Burtonize water for IPA based on BeerSmith's calculations? (acting strange)

So I'm doing a Lagunitas IPA clone this weekend and want to nail the water profile suggestion as best I can. It suggests to "Burtonize water".

I typically use 10-20% tap water (the rest DI) for my brews. I am using Beersmith's Water Profile tool and getting some strange behavior. I've already set up my tap water as a profile, and choose that option in the "Base Profile" section (1 gallon). (Profile is Ca:48, Mg:12, Na:30, SO4:17, Cl:38, HCO3:130).
Next I select "Distilled Water" as the profile to "Dilute With" (can't remember if I made this profile or if it was in Beersmith already, but it's all zeroes with a pH of 6). I set the volume for this step at 8.76 gallons. Finally, I select the Burton on Trent water profile as the Target.

When I click "Calculate Best Additions", it adds only 3.4g gypsum, 2.1g epsom, 0.1g CaCl, 0.9g NaHCO3, and 0.7g CaCO3. The resulting profile is still worlds away from the target. Every number is off, by as little as 19 (Cl) to 649 (SO4) ppm. What gives? It's like it only adds enough for the 1 gallon of tap and doesn't account for the dilution.

What I ended up doing was just diluting the tap numbers myself and plugging those in as the "base profile" numbers and setting the volume to the full 9.76 gallons. When doing this (and not using the Dilute section), it does get the numbers pretty close.


And as a secondary question, when I get it to be close to the target, it wants me to add like 30g of gypsum and 20g epsom, which brings the SO4 to around 720ppm. This seems a bit excessive, no? Should I just say eff it and stick to AJ's primer regarding 'bitter' beers?

Hmm... Can you post a screen shot of the water tool please? It will be much easier to analyze when its lined up and matched up ala beersmith.

Thanks!

Don't use chalk.

It will not dissolve for days. (Test this. Add a pinch to some water. Result, cloudy water)

Don't use click best additions as they give advice like (use chalk). It is a pure numbers tool.

Also remember that choosing a geographical water profile without knowing what the brewery you are trying to emulate, did to their water prior to using it is a flawed approach.

If you know what the brewery does to it's Burton-on-Trent like water you want to be doing that too. If they don't do anything to it, that's fine too. You've probably already looked into all of that already, so forgive me if this is all redundant stuff.

If the software is suggesting 50g additions you should seriously question the tool you are using. I know BOT water is very high in sulphate but 50g. That's a ton.

Red flags and flashing alarm bells.

Yeah I don't have any chalk and hadn't planned to use it. As for screenshots, I decided to forgo with the Beersmith route and go with my usual water profile calculator, Brewer's Friend.

I set the target to Burton water (decarbonated), and manually added some salts until the numbers grew in proportionate amounts. I didn't push it all the way to Burton water as the levels seemed high. But this is what I did come up with.....does it look reasonable?
I've never added table salt to my brewing water before, but I was trying to get the sodium more in line without using baking soda and raising the bicarbonate levels more:

Oh, I wouldn't. I would run from that profile as if my tail were on fire.

If you have never had a beer made with 300+ ppm of sulfate and 100 ppm of chloride, I would try one first to see if you can even get it down. It would be extraordinarily mineraly, and not palatable. I would not burtonize any water.

Please read this, from Martin Brungard's excellent "water knowledge page": https://sites.google.com/site/brunwater/water-knowledge

For example, the groundwater in Burton-on-Trent is the result of upwelling from the Mercia Mudstone (a gypsum-bearing formation) into the surficial Sand and Gravel aquifer where it mixes with groundwater supplied from rainfall infiltration and the nearby Trent River. The more the brewers of the region utilized that water source, the more the sulfate-laden upwelling was diluted by the other less mineralized water sources. The amount of rainfall and the river level also affect the local groundwater quality.

The location of the water supply well also has an influence in Burton. At Marston Brewery, the sulfate content of their groundwater is up to 800 ppm. While at Coors Brewery, the sulfate content of their groundwater was only about 200 ppm. These were sampled at the same time and the samples come from the same Sand and Gravel aquifer (Pearson, 2010). Therefore, defining a 'true' Burton water profile is not possible. Research on the physical setting in Burton suggest that the high sulfate groundwater was diluted by inflow from the nearby River Trent and breweries did not brew with the high sulfate concentration shown above (Brungard, 2014).

The balanced Burton water profile shown above was estimated based on the relative concentrations of ions observed from the Sand and Gravel aquifer, but those concentrations could be higher or lower depending upon time of year and location. At over 600 ppm sulfate, the profile provided is not as mineralized as that groundwater resource gets, but it is highly mineralized. Brewing with the Burton profile may be extreme and may produce sulfury notes in the finished beer. An alternative would be to brew with the Pale Ale profile that is included in Bru'n Water as a first try for brewing a hoppy beer (300 ppm sulfate).

Thanks for the info Yooper! I just checked out the Pale Ale profile in Bru'n you mentioned, and surprisingly enough it is almost spot on with what I entered in my previous post (not the target, but the actual salt additions).

The only thing that was a bit high was the sodium and chloride, which I remedied by reducing the NaCl to 1g and increased the CaCl2 to 3g. This projects to give me the following water, which is nearly identical to what the Pale Ale profile in Bru'n suggests. Thanks for the help!

Work your way UP, not back down. Try 125-150ppm sulfate levels and move up next time if you think you need it (by 25ppm each time would be good)

The overall water report seems to be outputting ml/l not ppm...Is this throwing us off?

cannman said:

The overall water report seems to be outputting ml/l not ppm...Is this throwing us off?

Click to expand...

Isn't mg/L the same as ppm?

Yeah I've always understood ppm to be the same as mg/l in our cases. And it makes sense if you think about it.....

Let’s say you determine the salinity of water by taking a reading of 35,000 ppm. That means that for every million parts of water, there are 35,000 parts of salt. "Parts" can be any measure, and the size of the sample is irrelevant. It’s the ratio of the tested parts (salt) to the total number of parts (water) that’s important.

A liter of water (metric measure of volume) weighs 1 kilogram. That’s 1,000 grams.
Now think about a milligram. It is 1/1000th of a gram, making it 1/1,000,000th of a kilogram. Put another way, a liter of water weighs 1,000,000 milligrams.

For our purposes, 35,000 milligrams/Liter is the same measurement as 35,000 parts per million. Both measurements tell us how many parts (milligrams) are present in every million parts (Liter).

I once did an IPA with 300ppm of sulfate (chloride was ~50ppm) and the end result was like licking drywall. You take your sip; you get 'IPA'; you swallow; you're left with a pasty tongue (like you got cat hair in the back of your throat) and the residual character of "mineral" on your tongue. I later backed down to 250ppm sulfate and it was still too much. I have found 125-175 to my liking for american pale ale variants.

1L=1000cc
1cc of water=1g=1000mg of water (cc=ml)

1L=1,000,000mg of water


ppm=mg/L

stpug said:

Work your way UP, not back down. Try 125-150ppm sulfate levels and move up next time if you think you need it (by 25ppm each time would be good)

Click to expand...

Very good advice. It avoids creating a batch that you really don't want to finish. While I enjoy 300 ppm sulfate, others don't. I agree that starting around 150 ppm sulfate is appropriate. However, to help speed your assessment of what sulfate level you prefer, I suggest that adding gypsum to the glass can be a good way. Just remember that a pint of beer is small in the grand scheme of things and the amount of gypsum per glass would be really small.

stpug said:

I once did an IPA with 300ppm of sulfate (chloride was ~50ppm) and the end result was like licking drywall. You take your sip; you get 'IPA'; you swallow; you're left with a pasty tongue (like you got cat hair in the back of your throat) and the residual character of "mineral" on your tongue. I later backed down to 250ppm sulfate and it was still too much. I have found 125-175 to my liking for american pale ale variants.

Click to expand...

Me too. I have exactly ONE recipe, out of all of my IPAs and APAs, that I like at 250 ppm of sulfate. The rest I love at 135-150 ppm of sulfate, with a relatively low chloride level of 40-50 or so.

"Less is more" quite often when dealing with water. If you know you love a very minerally beer with a high sulfate and chloride level, that's one thing. But 5 gallons of it, if you don't know if you love it, is another thing.

Yooper said:

Me too. I have exactly ONE recipe, out of all of my IPAs and APAs, that I like at 250 ppm of sulfate. The rest I love at 135-150 ppm of sulfate, with a relatively low chloride level of 40-50 or so.

"Less is more" quite often when dealing with water. If you know you love a very minerally beer with a high sulfate and chloride level, that's one thing. But 5 gallons of it, if you don't know if you love it, is another thing.

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I wonder what makes that one recipe good with 250ppm? After my experience with 300ppm, I don't think I could bring myself to venture that high again (I'm skeered)

stpug said:

I wonder what makes that one recipe good with 250ppm? After my experience with 300ppm, I don't think I could bring myself to venture that high again (I'm skeered)

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Yeah, I couldn't tell you. I can tell you that the "Dogfish Head" clone is terrible with more than 150 ppm in my mind. My "summer IPA" recipe is great with 149 ppm (call it one 150, just to be easier) but not nearly as good with a higher sulfate level.

I'm sure it is MY taste- but I've tried many recipes with 135-150 ppm of sulfate, and 200+ (up to 300 ppm) and like I said there was ONE that I thought was better at the higher level. One pale ale was best (again, in my opinion) at 110 ppm. Even my Pliny clone was awesome at 150 ppm.

The one beer that stands out to me with 200+ ppm of sulfate that I thought was fantastic was this one:

10 gallon batch
14 lbs Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM)71.8 %
2 lbs Borlander Munich Malt (Briess) (10.0 SRM) 10.3 %
1 lbs 8.0 oz Victory Malt (25.0 SRM) 7.7 %
1 lbs Caramel/Crystal Malt - 40L 5.1 %
1 lbs Wheat - White Malt (2.3 SRM) 5.1 %

1.00 oz Magnum [11.60 %] - Boil 60.0 min 19.7 IBUs
2.00 oz Amarillo [9.50 %] - Boil 15.0 min14.5 IBUs
2.00 oz 7 C's Falconers Flight [9.90 %] - Boil 1.0 1.4 IBUs
1.00 oz Amarillo [9.50 %] - Boil 1.0 min 0.6 IBUs

1.00 oz Centennial [9.60 %] - Dry Hop 7.0 Days
1.00 oz Simcoe [12.70 %] - Dry Hop 7.0 Days

Why this one, and not the other amarillo/simcoe combinations?

I have no idea, unless it's that it had enough malt backbone in it that it kept it from being too dry, without that strong harsh "too much sulfate" dryness that comes from some IPAs where I feel the enamel may come off of my teeth.

Yooper said:

Why this one, and not the other amarillo/simcoe combinations?

I have no idea, unless it's that it had enough malt backbone in it that it kept it from being too dry, without that strong harsh "too much sulfate" dryness that comes from some IPAs where I feel the enamel may come off of my teeth.

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Hm that's interesting. One thing about this Lagunitas IPA clone is it is mashed at 160°F, which would provide more body/maltiness than at a more conventional mash temp.

I went ahead with using the Pale Ale profile and got my water pretty close to those numbers. Sulfate was around 290ppm.

I appreciate all the help, and for future brews I'll definitely take the "less is more" into consideration. This beer is going to be served at a beer festival next month, so I'm not too worried about not liking it myself. But I wanted to go higher to see if is something I'd prefer in future beers (or if I should stay away from it).

MagicMatt said:

Yeah I've always understood ppm to be the same as mg/l in our cases. And it makes sense if you think about it.....

Let’s say you determine the salinity of water by taking a reading of 35,000 ppm. That means that for every million parts of water, there are 35,000 parts of salt. "Parts" can be any measure, and the size of the sample is irrelevant. It’s the ratio of the tested parts (salt) to the total number of parts (water) that’s important.

A liter of water (metric measure of volume) weighs 1 kilogram. That’s 1,000 grams.
Now think about a milligram. It is 1/1000th of a gram, making it 1/1,000,000th of a kilogram. Put another way, a liter of water weighs 1,000,000 milligrams.

For our purposes, 35,000 milligrams/Liter is the same measurement as 35,000 parts per million. Both measurements tell us how many parts (milligrams) are present in every million parts (Liter).

Click to expand...

wow very good information!

MagicMatt said:

Hm that's interesting. One thing about this Lagunitas IPA clone is it is mashed at 160°F, which would provide more body/maltiness than at a more conventional mash temp.

I went ahead with using the Pale Ale profile and got my water pretty close to those numbers. Sulfate was around 290ppm.

I appreciate all the help, and for future brews I'll definitely take the "less is more" into consideration. This beer is going to be served at a beer festival next month, so I'm not too worried about not liking it myself. But I wanted to go higher to see if is something I'd prefer in future beers (or if I should stay away from it).

Click to expand...

Let us know how it turns out. I'm interested in how you like the high sulfate.

chri5 said:

Let us know how it turns out. I'm interested in how you like the high sulfate.

Click to expand...

Just pulled the first pint this weekend. It wasn't fully carbed yet, but I definitely notice the aftertaste from what I can only guess to be the mineral levels. I haven't tasted anything like that in any of my other beers, which have never gone above 100ppm sulfate.

I don't mind it. I might not prefer it, perhaps it is a bit high for my palate, but it's not bad. I might go a little lower next time, perhaps in the 150-200ppm range instead of ~290ppm.

Though this was after only 1 pint. I'm serving it this weekend at a beer fest, so I'll be able to gauge how it fairs with the general public. I'll try to remember to report back with the overall consensus.

So I served the beer this weekend, and it was great! I actually really like how it came out. I don't think I'll be lowering the salt additions next time. If anything I'll up the dry hop amount a bit.

Not sure if I mentioned but it was a Lagunitas IPA clone, and there was a Lagunitas tent at the fest so I got to compare side by side. Color was dead on, taste was nearly identical, but mine lacked some in the floral aroma department. But I didn't taste any excessive mineral taste at all.

Guess the extra week in the keg made the difference. We sold out of 20 gallons of beer in 3 hours, and that's only serving 3oz pours!

Yooper said:

The one beer that stands out to me with 200+ ppm of sulfate that I thought was fantastic was this one:

10 gallon batch
14 lbs Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM)71.8 %
2 lbs Borlander Munich Malt (Briess) (10.0 SRM) 10.3 %
1 lbs 8.0 oz Victory Malt (25.0 SRM) 7.7 %
1 lbs Caramel/Crystal Malt - 40L 5.1 %
1 lbs Wheat - White Malt (2.3 SRM) 5.1 %

1.00 oz Magnum [11.60 %] - Boil 60.0 min 19.7 IBUs
2.00 oz Amarillo [9.50 %] - Boil 15.0 min14.5 IBUs
2.00 oz 7 C's Falconers Flight [9.90 %] - Boil 1.0 1.4 IBUs
1.00 oz Amarillo [9.50 %] - Boil 1.0 min 0.6 IBUs

1.00 oz Centennial [9.60 %] - Dry Hop 7.0 Days
1.00 oz Simcoe [12.70 %] - Dry Hop 7.0 Days

Click to expand...

Yooper, what yeast do you use for this? And what's your OG, FG, and SRM so I can try to scale it down a bit? I'm going to try it next since you said it was so good!

Edit: Nevermind! I checked out your recipes and found it! Thanks!