I think I got it? (water additions)

HI,

I was really hoping someone could take a look at my results with palmers Mash RA spreadsheet. I think I got it right but I wanted to make sure.

Source Water + SRM:


Mash Water + Salt additions:


Water Results:


Anyone see any issue with my plan? Or have any thoughts?

Thank you so much for looking at this!

I've got that same water, practically unusable because of the alkalinity. You can heavily dilute (90% RO / 10% tap) and follow the brewing primer (link below):

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

Baking Soda shouldn't ever need to beused with tap water like that, adusting the ratio of RO/tap would be better if dark beers result in low mash pH. Most likely you'll always be adding some acid.

You have been taken in by the "If the SRM is x the RA must be y" school. In this case you are being led way astray. Apparently you have water with alkalinity of 240 or thereabouts and are proposing adding alkali (bicarbonate) to that. Unless you have roast malts and/or dark crystals to the point that the beer would be undrinkable this will result in a mash pH that is much too high.

There is a chart at http://www.pbase.com/agamid/image/57446374 which shows the characteristics of the waters of the world that led to most of the extant styles. No report on that chart shows an RA > 150 or alkalinity > 260. You apparently want an RA of 292 and an alkalinity of 357. What are you trying to brew here? Given your alkalinity it is more probable that you will need acid than alkali but we need to know more about your grain bill.

Wow thanks for the replies... I have much to ponder:

I am (and should have included in original post) brewing:
My third version... it's 'good' but I know water adjustments will make it better (a bit to bitter).

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f126/bee-cave-brewery-robust-porter-56768/

11# 2 Row
1# Chocolate Malt
1# Crystal 40
4 oz. Black Patent
1 oz. Roasted Barley
8 oz. Flaked Barley

So you do have a lot of dark stuff. But you also have a lot of alkalinity. Dark beers are tough in that the malts contain so much acid that a swing from batch to batch of a few % can make an appreciable difference. This is really a case where a check with a pH meter would be valuable. My gut says recipes like this were put together for water like this and that you probably don't need to add anything.

fermenter said:

Wow thanks for the replies... I have much to ponder:

I am (and should have included in original post) brewing:
My third version... it's 'good' but I know water adjustments will make it better (a bit to bitter).

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f126/bee-cave-brewery-robust-porter-56768/

11# 2 Row
1# Chocolate Malt
1# Crystal 40
4 oz. Black Patent
1 oz. Roasted Barley
8 oz. Flaked Barley

Click to expand...

Maybe PM EdWort and ask him about his water since its his recipe?

Thanks again for the replies I have been dreading tacking "Water", but now is the time...

@ DSmith Since you live close to my home town in MN what do you do when you brew? Dilute with R/0? do you add any salts back in to get within ranges? I suppose it all depends on the recipe your brewing ha?


Here is my second attempt:

My goals were:
1 - Mash PH within range
2 - Within palmer ranges for brew water
3 - Balanced Chloride / Sulfate ratio.



Does this look better? a question I had was if I really needed to have my sulfate 50+ most of the salts I added was only to achieve a sulfate of 50+ and still maintain a balanced Chloride / Sulfate ratio.

I had discounted the primer originally as it seems that it was only for Soft water and as I had hard water I thought it did not apply. I guess I missed the section where he was diluting hard water with R/O to make a more softer water to work with.

Thanks again!

Or perhaps this is better... so many ways to do this...

Do you batch sparge? You should dilute your sparge water the same as the mash water. Treating it all the same (dilution and salts) is the easiest.

I dilute with Cub Foods RO water or bottled distilled water. Distilled water was overkill but I was not interested in saving $3 when I was learning about water in case the RO water machine wasn't maintained and I had an unknown variable... The pH meter and test mash will make using RO only a better bet. I bet when you find your dilution that it doesn't change from beer to beer. Go for something that's easy to measure instead of an even %. You could skip diluting and use 100% RO water but having a small amount of trace elements seems best for no proven reason to me. Remember to treat an tap water for chlorine/choramine.

You should probably use Gypsum instead of MgSO4 (plenty of Mg comes from grain). You'll need to look at your CaCl2 and CaSO4 additions after you dilute your sparge water again. I bet shooting for about 50-80 ppm Ca, 50 ppm Chloride & 50 ppm Sulfate will make a good porter and allow you to add some more gypsum in the glass to decide if it would taste better next time with more sulfate.

ok great. I think I might be getting it. I do batch sparge.

Edit: I also carbon filter all my tap water - the results I had for my water was a Ward lab result with this filtered water.

There's a note about that on the top of the EZ Water spreadsheet about Ward reporting sulfate as (SO4-S). Mine is higher than 15 ppm SO4, check to see if you multiplied the Ward number by 3.

DSmith said:

There's a note about that on the top of the EZ Water spreadsheet about Ward reporting sulfate as (SO4-S). Mine is higher than 15 ppm SO4, check to see if you multiplied the Ward number by 3.

Click to expand...

Good thinking - I had multiplied mine. It was originally 5, so in the EZ Water sheet I used the value of 15.