Water, beer & Ward Labs Experiment...

I wanted to post this here and see if any of the waterheads thought that some good info could be gained from this experiment. I posted the THREAD in the GENERAL forum but feel free to make comments here as it's probably more relevant. I know Martin commented on the NB forum so big ups to him for replying. Cheers.

Ken, it appears your RO water supplier needs to change the filter. I don't know what the legal parameters are for the classification of RO water for sale or if there even are any but I can see where you aren't going to get your CO3 number down as much as you would like by diluting with it. I agree that distilled water would be a better starting point for your lighter beers.

As for the Pilsner Urquell I have no basis for a response. Some of the numbers, like Magnesium, Chloride and total hardness seem off the scale. Is Urquell adding Magnesium Chloride somewhere in the process? And if they are, why? As you said does the alcohol content of the beer skew the ion readings of the test? There is some Magnesium content in malt but AFAIK it is nowhere near that number and the chloride content is puzzling.

Malt is typically 0.13% magnesium by weight. Thus if you mash 1 kg of malt with 3L of water the magnesium content will be 1.3/3 = 433 mg/L in the mash tun.

I brew Helles with a chloride content of 56 mg/L in all the water. The chloride content of the finished beer is 177 mg/L. Thus 121 mg/L is coming from somewhere else and that somewhere is the malt with, perhaps, a small contribution from the hops. Plants do absorb chloride from the soil.

As I noted in the forum where the original post lives there is something fishy about the alkalinity as most labs titrate to 4.5 and thus any sample with pH 4.5 has, by definition, alkalinity = 0. So maybe these guys titrate to 4.3. Even if they did an alkalinity of 70 defined by titration to pH 4.3 implies a bicarbonate concentration of 227 mg/L accompanied by 17.6 grams/L dissolved CO2 (approximately 6.3 Volumes). The calculated bicarbonate on the report uses the *= 61/50 rule which does not apply at pH 4.5. CO2 at about 1.5 vols would result in an alkalinity of 16 and a bicarbonate level of about 50 mg/L. Something is definitely hokey with the alkalinity and bicarbonate numbers.

Good information and mostly beyond the ability of my simple brain. I don't mean to ask you to do a project but from these numbers, could you reasonably arrive at what the PU water might have looked like before it was used to make the beer? I realize you see the bicarb and alkalinity numbers as off and I agree that those numbers surprised me but I'm not looking at them from the same angle you are. Your explanation of the magnesium and chloride makes sense and explains those high numbers. I assume that anything concrete we may learn from this would have to be based on some non-concrete assumptions, variables and estimations. Not sure that it would be worth it but could be interesting to at least "think" we knew what the original water looked like. Thanks for running through this and replying to the thread... much appreciated.

It would be impossible to tell whether they are treating their water or not. Malt also contains a lot of calcium so one can't conclude anything about water treatment from the calcium numbers than he can from the chloride. For years PU did not treat their water but they now do a lot of things they didn't used to do and the beer isn't the same. They may have discovered, along with the rest of us, that chloride leads to mellower beer and they may indeed be dosing some CaCl2 into their mash liquor. The reason I use calcium chloride in my Pilsners is exactly this (with a seconday goal of having calcium oxalate precipitate in the lagering vessel rather than in my kidneys - been there and don't wish to be there again). Yes, their chloride is higher than mine but they may be using malt grown in a region with saltier soil than mine. Or they may be adding calcium chloride.

The most interesting thing to me in this is that the reported chloride levels for their beer are approaching 200 mg/L - the level above which beer is supposed to start tasting 'pasty'. Or perhaps it is that beers made with water with chloride above 200 mg/L taste 'pasty' because the chloride level in the beer is 100 or more ppm higher than this.

Okay, good stuff. I still plan to make a beer as we discussed in the other thread (pilsners & water) with 100% distilled with the 3g (or so) of CaCl. My experiment yielded some good info... 1) my RO water is not what I thought it was (although I could still brew with it and/or dilute it) and 2) the PU experiment was interesting but not necessarily informative. Thanks for the help gang.