Brewing a helles bock and need suggestions on water profile

My starting water profile is
Starting Water (ppm):
Ca: 19
Mg: 4
Na: 33
Cl: 53
SO4: 5
HCO3: 37

I use the EZ Water adjustment spreadsheet to calculate water additions. Grain bill is 11lb pilsen, 11lb vienna, and 5 lb munich. If anyone has suggestions on where what the right adjustments would be for mash and boil I would appreciate it. Mashing in in T minus 48 hours.

You need to add Calcium (Ca+)to get up to around 60-75ppm and my first suggestion is to use Calcium chloride. However, your chloride (Cl-) is already at 53 ppm so you should keep an eye on that as I would not exceed 100ppm. You can also add some gypsum/Calcium sulphate to up the Ca+ number but you don't want a lot of SO4 in this beer either. Keep the SO4 ppm at half or below the SO4 ppm. You may have to consider dilution with distilled or RO water to keep the chloride number under control.

First option for this water would be to do nothing. You ought to be able to brew a pretty nice beer with it as is. Clearly, this is the easiest thing to do.

Second option, very little more difficult than the first would be to add about 1.9 grams of CaCl2 per 5 gallons. This will get the calcium up to a bit to around 50 which is plenty but will push the chloride up close to 100. Chloride generally does good things so this would also make a good - perhaps even better beer than option 1.

Third option - the most trouble but most likely to give the best beer- would be to cut 1 + 1 with RO water and then add 2 grams (per 5 gallons treated) or so of calcium chloride to that. This would give you calcium at about 25 and knock the sodium and sulfate down. For these beers you really want as little sulfate as you can get. Add a couple percent sauermalz to set mash pH and you should be in pretty good shape.

Thanks for the advice. I also failed to add(just flat forgot) that I use a 2 micron filter that filters sediment, rust, and chlorine taste and odor. I don't know how much it changes the numbers. I usually just leave the numbers as is when I'm adjusting for ales and I've been hitting 80% eff. over my last few batches.

I don't have access to sauermalz so is there anything you would suggest for this brew? I do plan to keep some on hand for the future.

flananuts said:

Thanks for the advice. I also failed to add(just flat forgot) that I use a 2 micron filter that filters sediment, rust, and chlorine taste and odor. I don't know how much it changes the numbers. I usually just leave the numbers as is when I'm adjusting for ales and I've been hitting 80% eff. over my last few batches.

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Particle and activated carbon filtration do not change the mineral picture at all but of course you do not want rust or chlorine (free or bound) in your beer.

flananuts said:

I don't have access to sauermalz so is there anything you would suggest for this brew? I do plan to keep some on hand for the future.

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The sauermalz contains lactic acid so that (available at almost any HBS and online but then sauermalz is also available on line) will do as well. You'll have to figure out the amount of lactic acid. Sauermalz is on average 2% lactic acid by weight and 2% of the grist is a good starting point for a sauermalz addition so if you had 10 kg of grist (22 pounds) you would want 200 grams of sauermalz which at 2% acid would be 4 grams of acid. The acid weighs about 1.3 grams/mL and is usually of 88% strengths so that comes out to 4/1.3/0.88 mL.

ajdelange said:

The sauermalz contains lactic acid so that (available at almost any HBS and online but then sauermalz is also available on line) will do as well. You'll have to figure out the amount of lactic acid. Sauermalz is on average 2% lactic acid by weight and 2% of the grist is a good starting point for a sauermalz addition so if you had 10 kg of grist (22 pounds) you would want 200 grams of sauermalz which at 2% acid would be 4 grams of acid. The acid weighs about 1.3 grams/mL and is usually of 88% strengths so that comes out to 4/1.3/0.88 mL.

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When following ajdelange's baseline recommendation of sauermalz equal to 2% of the grist, you can multiply the weight of the grist in pounds by 0.15859873 (call it .16) to determine the equivalent amount of milliliters lactic acid at 88% strength needed in lieu of usng sauermalz.

So I brewed yesterday and went with the 1.9g of cacl at mash and 1.9g of cacl in the boil. My mash ph was 5.0(not sure if this is too low) and I hit my 75% brewhouse effeciency with a SG of 1.068 @ 60 deg at target volume of 10 gallons into the fermentor. I've ordered some sauermalz as well as some lactic acid solution to have on hand for future use.

Thank you everyone for your help and thoughts on this.

Yes, 5.0 is too low but it is not likely that your pH was actually that low. It should have been more like 5.4. I suspect you used strips which are notorious for, and pretty consistent from reports I see here and elsewhere at producing pH readings 0.3 or more units low. Unfortunately, a pH meter is really the only reliable way to measure pH. The good news is that they are a lot less expensive than they used to be.

spot on. I'll see what I can get off ebay for a ph meter as well as a refractometer for wort. Too bad my saltwater refractometer doesn't work...