White water (no rapids)

I did my first attempt at making my own profiled water from RO + salts today... I used BreWater 3.0, set it for 10 gal, used ion-free as my start, and Dublin as my target since I was brewing a stout. I used a scale with 1/100g accuracy and wound up with a collection of salts that was probably in the vacinity of a tablespoon or slightly more.

I threw those in my HLT, added 10g of RO water, and the result was something I certainly wouldn't drink if it came out of the tap. It was incredibly white. It was so cloudy that I could bareley see the markings on the opposite side of my sight glass which is about a half inch in diameter. It stayed that way the entire time and left a lot of scaling behind in the HLT when all was said and done.

Soooo... For those of you who make your own water... I'm wondering if this is normal or if I missed a paragraph somewhere on profiling water. After double checking what BreWater said to use, I went ahead and brewed with it. My mash pH seemed to be right on, so I'm assuming that all is well... Just fishing for some reassurance.

-jas

mine usually gets pretty cloudy too. i just ignore it. beer tastes great. i am curious if anyone knows why. after all we are dumping a bunch of salts and stuff in there, but you wouldn't think it'd be enough to really cloud the water up. maybe the heat and the mixture of salts is causing some to precipitate. who knows!

I'm just getting into building my own water up from deionized. What is RO? I'm something I should know. I too notice a cloudiness in the two batches I have added my own salts (gypsum, epsom salt, canning salt, and baking soda) to, but the cloudiness seemed to go away after everything got dissolved.

Ok, I fell better then... Thanks for the peace of mind!

RO = Reverse Osmosis... Pretty close to distilled, but I can get it easier in 5 gal containers here than distilled. The shop I buy from claims 5 ppm total disolved solids on their RO, so that's reasonably close to ion-free.

its pretty hard to deionize water that hasn't gone through an RO membrane first.

In your typical purification setup, you go through a normal carbon filter first (essentially a big Brita type filter), then the RO membrane, and lastly a Deionization stage.
RO/DI water is what they use in chemistry labs, to ensure the water is clean/inert, and won't contain a lot of carbonates or other trace chemicals that could react with another compound.