exactly those additions to RO in my Porter and the beer is utterly fantastic. Mash pH with the salts in that batch was 5.4, so it's really unlikely your blonde will be wanting for bicarbonates.

I tried to build water. No matter how much Barry White I played my hydrogen wouldn't bond with teh Oxygen.

Have a look at TH's Water Spreadsheet too.

Thanks for all of the great reads. So the way i see it is to start small with the calcium chloride addition and build from there. The brew store is closed and I need to brew tonight so do I really need that saurmalz stuff, or can I get away with just adding the CaCl2? With a blond do I even really need the CaSo4?

Sorry, one more question. Is it necessary to the minerals to both mash and sparge or can you just add them to the mash?

I usually use the search function to find this stuff out but I am under a bit of a time crunch.

Thanks again!

well it's been about 8 days since brew day and I gotta say things went very well. Thanks again for all you're help. I didn't take a ph reading or anything but I went from 1.052 down to 1.012 and the beer is exceptionally clean and malty. So something went right.

Thanks guys