Campden tablets Quantity?

I did my first all grain on Saturday gone, went very well. It was the first time I've used my tap water and I wanted to treat it with the campden. I read to use half a tablet for every 5 gallons. These tablets are tiny, can this be correct? I ended up using half a crushed tab for my mash water, and a quarter each for my two batches of sparge water, reason being that we are talking about a 35L volume of water and I simply can't treat ALL my water at once.

1 tablet treats 20 gallons but a little overdose isn't going to be a problem.

yikes! yeah, I mean it's fermenting away at the moment, but I can't get to grips with how half a crushed tablet (very small tablet) could have any real affect on such a large volume of water. Is there any alternative additive to campden?

Graeme said:

yikes! yeah, I mean it's fermenting away at the moment, but I can't get to grips with how half a crushed tablet (very small tablet) could have any real affect on such a large volume of water. Is there any alternative additive to campden?

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Well, you have like 3 ppm chlorine in your water, give or take, so it doesn't take much of any additive to react with it fully.

There are other things that will react with chlorine, tons, but none do it better than campden or with fewer side effects.

Carbon filtration works too.

I see, I see. So presumably I would have to add the campden to the water pre mash and sparge, I couldn't just add it to my starting boil volume?

Yeah, all the water should be treated. The reaction is pretty fast though, like minutes would be a safe amount of contact.

When I used to use campden and had to treat mash vs sparge water separately, I just crushed the tablet and eyeballed half for the mash water and half for the sparge water (well not quite half and half but eyeballed based on the ratio of water). That always worked fine for me. As I was using enough campden to treat 20 gallons and only treating 8 or 9 I obviously had a decent margin for error on my eyeballing. If your margin for error is tighter, weight it on the cocaine scale that you bought of Ebay for $10 for weighing hops.

my campden asks for 1 pill for every gallon...

what does your bottle say?

Hey brewbuddy,

I'm pretty sure that the 1 pill per gallon is relevant in the wine making proccess where the use of campden tablets isn't just for dechlorinating tap water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campden_tablets

Graeme said:

Hey brewbuddy,

I'm pretty sure that the 1 pill per gallon is relevant in the wine making proccess where the use of campden tablets isn't just for dechlorinating tap water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campden_tablets

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Yeah, just use the one tablet or a little less.

oh. i see. i used 1 tab per gallon for pasteurizing cider. Is it a good idea to use campden to stabilize and then force carb?