Precipitating out bicarbonates

I have extremly high amounts of bicarbonates with almost no calcium. I have read you can precipitate out bicarbonates by boiling. Does anyone do this and if they do are you have any better luck with mash pH?

Madison has hi carbonate levels, something over 300 ppm of something or another which makes for nasty pale ales and IPA's but decent stout & porters.

I used the method in Palmer's book How to Brew were you add some kind of mineral( calcium carbonate,1 tsp per 3-5 gal, but, if total alkalinity is greater than total hardness, calcium sulfate or CA chloride to equalize the two...blah, blah, blah.(pg. 39)), to create nucleation sites for carbonates to precipitate out during a 10 min boil, and decant.

It seemed to help some but I ditched that method cuz it's a lot easier to just buy RO water from store and cut the tap water to achieve a lower carbonate level.

Boiling will remove the bicarbonates but you won't know by how much. Go with uuurang's approach and just dilute with RO or distilled water.

GT

I do the boiling to remove bicarbonates. Hard to say, how much does it help, I checked the temporary hardness with aquarium test: before boiling it was 6, after: 4. You can also see, that lots of the white staff stays on the bottom of the kettle.
I didn't add any calcium salts to the boiling, but I will try this trick, maybe it will help.

Lastly I also saw, and ordered such a chemical:
Brupaks CARBONATE REDUCING SOLUTION - 250ml
but I didn't try it yet. When I do, I'll let you know how it works.

uuurang said:

Madison has hi carbonate levels, something over 300 ppm of something or another which makes for nasty pale ales and IPA's but decent stout & porters.

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I agree. This Madison water kills me, and i hate dropping an extra $5 for water each brew day. Really, it's more about an extra trip to the grocery store

Apologies for thread-jacking, but all the madison folks inspired the question. Anyone have a full water report (or a link to one) that would be useful to brewers, e.g. levels of Ca2+, Cl-, CO3?

You have to input your address here. Then decide which well to look at (summer vs. winter). If you are fed by multiple wells, they're usually pretty similar in their results.

I use bicarb precipitation all the time for my brews.
Works perfectly, just treat the water the day before you brew.
You should fine tune the amount of pickling lime for the type of beer.
Lighter beers take more and darker beers need less pickling lime to hit desired pH.

Is the pickling lime what Noonen talks about in Brewing Lager beer?

I use pickling lime (and potassium metabisulfite) with my tap water. I set it up at least a day in advance to let all of the calcium carbonate settle out. I add ~ 1 tsp of pickling lime per 5 gal of water. I have fairly high calcium too so I don't worry about adding any back. I do check my pH after mashing in as the lime can mess up the pH if you add too much.

You can pick up pickling lime very inexpensively at most suppermarkets in the canning supplies section.


Another technique I've read about but haven't yet tested is to simply bubble the water with air. Over time, water will slowly decarbonate itself to reach equlibrium with the C02 in the air. How long, it takes, wasn't mentioned in the references I found. One day soon I will test this. I bought a test for carbonates so I'm going to set up some water on a bubbler and take samples every other day for 2 weeks and then I'll measure their carbonate levels. I'm going to set up a bubbler flask before the test water to humidify the air to minimize evaporation of the test water.

I'm hoping it takes just a week so then I'll just look around for a 10-20 gallon container to keep continually on a bubbler (not the Milwaukee kind of bubbler) that I would just drain out of and top off as needed.

I start my brew day by heading to Wally World and paying 25 cents per gallon to refill gallon jugs with RO water. I then dilute 2:1 or 3:1 RO to hard water, and then treat with gypsum or CaCl2 to dial in the mash pH. Our water is 430ppm bicarbonate (off the charts).

I could precipitate out the bicarb, but why bother; I would spend a bunch of time and energy boiling the water, and then I would have to spend another 15 minutes on brew day scrubbing the scale out of the bottom of the pot. No thanks... My time is worth a few bucks for the RO water!

We've got crazy high bicarbonate levels here, too - something like 469 ppm!

I've had good luck with using acid additions to neutralize the alkalinity, OR diluting with A LOT of RO water, OR using 100% RO water and adding minerals to the desired levels. I also use the 5.2 pH buffer just to be sure.

We are 250 ppm of bicarbonates so not bad like yours, however we are 1 ppm for calcuim and maganeise.

How do you add acid? Noonen says until water ph is 7 but I don't have a ph meter. Do you notice a sour flavor with the amount you add? What kind of acid and where do you get it?

I am going to really have to start dilluting down the tap water, or at least paying attention to it. I've used it as is for a few German style lagers, and it turned out fine. Didn't think about it before brewing the Pilsner though. Didn't turn out so hot.

modenacart said:

We are 250 ppm of bicarbonates so not bad like yours, however we are 1 ppm for calcuim and maganeise.

How do you add acid? Noonen says until water ph is 7 but I don't have a ph meter. Do you notice a sour flavor with the amount you add? What kind of acid and where do you get it?

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Palmer's got a spreadsheet at www.howtobrew.com that can help you determine how much acid (depending on the acid and your water profile) you should add. There are some others on the web, too.

CHansen6 said:

I am going to really have to start dilluting down the tap water, or at least paying attention to it. I've used it as is for a few German style lagers, and it turned out fine. Didn't think about it before brewing the Pilsner though. Didn't turn out so hot.

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I noticed the after taste on all my beers have been really dull and kind of soapy so I decided to mess with my water. I added about 1 lb of acid malt to my last stout and it took away the dull soapy flavor. Its worth it to me to play with the water after that.

Lil' Sparky said:

Palmer's got a spreadsheet at www.howtobrew.com that can help you determine how much acid (depending on the acid and your water profile) you should add. There are some others on the web, too.

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I will have to give that a shot. Where did you get your acid?

I picked up some lactic acid from AHS when I placed an order.