Water chemistry is hard

Enclosed is my spreadsheet from EZ calculator for my water profile. I will be brewing a stout mirroring Dublin water. My source water has a ph of 9.0. My mash ph is reading low according to the calculator, 5.18. How is this possible when my source water has such a high ph?

Grain bill is

11 lbs 2 row
4.5 lbs barley flaked
2.25 black barley

Beersmith is telling me to add 13 grams chalk and 2.3 grams epsom salt, but according to EZ calcualtor my ph would still be low.

Water profile is

Na 91
Ca 28
Mg 8
Total Hardness, CaCo3 103
SO4 108
Cl 115
Co3 6
bicarbonate HCO3 40
Total Alkalinity CaCo3 43
ph 9.0

Pardon my picture quality, but it was the only way to upload the sheet.

kyle0226 said:

How is this possible when my source water has such a high ph?

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That happens when your water isn't strongly buffered, i.e. small amounts of salts or acids will change the pH by a lot.

Any thoughts on how to fix this? I can't add any more baking soda or chalk cause I'll go over on my ranges.

Squeezing lime in will reduce mash pH

I need to raise mash ph.

5.2 is a perfectly good mash pH.

Ah, balls. Sorry! I misread something and saw "my source water has such high pH."

Also, you're right ArcaneXor. 5.2 is the butter-zone for mash pH.

Most of the spreadsheets persist in using beer color as a strong predictor of mash pH. They tend, therefore, to underestimate mash pH considerably especially for dark beers. It is, in fact, unlikely that your mash pH will be as low as is predicted by these spreadsheets unless you are using inordinate amounts of black malt in which case your beer will taste like charcoal briquettes anyway and you needn't worry much about mash pH. There is some uncertainty here so the best advice I can give is that you obtain a pH meter and use it to check dough-in pH. You can stir in a little chalk if you find you need it but don't do this until you have checked pH and determined that it is necessary. Absent a pH meter, brew the beer with the water you have with no salt additions and you will be fine.

A typical Irish Dry Stout recipe (taken from Aston Lewis's chapter in Michael Lewis's monograph on Stout) calls for 10% of the grist to be roast barley. With your water the pH for such a mash would be about 5.5-5.6. No additional alkali is necessary. I note you are using 15% roast barley so your pH will probably a around 5.45 - a good value.

So the answer to your question "how can this be?" is "it can't". The buffering capacity of your water is modest at 43 but the base malt has buffering capacity too. It takes, in my experiments, about 30% roast barley to pull mash pH as low as 5.2 and that's 3 times what you need for a balanced stout.

AJ's example is a little narrow and uncharacteristic of most brewer's grists. Roast malts are rarely the only color producers or flavor producers used by brewers. In addition, roast malts produce only modest acidity in comparison to most crystal malts. While AJ is usually right, he focuses on a single example that misses the mark for most brewers.

Programs like EZ Water and Bru'n Water use malt color and type to help estimate the effect of the grist on mash pH. I haven't researched EZ Water, but it probably predicts the mash pH decently. I know that Bru'n Water predicts the mash pH within 0.2 units every time. The next version will even correct the anomoly that AJ pointed out for the pH predicted when a pale grist with distilled water.

It turns out that the decarbonation of water that contains alkalinity is a predictable and consistent phenomena when the water is heated to mash temperatures. RO and distilled water have very little or no alkalinity and their decarbonization upon heating is essentially zero. Thus the effect of calcium carbonate dissolution that any brewer using alkaline water experiences, would not be seen when brewing with a non-alkaline water. This effect explains why all the actual mash pH response data that brewers from around the world have reported to me is reasonable and AJ's prediction using Kohlbach's information is accurate also. Bru'n Water is relatively accurate now when your brewing water contains moderate to high alkalinity. It will be more accurate for low alkalinity water in the future.

For the OP, forget anything that Beersmith recommends regarding water additions. It has no basis in fact. As mentioned above, the tap water is relatively low in alkalinity and would need additional alkalinity to avoid dropping the mash pH too far. I recommend that in most cases, mash pH should not be allowed to drop below 5.3 (room temperature measurement). In the case of darker beers, I find that bumping up that minimum recommended pH by a tenth or two is helpful for rounding the flavor. Do be careful when increasing alkalinity. As AJ says, you do not want to add any more alkalinity than absolutely necessary to achieve proper mash pH. I think that Bru'n Water gives brewers accurate knowledge of what the amount of alkalinity might be. Checking with a pH meter is the best way to check, but having a good idea of what amount of a alkalinity producing mineral you'll need is very helpful to me.

In my previous post I focused on a particular example because OP asked about a particular example i.e. a stout with a recipe similar to Lewis's using water similar to mine (WRT to alkalinity and hardness - I haven't got his sodium or sulfate thank Ninkasi). I simply reported what he is likely to experience if he brews Lewis's recipe with water untreated based on my experience and lab measurements with similar grist and similar water. If I put Lewis's recipe and my water into EZ presumably I'll get the same predicted pH OP did. If I put those data into Bru'n water I get a prediction of 5.1 and an admonition, in red, to add alkalinity to my mash water. I've brewed this beer many times (well, several anyway) and mash pH has always come in at about 5.5 with no water treatment. Thus neither EZ nor Bru'n model the roast barley in Lewis's recipe very well.

I have no doubt that some crystal malts contain more acid than some roast malts (based on Kai's data) and apparently at least Bru'n water models many beers well. But it doesn't model Irish Stout very well. If OP adds alkali to his water (or mash) I think he'll regret it (if he ever tastes an Irish stout made with water and recipe to his without). It also doesn't model my dark or light lagers very well. So sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. In engineering we'd say the model isn't "robust". That does not mean it isn't useful.

Is this problem fixable? Yes, it is - the spreadsheets need to be modified to recognize that roast barley is less "powerful" than the way it is currently modeled. Following such an approach could improve the utility of these spreadsheets greatly but each such improvement adds complexity to the spreadsheet to the point where it becomes unwieldy (for the programmer at least). My take on this is that the problem has too many degrees of freedom (too many available malts with too much variation between cultivar, grower, maltster and even within a particular maltings, lot to lot). So I don't even try to model mash pH. I do look at Kolbach's shift but take it with a big grain of salt. I've been doing this long enough that I can pretty much guess what mash pH will be but if you asked me to brew something I've never brewed before I'll bet my guess wouldn't be so good.

If anyone reading my previous post interpreted it to mean that any dark beer brewed with water like OPs will get pH 5.5 then let me make it clear that what I reported is what I measured for Lewis's recipe and his recipe alone though it is obvious that similar results should be obtained for similar recipes with similar hardness/alkalinity water and indeed several have confirmed that here and in other fora.

The real bottom line to me is that if you are willing to forgo a couple of sessions at your favorite brewpub* you will save enough money to buy yourself a decent pH meter. Then you won't have to rely on my advice or that of anyone else. You will know what the real story is.

*If your favorite brewpub is Mad Fox ignore this.

Thanks for all the info guys. I really appreciate it. When inputting the numbers into Bru'n, what do you input Barley Flaked as? (crystal, base, or roast)

I will definitely go out and get a ph meter, preferably ATC. Would it be better to overshoot or undershoot mash ph? For instance with my sach rest I intentionally try to undershoot my temp and add water accordingly to hit temp. After all the suggestions I think I may need to change my water system to RO water. I may be able to hit my ph with my current water, but hitting my mineral profile based on region would be a whole different story.

With a pH meter in hand you should be able to get pH right where you want it and so it becomes another parameter (along with chloride level and sulfate level) you can adjust to produce the beer you like best.

I can tell you what the effects of high pH are. Dull beer. Dull in the sense that the usual description by those who have followed the Primer and/or obtained a pH meter are that all their flavors seem "brighter" and that seems a pretty good way of putting it IMO. The flavors just seem better defined.

I have never succeeded in going too low (yet) but continue to push in that direction to see what happens. Eventually the peak is going to be passed but I don't know what the effects will be. Will the flavors become "duller" again?

It's going to take some effort to get too low. About the only ways I can think of to do it is to add so much black malt that the beer would taste like blended charcoal briquettes so that pH error would be a relatively minor concern or to slip with the sauermalz or acid. Weyermanns publishes a recipe for a Berliner Weiße using, I think, 8% sauermalz. This gets the pH of the finished beer low enough that it tastes like a Berliner Weiße (i.e. quite sour) without, apparently, disastrously effecting the conversion effectiveness of the enzymes or the fermentation abilities of the yeast.

ajdelange said:

This gets the pH of the finished beer low enough that it tastes like a Berliner Weiße (i.e. quite sour) without, apparently, disastrously effecting the conversion effectiveness of the enzymes or the fermentation abilities of the yeast.

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I don't mean to hijack the thread -- but a quick question based on your response: does going this low with the pH have a big impact on the mouthfeel of the beer? Does it mean thin beer?

Berliner Weiße is pretty wimpy beer in terms of OG, FG and alcohol content as a consequence of which it has a pretty thin body. Whether the mash pH has anything to do with this or not I do not know. I would expect temperature to have a much greater effect but just as temperature does that by controlling the efficacy of the various enzymes I would expect that pH, as it also determines enzyme activity, would as well. Really low pH is not a region I have explored. Some texts have graphs of enzyme activity as a function of temperature and pH. Having a look at one of those might give some insight e.g. lower temp. makes beta amylase more active than alpha so that the beer is thinner. If low pH also renders beta amylase more active you might suspect that it would lead to thinner beer. But I don't remember the details. I'll see if I can find something tomorrow.

What is the timeframe the the pH would stabilize after dough in if treating/ not or adding acid malt? 5 minutes? 10? How long after any further adjustments should measurements be taken?

My water has chloramines in it. When using a RO system are campden tabs still necessary for reducing/ eliminating chloramines?

When making salt additions what is the best way?

1. Force carb concentrated amount in a corny keg
or
2. Add directly to mash, adjust sparge water with acid, then add sparge water additions to wort?

Bigscience said:

What is the timeframe the the pH would stabilize after dough in if treating/ not or adding acid malt? 5 minutes? 10? How long after any further adjustments should measurements be taken?

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Mash pH stabilizes reasonably quickly with one exception and that is when sauermalz is part of the grist. It then takes 15 - 20 minutes for the pH to rise to its final value. It can look a little scary at first when sauermalz is involved.

pH does change somewhat throughout the course of the brew depending on how you are proceeding. If using hard, alkaline water with decoction mashing a drop in pH of a couple of points can occur as the decoctions progress. With soft water and sauermalz pH actuall rises a little.

kyle0226 said:

My water has chloramines in it. When using a RO system are campden tabs still necessary for reducing/ eliminating chloramines?

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It is necessary to remove chlorine/chloramine for the sake of the RO membrane. Short of coming up with some sort of metering device to inject metabite into the RO units feed it is much more practical to use an activated carbon filter prior to RO. Many/most systems include such a filter.

kyle0226 said:

When making salt additions what is the best way?

1. Force carb concentrated amount in a corny keg

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The only thing that you might consider adding that requires CO2 is chalk and you really don't want to be fiddling with chalk for a number of reasons the obvious one of which is that having to do the CO2 thing is a big pain. The second major reason is that having gone to the trouble of getting chalk to dissolve by the use of CO2, it will immediately drop out again when the water is heated.

Many of the spreadsheets overestimate the acidity of dark and even base malts and wind up advising the addition of chalk. Most at least suggest adding this to the mash rather than the water so even if you follow one of them you wouldn't have to bother with CO2.

Advanced brewers who have particular reasons for wanting to emulate a particular water profile might add chalk and CO2 to their water but it is not something for the beginner.

kyle0226 said:

or
2. Add directly to mash, adjust sparge water with acid, then add sparge water additions to wort?

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Salts other than chalk are quite soluble in water and it is, IMO, better, therefore, to dissolve them in the brewing liquor as this has to be a better way to uniformly expose the grist to them than trying to stir them into thick mash.

If mash pH is too low, and it shouldn't be, then you would correct that with chalk or lime and that should be stirred into the mash rather than the water. But resist the advice of those who would have you do this until you have verified, by a reading from a properly calibrated pH meter, that the addition is really necessary.