MagicMatt
Brewmathemagician
So I'm doing a Lagunitas IPA clone this weekend and want to nail the water profile suggestion as best I can. It suggests to "Burtonize water".
I typically use 10-20% tap water (the rest DI) for my brews. I am using Beersmith's Water Profile tool and getting some strange behavior. I've already set up my tap water as a profile, and choose that option in the "Base Profile" section (1 gallon). (Profile is Ca:48, Mg:12, Na:30, SO4:17, Cl:38, HCO3:130).
Next I select "Distilled Water" as the profile to "Dilute With" (can't remember if I made this profile or if it was in Beersmith already, but it's all zeroes with a pH of 6). I set the volume for this step at 8.76 gallons. Finally, I select the Burton on Trent water profile as the Target.
When I click "Calculate Best Additions", it adds only 3.4g gypsum, 2.1g epsom, 0.1g CaCl, 0.9g NaHCO3, and 0.7g CaCO3. The resulting profile is still worlds away from the target. Every number is off, by as little as 19 (Cl) to 649 (SO4) ppm. What gives? It's like it only adds enough for the 1 gallon of tap and doesn't account for the dilution.
What I ended up doing was just diluting the tap numbers myself and plugging those in as the "base profile" numbers and setting the volume to the full 9.76 gallons. When doing this (and not using the Dilute section), it does get the numbers pretty close.
And as a secondary question, when I get it to be close to the target, it wants me to add like 30g of gypsum and 20g epsom, which brings the SO4 to around 720ppm. This seems a bit excessive, no? Should I just say eff it and stick to AJ's primer regarding 'bitter' beers?
I typically use 10-20% tap water (the rest DI) for my brews. I am using Beersmith's Water Profile tool and getting some strange behavior. I've already set up my tap water as a profile, and choose that option in the "Base Profile" section (1 gallon). (Profile is Ca:48, Mg:12, Na:30, SO4:17, Cl:38, HCO3:130).
Next I select "Distilled Water" as the profile to "Dilute With" (can't remember if I made this profile or if it was in Beersmith already, but it's all zeroes with a pH of 6). I set the volume for this step at 8.76 gallons. Finally, I select the Burton on Trent water profile as the Target.
When I click "Calculate Best Additions", it adds only 3.4g gypsum, 2.1g epsom, 0.1g CaCl, 0.9g NaHCO3, and 0.7g CaCO3. The resulting profile is still worlds away from the target. Every number is off, by as little as 19 (Cl) to 649 (SO4) ppm. What gives? It's like it only adds enough for the 1 gallon of tap and doesn't account for the dilution.
What I ended up doing was just diluting the tap numbers myself and plugging those in as the "base profile" numbers and setting the volume to the full 9.76 gallons. When doing this (and not using the Dilute section), it does get the numbers pretty close.
And as a secondary question, when I get it to be close to the target, it wants me to add like 30g of gypsum and 20g epsom, which brings the SO4 to around 720ppm. This seems a bit excessive, no? Should I just say eff it and stick to AJ's primer regarding 'bitter' beers?