EZ Water Cream Ale

[Dog House Brew]

I have soome pretty hard water so I'm doing an 18 gallon batch of cream ale, 4.4 SRM tomorrow. Built the water from 100% RO to get -51 RA. (from Palmer) I went to Palmers spread sheet and built the same, but noticed it didn't say anysthing about sparge water additions. Inserted the Palmer numbers into EZ, and EZ stated I needed to add 3g Gypsum, 7g CaCl, and 4.3 Epsom to the boil. Which of these is correct? I also noticed that when I dilute my sparge water 50% with my water it didn't chage any of the additions to the boil, but did change the totals in the water. Any harm in diluting the sparge 50% with my water, HCO3 169, CaCO3 139,
total hardness 215?

Thanks, My first time building 100% RO

 

[Dog House Brew]

I ended up using Kai's spread sheet with both mash and boil additions. Using gypsum, calcium chloride and epsom. I don't have a gram scale, so I used tsp, and 1/4 tsp to make up my additions. The spread sheet calculated 5.4 mash ph in my RO built water/mash. Came out to around 5 by my ph strip, which I know are not perfect. This could be due to the inaccuracies of not having a scale. Better than nothing I guess. The boil ph came out around the same. I hope being around 5 ph isn't too low. Not sure what low will do. I did use 50% tap for the sparge. I did learn that ph test strips can be really hard to see the differences when matching the color. I've never had this trouble with darker beers, but I had trouble with telling where the ph was. They were colorphast strips by the way. Great spread sheet by the way.

 

[remilard]

As for the OP, it is absolutely not ever a good idea to add alkalinity to sparge water.

The pH strips read .3 low on average and there is also the poor resolution and potential error in reading them (they always read different under different light sources for me) so I would not be alarmed at 5.0 when I was expecting 5.4 as the systematic error adjustment gets you to 5.3 and you can't expect to be within .1 with strips.

 

[Dog House Brew]

As for the OP, it is absolutely not ever a good idea to add alkalinity to sparge water.

The pH strips read .3 low on average and there is also the poor resolution and potential error in reading them (they always read different under different light sources for me) so I would not be alarmed at 5.0 when I was expecting 5.4 as the systematic error adjustment gets you to 5.3 and you can't expect to be within .1 with strips.

I tried my hardest to read the color shade and I thought it was just me. I guess I really need a meter. I also didn't know they read .3 low. Thanks for that. Now I know why I've always read low on all my batches. The spread sheets jave been really acurate for prdicting my mash ph. Thanks again for the info.