Super high Bicarbonate to get to my RA

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Tall_Yotie

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Howdy all!
New to water science, went through the "how to brew", got the spreadsheet, figured out what profile(s) I want. I am looking to brew a big dark RIS, and my RA should be 250 minimum.

My starting water profile:

Ca+ 28ppm
Mg+2 28ppm
S04-2 26ppm
Na+ 20ppm
Cl- 27ppm
HCO3- 190ppm

My RA is sitting at 67. To get to 250 RA, I need to get my Bicarbonates up to 285ppm if I do not adjust ANY other ions in the water. As charts say 250 is the max you need for dark beers. If I wanted to peg out at 300RA (as it is a very dark roasted beer) I would need Bicarbonates at 335ppm.


Is there a drawback to having too much Bicarbonate? The brew uses a lot of roasted grains.

Thanks for any feedback!
 
New to water science, went through the "how to brew", got the spreadsheet, figured out what profile(s) I want. I am looking to brew a big dark RIS, and my RA should be 250 minimum.

No, it shouldn't. I have attached a chart showing the RA of many of the well known brewing cities reported water profiles. As you can see, no city has an RA near 250. I hope this is enough to convince you that you do not need an RA of 250. In fact there is no such thing as a 'required' RA. You need as much acid or base as is necessary to get your mash pH into the correct range. This is pretty easy to do with light beers but when you start using a lot of dark malt things get tricky because the dark malts contain a lot of acid - even enough to over come the alkalinity of your water which is fairly high at about 158 - and it's hard to tell how much.


The best way to proceed here is to make a test mash with a small portion of the grist you will be using and measure the pH of that with a properly calibrated meter. If you do not have a meter then there are spreadsheets which will attempt to calculate the amounts of acid or base you will need to add based on the color of the malts - not the beer. This is iffy and a mash test is much more reliable as if, indeed, you do require base the clear choice is calcium hydroxide (not bicarbonate) and it takes a fine hand to not overshoot with this stuff.

Given the alkalinity of your water I'd try the beer without supplementing. You might go under on pH but then you might not. You can get a rough idea with test strips - add 0.3 to the reading you get from them. If you read something in the 4's then add a pinch of pickling lime, stir and measure again repeating until you get to a reading a bit over 5. Do this with the test mash first to see if you are going to need lime at all. Best to get a pH meter, learn how to use it and, from experience, know how much lime you can be expected to have to add.

KolbachRA.jpg
 
Your water profile isn't that much different than mine, and I brew wonderful stouts with no adjustments. My HCO3 is just a little higher than yours.

I think that if you don't have a way to check actual mash pH, that the thing to do here is to just use the water "as is". I doubt your mash pH will be too low.
 
ajdelange: Thanks for the chart. Unfortunately a "city water" value isn;t terribly good for looking at breweries as they treat their water afterwards.

Yooper: My stouts I make are delicious, I just wanted to see if going the extra step would help. My Sodium, Sulfates and Calcium seem to be a bit low on the recommended side, so I might have gotten caught up in the "make everything perfect" vision. I was just figuring having the mash pH in the right area would help my efficiency.

I will grab some pH strips (with the 0.2-0.3 adjustment) and see how it looks next brew.

Would you suggest then that I just worry about changing the water profile if I am making a hoppy beer?
 
Would you suggest then that I just worry about changing the water profile if I am making a hoppy beer?

No. I think you're good for stouts, but for a lighter beer I'd definitely take stops to reduce the alkalinity.

I'd cut it with reverse osmosis water for a lighter colored beer. I would think that, like mine, a kolsch with that water would be very harsh tasting. Or a cream ale, or a pale ale. The only beer that comes out perfect for me with my tap water is a stout, or a robust porter. Every thing else I've find that I have to reduce the alkalinity, and also use RO for the sparge water (due to the high alkalinity).

The calcium in your water is a little low, so some calcium chloride isn't a bad idea. My calcium is a little higher.
 
ajdelange: Thanks for the chart. Unfortunately a "city water" value isn;t terribly good for looking at breweries as they treat their water afterwards.
That's very true and I meant to mention that to reinforce the point that 250 is such a ridiculous number. You can be sure that none of them did anything to increase alkalinity. If they had high alkalinity they added acid - often in the form of dark malt.

With a lot of the profiles on the chart simply heating the water in the HLT would cause calcium carbonate to drop out. Since losing an equivalent of calcium hardness increases RA by 1/3.5 equivalents but losing an equivalent of bicarbonate decreases it by 1 it is clear that each equivalent precipitated decreases RA by 2.5/3.5 equivalent. This means it would be difficult to synthesize water with RA as high as 250 unless one used soda ash or lye or perhaps lime. Palmer's solution to this was to dump chalk into the mash where the acid from the malts would dissolve it. Fortunately (?), chalk dissolves so slowly that only perhaps half of it reacts in the early phases of the mash but the rest continues to dissolve until the sparge is completed. The result of this has been many a ruined beer but fortunately we are wiser now and this concept (high RA tied to high color) has largely moved out of the home brewers way of thinking.
 
Ah, that does make a good amount of sense!

So what I am gathering from all of this is that the concept of super high RA (through bicarbonates of course) for dark beers is not as necessary as the math and previous literature states. However, I should watch my RA for lighter beers. And the other ion concentrations are a bit more key as far as flavor and balance and should be taken care of, while the RA can be put aside for darker brews at the levels I am starting at.
 
So what I am gathering from all of this is that the concept of super high RA (through bicarbonates of course) for dark beers is not as necessary as the math and previous literature states.

John Palmer noted the correlation between dark beers and the alkalinity of the water they were brewed with and suggested that the correlation could be used to design beer i.e. dark beer - higher alkalinity and used some model to come up with an actual curve. He fully realized that the curve could at best be used to give a WAG at what the RA might be calling the concept in his own words 'a hand wave at best' but the community grabbed at it like a plank in a storm at sea and spreadsheets and calculators began to appear into which you entered your color and out of which came a 'required' RA number. As I noted in an earlier post most of us have discovered that this is not the best way to proceed.

However, I should watch my RA for lighter beers.
RA was really developed in order to give brewers a tool for prediction of kettle pH for light lagers - the kind of lagers the brewers who were the target audience for the original paper (which you can get from http://www.wetnewf.org/pdfs/Brewing_articles/KolbachPaper.pdf) were brewing. RA is a great tool for comparing waters but not so great a tool for predicting and controlling mash pH when the beers start to get dark. Your task for light beers is pretty simple. See the Primer here for some starting guidelines. When the beers get dark you have to account for the acid in the malts and while that can be done approximately measurements are the best way to go. It is quite possible to make very dark beer with water like yours. Yooper does it and I do it and so do many others but when I see the word 'Imperial' that implies that you are going to use a lot of everything which means a lot of dark malts. If you keep them in proportion i.e. add double the patent but also double the base malt relative to a more modest stout then you should be OK as the base malt will buffer the patent. But if you double the base malt an quadruple the patent then pH will shift lower. I can't imagine that such a beer would taste very good by my tastes and yours are probably not the same and you might wish to make such a beer.

And the other ion concentrations are a bit more key as far as flavor and balance and should be taken care of, while the RA can be put aside for darker brews at the levels I am starting at.
The two big myths out of the home brewing literature of the last decade were that one needs huge RA for dark beers and that one must have a particular sulfate to chloride ratio. Sulfate and chloride do both effect flavor but not in antipodal ways. Use as much of each as is needed for the flavor effects you want. It should be obvious that 10 mg/L of each does not give the same 'balance' as 100 or 200 mg/L of each.
 
Thank you for the very detailed information! I had to deal with "myths" and such earlier on (always rack to secondary, etc.), so it is interesting to see some more waves of them come along.

The two big myths out of the home brewing literature of the last decade were that one needs huge RA for dark beers and that one must have a particular sulfate to chloride ratio. Sulfate and chloride do both effect flavor but not in antipodal ways. Use as much of each as is needed for the flavor effects you want. It should be obvious that 10 mg/L of each does not give the same 'balance' as 100 or 200 mg/L of each.

I had gathered that a bit about the ratios. It makes sense that if I have one high for some flavor reason, I wouldn't want to automatically pump the other up to "balance" the ratio. Same with a low value. I see it more as a side-check; make the profile, see what the ration looks like, and see if I give a darn about actually changing it at all.

So, when I brew my RIS tomorrow, should I do a pH measurement and just use a stabilizer if it seems I am off enough to be an issue? Or would you recommend avoiding such products unless I am WAY off?
 
So, when I brew my RIS tomorrow, should I do a pH measurement...
Always until you are experienced enough to know where your pH is going to go and even then on occasion as a check. I'd be ready with some, preferably, pickling lime, but if you don't have that, some sodium bicarbonate. Use either only if the pH is really low: below 5.2 as indicated on a meter or below 4.9 as indicated by strips. These are lower than you would really like but I'm thinking the dangers from you overdoing the dosing and winding up chasing pH all over creation are greater than the dangers of slightly low mash pH. If you can find time to practice on a small test mash before brew day then you could try to tweak mash pH to 5.4-5.5 as indicated by a meter or 0.3 less than that as shown by strips.

... and just use a stabilizer if it seems I am off enough to be an issue? Or would you recommend avoiding such products unless I am WAY off?

I listed the two biggest myths from the last 10 years in my previous post. Guess what the third is? If you guessed that it is that mash pH stabilizers based on phosphate buffers actually work you were spot on. This is inherent in the nature of the phosphate system - it's pK's straddle the desired range of pH and midway between pK's is where buffers have minimum effect.
 
There is a correlation between beer color and necessary water RA to get the mash pH into a desirable range. But the correlation that John found was not correct. I did some work on that and found that roasted malts don't contribute as much acidity per unit of color as crystal malts do. And because most really dark beers get most of their color from roasted malts they don't need nearly as much RA as one may think. Here is something I published based on research I did in 2009 : http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php?title=Beer_color,_alkalinity_and_mash_pH

There are a few tables at the bottom that show RA for color and the percentage of color that comes from roasted malts.

As A.J pointed out until recently the primary additive for increasing RA was calcium carbonate. But I noticed that calcium carbonate is not as effective at raising mash pH as one would think. What happened is that brewers added lots of chalk thinking it would get them the high RA that was needed. Fortunately chalk is not able to raise the mash pH all that much and the beers turned out fine. In many cases they turned out better than w/o the chalk since they needed some increased RA. Because of that John's spreadsheet was not questioned.

Kai
 
AJ, that is what I was thinking about the buffers. I am not one to trust much a single ingredient to do such things, as there are way too many variables from brew to brew.

Kaiser, thanks for the info on that all. I will give the spreadsheet a look over as well as the site (took a glance, will read in detail later). Thanks for all the info!

What I am getting from this is really to only worry if my pH is out of range, and not worry if I hit a good pH even if the RA seems off.
 
What I am getting from this is really to only worry if my pH is out of range, and not worry if I hit a good pH even if the RA seems off.

"RA being off" depends on how RA is calculated. If the necessary RA is calculated correctly it won't be "off".

Kai
 
Well Kaiser, according you your spreadsheet (with me sitting at 87% roasted as it is VERY heavy handed), without any additions I am sitting at an estimated (I understand the term estimated) mash pH of 5.42, which means I am just going to brew with my water straight and see what the pH comes out to, and fly from there.

edit: If I plan to add the Roasted grains at the end of the mash, will that change this? Would you aim a water profile for the without roasted or the with roasted?
 
Stone Brewing brews its RIS with San Diego water that has an even lower RA than your. So yes, you'll be fine w/o any additional alkalinity.

Kai
 
Well. Just mashed, used a pH strip, and with adding 0.3 I got 4.7-4.9 (hard yo tell exactly). So, seems I am a bit low! This is my control batch, will do this one again with adjusted water and see this difference. The beer is my best one, so no such thing as too much!
 
OK, I used the "EZ Water Calculator", which estimated my pH to be 5.6; the "Kaiser Water Calculator" says 5.3 (87% roast); however, my mash says 4.7! That is with pulling a few drops off after the mash went for about 15 minutes, let them cool for a short bit, and used a pH strip (adding 0.3 to the value). I got a 63% efficiency, on my smaller / lighter colored ales I tend to hit my 75%.

This is with no water adjustments.

To get the calculated mash pH that low I have to do some REALLY weird stuff to my starting values.

Sooooo.... where is the most likely place I could be going wrong?
 
15lb base malt
1lb victory
1lb roasted barley
0.5lb black patent
0.5lb Crystal 60
0.5lb Crystal 60
0.5lb carapils

Mashed at 1qt/lb
 
Why such a thick mash at 1 qt/lb? With Kai's findings, I've moved to 1.5 qt/lb as my typical. Is your mash tun too small?

19lb of grain absorb 2.375 gallons. At 1.5qt/lb I am mashing with 7.125 gallons. First runoff is 4.75 gallons. For a pre-boil volume of 6.5 gallons (5.25 gallon final, 60 minute boil) that leaves only 1.75 gallons to do two batch sparges with. So mashing think is impractical, as my efficiency would suffer even more.
 
I figured that the mash had to be thick. But regardless of the thickness I'm estimating a distilled water pH of 5.5. Even if the base malt would be a low pH base malt like Rahr (that one had DI water pH of 5.5 in my testing) the DI water pH of the grist would only fall to 5.3.

I think I have to run more experiments with grists high in dark malts.

But 4.7 is awfully low. It's not unlikely that there may have been an issue reading the strips. The 4.7 pH range is what I measured when I mashed only roasted malt. Since there is also base malt in this grist I would expect the mash pH to be at least in the 5s
 
I tested twice, used my artist wife to help with the color. I had dipped in my mash paddle, let drips land on a clean cool glass plate, waiting a few minutes, then dipped the sample. At it 2 seconds then read it. Thia was after 15 minutes mashing. Could be the strips though. Would it be smart for me to add the dark grains later o reduce the pH hit? That is if what I read was real.
 
let drips land on a clean cool glass plate, waiting a few minutes, then dipped the sample. At it 2 seconds then read it.

I don't think that is the proper procedure for using the strips. I think you should use at least a sample that is as much as a tsp to submerge the strips in it. The problem is that the strips themselves act as an acid and when there is too little sample the strips themselves may skew the results. It's hard to tell if this could have been the cause, though.

Kai
 
That could have been part of the problem. I think however next batch I am going to do water adjustments usin the spreadsheets found and will do the larger sample with the pH strip. I suppose not having a "pure" sample isn't terribly necessary is I have the sheets to use as reference.

Is there a general rule for pH offset at mash temperatures? I plan to do at mash and at room temp to get the offset myself, but am a bit curious.
 
This was a timely thread. I just ordered a replacement probe for my pH meter and plan on doing a small stove top test mash on my RIS recipe. If I undershoot my test mash by several points how much pickling lime would you suggest adding to the test mash (say 1.5# grain) or full mash (25#) with about 1.25qt/gal? I do have an accurate gram scale and I have the same water profile as the OP.

Edit: I should add that I plan on adding about 1g/gal of calcium chloride to my mash to get the calcium level up for the yeast.
 
I guess I'd do it this way. Base malts seem to have a buffering capacity of 25 mEq/kg-pH so figure how much you want to raise the pH and multiply that times 25*the number of kg of malt you mashed to get the number of mEq you need. Pickling lime has an equivalent weight of 37 mg/mEq. Multiply that by the equivalent weight of pickling lime thus

wt_lime ~ Delta_pH*25*kg_malt*37

Example: You get mash pH 4.9. After waiting a few minutes to be sure it isn't increasing on its own (which it often does) you decide to raise to 4.4 i.e. by 0.5 pH. You mashed 10 kg of malt (22 lbs). The lime required would be 0.5*25*10*37 = 4625 mg. I'd start by adding 1/3 or one half that, stirring it in and checking pH. Then add another small portion of the total. You don't want to overshoot.
 
A.J, you are forgetting about the PH lowering effect of the calcium that is in pickling lime

The pH lowering effect of the added calcium would be minor, but real. A better way for a brewer to assess and predict lime addition is with Bru'n Water. The pH lowering effect of the calcium and the pH raising effect of the hydroxide are incorporated.
 
The pH lowering effect of the added calcium would be minor, but real. A better way for a brewer to assess and predict lime addition is with Bru'n Water. The pH lowering effect of the calcium and the pH raising effect of the hydroxide are incorporated.

An even better way is this: http://www.brewersfriend.com/mash-chemistry-and-brewing-water-calculator/

which makes a difference between the alkalinity derived from OH- vs. the alkalinity derived from bicarbonate. There is a difference.

Kai
 
Each equivalent of Ca(OH)2 would raise the alkalinity by 1 equivalent. The calcium would reduce it by 1/3.5 equivalent. The net gain is thus 2.5/3.5 = 0.71 Eq. I'd rather have him undershoot than overshoot.
 
Hey folks,

So going to brew again next chance I get and use a better volume of water. That being said, for my RIS, I have made this water profile:

Calcium: 73
Magnesium: 31
Sodium: 60
Sulfates: 77
Chloride: 67
Bicarbonates: 300

For a really roast, big RIS with mild hop notes I think this would work from what research I have done. I am getting, according to the Kaiser sheet, a mash between 5.4 and 5.5 pH. Seems reasonable?
 

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