Brewing Salts and abosrbition/boil off

Howdy all!
Couple questions about water adjustments;

If I don't care about adjusting the pH during the mash from salts, is there any reason I can't just add the salts to the boil kettle rather than to my mash water / sparge water?

I use calculators to figure out what my water profile will be after salt additions. However non of these calculators I have found give a post-boil number. Wouldn't the ions be heavier concentrated due to boil-off? Should I add salts by calculating the final volume rather than initial, or am I missing something? Does a 10-15% increase in salts from boil-off really not make a difference?

Thanks for any help!

Yes, you can add salts in the kettle. However, you will loose the beneficial effect of the calcium salts in the mash where they reduce mash pH and help remove oxalate. To me, that is a worthwhile consideration.

If your boil vigor and length is producing the typical 10% volume loss, there isn't really a need to concern yourself with the 'concentrated' ion concentrations. That would just be one more PITA calculation that is no more valuable than the initial concentrations. However, if your boil is reducing the wort volume significantly more, then you need to be concerned with the concentrated ion concentrations. Under this condition, you can easily have too much ionic content and the beer flavor can be adversely affected. Then you would need to reduce your mineral additions to account for the extra boil-off.

Awesome, thanks for the reply. My NaCl additions tend to be very small, and splitting it between strike and sparge water was difficult, so figuring I could just add it to the boil.

One more question; I really need to treat my Sparge water as well, because if I put all of my salts in the mash water a lot of those ions will be lost to the water absorbed by the grains, correct? It makes sense to me, but I want to make sure I'm not missing something. Otherwise I will not only have less of the salts that get through to the kettle, but it will get diluted even further by the clean sparge water.

Not to hijack Tall_Yotie, but your posing a similar question i'd like answered..

If im on a 3 Vessel herms, and fly sparging what is the proper technique for minerals? Up until now ive been calculating additions for 19 Gallons(Full HLT) and just mash and sparge with the same water which more or less is what Bru'n Water says to do anyways(Split the mash and sparge additions). This of course is only for things like Gypsum/CaCarbonate, not things that shouldnt go in the Sparge water, or acid additions.

Tall_Yotie said:

One more question; I really need to treat my Sparge water as well, because if I put all of my salts in the mash water a lot of those ions will be lost to the water absorbed by the grains, correct?

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Not really. Calcium is lost in the mash due to reactions there, but they are beneficial. The other ions are fairly soluble and make it through the mash fairly well. Don't worry about those losses.

mabrungard said:

Not really. Calcium is lost in the mash due to reactions there, but they are beneficial. The other ions are fairly soluble and make it through the mash fairly well. Don't worry about those losses.

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Awesome, thanks. I was thinking on the extreme case of if I put all my salts in the mash and did it thick enough that all the water was absorbed, the non-treated sparge water would just go through and not bring through any of those ions. Good to know though!