Help Adjusting Water Profile

I had recently posted an issue I was having whereby and darker styles of beer I made had an "off' flavor to them. After some very helpful responses I was pointed in the direction of John Palmer's "How To Brew" - Chapter 15 where he discuss the minerals in water. I printed out the handy dandy nomograph and sure enough after plotting my water, I found out that it suits lighters ales WAY better than darker ones. However, when trying to figure out which minerals to add and in what amounts seems to be a bit of a challenge. I would appreciate any help that you can give.

First, let me begin with my water profile:

Calcium=147
Magnesium=6
Total Alkalinity as CaCO3=106
Sodium=27
Chloride=25
Sulfate=33

I then used these tools:

Online nomograph:
http://nomograph.babbrewers.com/

Recommended mineral levels:
http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter15-1.html

I also used the Excel version of the nomograph available from Palmer's website.


To come up with my additions (assuming 4 gallons of mash water) I input these numbers:

2.4 grams of CaC03 (to raise RA)
5.4 grams of NaHCO3 (to raise RA)
.9 grams of CaCL2*2H20 (to get the Chloride to Sulfate Ratio to be "malty")


While this seems all well and good, can anyone tell me if this is even remotely correct? All of the values in the spreadsheet "look" acceptable - the RA has risen to 232 which puts the SRM between 24 and 29 (I was shooting for around 25). The Calcium seems high at 227 as well as the Alkalinity as CaCO3 (397).

Any thoughts or recommendations?

Also, has anyone had any experience in starting with distilled water and builiding a profile from scratch?

As always, thanks in advance!

Andrew

Have you downloaded Brewater 3.0?

http://home.roadrunner.com/~brewbeer/

Since you have so much calcium in your water already, I'd dilute with ~2 gallons of distilled, to get it down to an acceptable amount.

To get your chloride up, use non-iodized salt instead of CaCl.

A lot of people have told me to never add alkalinity, because it's usually not necessary.

It's hard to hit an exact target with water additions, but with Brewater it's easy to nudge your water in the right direction.

I did take a peek at the BrewWater app. However, it appeared as though it was doing very similar things as Palmer's spreadsheet. I will look at it again though. It is necessary to add a target water profile?

Regarding NOT alkalinty to water, how then would I raise the RA of my own water if I wanted to brew a darker beer?

I like using brewater. It's pretty quick to try a lot of different salt combinations, and it quantifies how far off target you are.

You do need to have a target profile, but there are a lot of pre-made targets, like Mosher's Ideal Stout and others.

http://www.themadfermentationist.com/2008/09/i-think-that-water-treatment-has-made.html

I use that site to help make my target profiles.

CaCO3 needs acid to dissolve in water. If you add it before you mash in, you won't be able to dissolve it.

You would mash in, then measure the pH, then add alkalinity as needed.

Ok...so I tried out BrewWater 3.0 again and starting with a dilution of 3 gallons, I think I was able to get the numbers in line with the "Mosher's Ideal Stout" profile. My next question would be: The total volume of mash water is 4 gallons, but I diluted it with 3 gallons of distilled water. Does this mean that I should be using 3 Gallons of distilled + 1 gallon of my "original" water?

ahoffman565 said:

My next question would be: The total volume of mash water is 4 gallons, but I diluted it with 3 gallons of distilled water. Does this mean that I should be using 3 Gallons of distilled + 1 gallon of my "original" water?

Click to expand...

Exactly. Don't forget to add some yeast nutrient too because your tap water has minerals the yeast will need, and your distilled water is lacking.

You might be interested in this thread, esp. starting here:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f128/w...s-spreadsheet-144461/index22.html#post2299378

also here:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f128/soft-water-adjustment-portland-196560/#post2286280

and the information on this site:

http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

and from the water guru's site:

http://ajdel.wetnewf.org:81/
(sometimes this one is hard to connect to - keep trying)

and any other of ajdelange's posts

Thanks Nateo and DeafSmith!

DeafSmith - nice to see a fellow DFW area brewer on here.

Thanks for the links Deafsmith. Lots of good stuff I had never seen before.

Wow...it seems the more I read the more I'm confused. There seems to be one school of thought that says it's ok to use chalk (CaCo3) to raise your residual alkalinity. Other people say you'd never want to use chalk.

Has anyone ever had to use chalk to change their water profile? Has it helped?

I've used baking soda in a clone of Avery's New World Porter. That beer turned out awesome, but I don't know if it was because of or despite the alkali additions.

Did you find the graph on braukaiser with all the recipes, made with distilled water, plotted by SRM and mash pH?

http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php/Beer_color,_alkalinity_and_mash_pH

I think the point was that you can't estimate RA from SRM. With distilled water, there were only 4 recipes that fell lower than the acceptable mash range.

So water with any amount of alkalinity to it will probably be too basic, regardless of the grist.

Without a good pH meter it's impossible to say where your pH is. But it seems like it's way more likely that your pH will be too high than too low, even with really dark grains.

So that leads me to re-evaluate everything I thought I knew about water chemistry.

Nateo,

Did you use baking soda as an adjustment after plugging in your water on Palmer's nomograph or one of the Excel spreadsheets that are out there?

I did it on Brewater 3.0. I only use Brewater because they have the option of using tsp and my gram scale only has whole gram resolution, which isn't really accurate enough for that sort of thing.