got my water results, help?

OK ever since i moved, my pale ales/ipas have been awful. i have hopped the daylights out of them and cant seem to get any hop flavor. no bitterness, decent aroma, not much hop flavor. ive bought new yeast, new hops, new grain and it never has changed the hoppiness. my brew process hasnt changed, other than now im on a city water supply. before i was on well water and never added any minerals as i was very happy with my results. so i sent my water off to ward labs and this is what i got:

pH 7.8

Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) Est, ppm 49

Electrical Conductivity, mmho/cm 0.08

Cations / Anions, me/L 0.7 / 0.7

ppm

Sodium, Na 4

Potassium, K < 1

Calcium, Ca 10

Magnesium, Mg < 1

Total Hardness, CaCO3 29

Nitrate, NO3-N < 0.1 (SAFE)

Sulfate, SO4-S 1

Chloride, Cl 4

Carbonate, CO3 < 1

Bicarbonate, HCO3 29

Total Alkalinity, CaCO3 23

Total Phosphorus, P 0.01

Total Iron, Fe 0.04

"<" - Not Detected / Below Detection Limit



I guess what i would really need to do is to get the well water from my old house tested and see how it compared. any help you can provide with this water would be appreciated.

if water isnt the issue, my next router is going to be changing my kegerator lines and buying a new fermenting bucket.

That is pretty amazing water already. Very nearly R/O, very low alkalinity.

You may want to add a bit of mineralization, such as recommended in the Primer stickied here in this section. Look at the recommendations for very bitter or British beers with additions of gypsum and calcium chloride. I would also highly recommend getting a pH meter and looking carefully at your room temperature mash pH, getting that into the right range. The primer can help with that also.

You should, of course, treat that water for chlorine/chloramines before mashing.

Another great source of information is https://sites.google.com/site/brunwater/water-knowledge and the new book on Water by Palmer & Kaminski

Get palmers book it has great info for water.

These are good vids too




I'm curious how your Andes mint stout turned out. I've been thinking about doing one.

For some beer styles, very low mineralization is OK. However for hoppy American and British styles, mineralization is necessary to create the flavors and perceptions you expect with those beers. The primary component lacking in that otherwise outstanding water source is sulfate. That is what creates the pop you are missing. The pale ale profile in Bru'n Water is focused on enhancing the character desired in that style. Be aware that your tap water will require some alkalinity if you choose to bring the sulfate content into the 300 ppm range since you will be adding a lot of calcium too. That will depress the residual alkalinity of the mashing water too much and the mash pH will be too low. Overly low mash pH echos into the kettle wort pH and that low pH does diminish the hop expression and bitterness. So be aware of the alkalinity need if you boost the sulfate that much.

An alternative is to add only enough gypsum to drive the mash pH down to around 5.4 and just live with the amount of sulfate. That might be a good first step if you want to toy with mineral adjustment for your hoppy beers.

Thanks for the replies and sorry for my late response!

Sounds like i need to invest in a PH meter. Any suggestions?

insanim8er - I havent been able to brew the mint stout to my liking yet. The cocoa powder is always too dominant and bitter. I believe next time i will leave it out completely and try adding some in secondary somehow. I think if i toned down the cocoa powder, it would be great.

I'm super jealous!!! You can build just about any water you want from that.

My quick two cents:

I have very similar water and my IPAs used to suffer from the same fate as yours. MABrungard's post above reflects the solution that worked very well for me.

I hadn't been paying attention to my water profiles at all when brewing. But once I started tweaking them to better enhance a beer's specific characteristics, they really started to "pop" (as he says.) His particular spreadsheet for modifying brewing water has been a game changer for me.

For example, my most recent IPA (which I was very pleased with) had the following profile:

Ca: 129
Mg: 1
Na: 30
Sulfate: 265
Chloride: 19

This is what I started with:

Ca: 4
Mg: 1
Na: 30
Sulfate: 9
Chloride: 19

To get there it took 16.7g of gypsum total in the 9 gallons of mash / sparge water. I also used a bit of lactic acid to get the pH right where I needed it for the mash.

Thanks for your input MrHadack. I hope to brew again in the next couple weeks and see how it goes. What type of pH meter are you using?

Where can i find the spreadsheet you mention?

Here you go:

https://sites.google.com/site/brunwater/

Real nice piece of work on this spreadsheet. I recommend going for the pay version for it's improved ease of use and higher precision pH reporting. However, the free version is great as well.


Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew

nootay said:

Thanks for your input MrHadack. I hope to brew again in the next couple weeks and see how it goes. What type of pH meter are you using?

Click to expand...

PlinyTheMiddleAged posted the link to the sheet just above. When you get the sheet, I recommend taking the time to read the section called "Water Knowledge" first.

As for pH meter, this has been my favorite: EcoTstr pH2

It's waterproof, holds its calibration really well, and is very easy to use. A quick note: it says it is "temperature correcting" but you should still only test samples of your wort at normal room temperature (cool them first) because warmer temps can damage the meter.

That meter only reads to 0.1 pH which is marginal for brewing as we often make adjustments to water and mash chemistry that cause pH changes less than that. Someone will respond to this saying that 0.1 is plenty good enough for brewing. If you share that opinion then you don't need a higher resolution meter. I don't share that opinion for the reason given.

There are a couple of new offerings for around $100 that have the 0.01 resolution and commensurate accuracy by which I mean that the readings are stable. Unless you really need that extra $40 I would recommend one of those. I personally have only tested the Hach PocketPro + and found it to be a very good meter for the price but can't answer as to whether it will continue to be so two years from now.

The mysteries of ATC (Automatic Temperature Compensation) and how to best use meters equipped with it are discussed at https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f128/ph-meter-calibration-302256/

ajdelange said:

That meter only reads to 0.1 pH which is marginal for brewing as we often make adjustments to water and mash chemistry that cause pH changes less than that. Someone will respond to this saying that 0.1 is plenty good enough for brewing. If you share that opinion then you don't need a higher resolution meter. I don't share that opinion for the reason given.

Click to expand...

Not to get off topic, but does a couple hundredths of a point make that much of a difference? I don't ask in a dismissive manner, but out of genuine curiosity. What noticeable difference would there be in a mash that says 5.4 on my reader, but when measured on yours it reads 5.36?

Or, is it because of "accuracy" and "stability" as you mentioned, that my meter might be +/- 0.1 and yours more along the lines of +/- 0.01 on all readings?

The way I understand things currently (perhaps incorrectly as I have had several of these epiphanies over the last year or so of my brewing) is that while 5.4 may be ideal, but the range of 5.3 - 5.5 room-temperature pH is a perfectly acceptable ballpark. At least, for the average home brewer. Mind you, I make sure my meter is calibrated and I adjust to hit the 5.4 target every time, but I never thought the difference between, say, 5.36 and 5.44 would ever cause much of an issue.

Looking at your example in which my meter reads 5.36 and your reads 4 and let's say I have found through experiment that a particular beer is best when the mash pH is 5.44. I know I need to make an adjustment (on the next batch most probably because 0.08 pH, while it can make a fairly big difference, isn't the difference between ruined and delicious beer). With the 0.01 resolution meter (and assuming attending accuracy of 0.02 or so) I know I have potential for improvement. You don't.

Now a particular typical grist has a mash pH of 5.36 with 1.9% sauermalz. I propose to raise the pH by the 0.08 points by reducing the sauermalz to 0.6% of grist and do so. My meter will now read close to 5.44 - the target - while your meter will still read 5.4. We've removed over half the sauermalz and you would conclude that nothing happened. This is, I think, the biggest reason for wanting resolution of 0.01 rather than 0.1. The desirable range of mash pH is, perhaps, 5.3 - 5.6. A meter than only reads to 0.1 divides that range into three chunks. Perhaps it would be helpful to think about how you would manage mash temperature if you had a thermometer that read in 5 ° increments i.e. 140, 145, 150, 155, ...

If going from 0.1 to 0.01 resolution added a couple of hundred $ to the cost of a meter then I'd be singing a different song but it doesn't any more.

Thanks, AJ. The gap in knowledge for me here was where that just-noticeable-difference was for mash pH; at what point will someone cease to notice the difference in the finished product? I'm not a super-taster by any stretch and I don't participate in competition of any type so "5.4" was always "good enough." I can definitely see the benefit now, though, and those illustrations were very helpful.

I thought I was making good beer before I paid attention to chemistry. After I learned what I could about pH, water profiles, etc, my beer was improved quite a bit. Despite what I just finished saying above, who's to say I wouldn't notice another step forward by really dialing in the pH further? Looks like I may be buying a new meter soon. Thanks again.

Don't be in too much of a hurry to toss the current meter. In the example I gave in #15 the numbers were a bit contrived in order to illustrate what can happen. On average, if a meter is rock stable and has 1 decimal place of precision the rms error attributable to that precision is 0.0288 pH with an overall accuracy, assuming 2 point calibration with ±0.02 buffers of about 0.03. In a meter with 0.01 resolution which is equally stable the error from the precision is about 0.0029. As this is less than the error introduced by the buffers the buffers become the dominant error source and you would have an rms error (i.e. an average error magnitude) of about 0.015 (at mash pH). Thus the rms error in a meter with 0.01 precision is about half, ceteris paribus, that of a meter with precision of 0.1. This is the argument we would advance if the higher precision were expensive. Of course a manufacturer who makes a unit with 0.1 precision does not strive to measure voltage or temperature to the same accuracy as the guy who is building units with 0.01 precision so the actual rms accuracy of an 0.1 meter may be worse than 0.03. I note no accuraccy spec is given for the Oakton meter in question (at least I can't find one). I'd suggest hanging on to this meter and when it eventually goes TU replacing it with one with the finer precision.