I also use some calcium chloride. Would this potentially add that minerally taste? I guess it's probably hard to know.
Yes it could but it's not that hard to know. I always recommend brewing a beer for the first time with low mineral water and then adding some of the proposed salts to the beer in the glass. This will give a rough indication of what a beer brewed with more of that particular salt will taste like. Metal ions give a hard taste whereas choride gives a soft taste so calcium chloride may be a bit of an exception here. I guessing that as you add successively more and more calcium chloride you will find that the beer tastes softer, smoother and rounder in the region of concentration where chloride effect dominates but will, at higher levels, start to taste salty and minerally.
In looking at my past brews where I used brunwater (only been doing so for a few months), the first one had the most minerally taste. It had about 7 grams of gypsum, 5 grams of epsom salt, and 3.5 grams of CaCl. This was the amber bitter profile. Ion concentration 5.8 and 5.7.
That's really hard water (total hardness 482 ppm as CaCO3), high mineral content (625 mg/L TDS) and ionic strength 18 mmol/L so I'm not surprised it tastes kind of 'crunchy'. (I don't know what 'ion concentration' is but assume it is supposed to be the same sort of thing as ionic strength and I don't know why you would care about that unless trying to compute activity coefficients in which case you need ionic strength).
I made a belgian Tripel which used the yellow balanced and I can't detect any of the mineral flavors. The ion balance was 3.7 and 3.3.
Ah. Are these numbers what you are calling 'ion concentration'?
WRT the flavor perception: it is possible that in a strongly flavored beer like a tripel the mineral qualities are masked by phenols, maillard products, sugars, brett flavors etc.
BTW, my profile is below:
....
Not that it matters much because the levels are so low but some of these numbers are a bit inconsistent. For example you state alkalinity is 21 in one place and 22 in another. Based on
Calcium (Ca) 5.0
Magnesium (Mg) 1.0
Sodium (Na) 6.0 3.0 Sulfate (SO4)
Potassium (K) 1.0 5.0 Chloride (Cl)
Iron (Fe) 0.0 0.3 Nitrate (NO3)
0.0 Nitrite (NO2)
0.0 Fluoride (F)
Reported Total Alkalinity (as CaCO3) (mg/L or ppm) 22
Reported or Measured Water pH 9
your cation/anion balance would be, based on the assumption that alkalinity was measured to pH 4.5 at 20 °C, 0.618/0.616 (!!!), your bicarbonate 22.9 mg/L (as opposed to 15.0) and carbonate 1 mg/L (as opposed to 6.0) for total hardness of 16.6 (all temporary) and an RA of 17.8.