Are you saying Palmer's nomograph is a hoax?
Yes, if the spreadsheets are based on it, in the sense that hundreds of the naive cleave to it as a simple way out of a very complex problem and are terribly misled as soon as the color of the beer gets darkish. I usually use stouts as an example because Guiness extra stout has an SRM of 67. The EZ spreadsheet tells me that if I add 65 grams of chalk to 5 gallons of DI water I'd get water with an RA of 707 and that the "pH will be suitable for a color range of 63 - 78". Do you really believe that? Should anyone believe that? It would be insane to brew any beer with an RA that high. I doubt if you could find any natural water with an RA that high. Yet many do believe what the spreadsheet tells them and willy nilly add tablespoonsfulls of chalk to their brews. I've brewed some pretty bad beers in my day but none that would taste as bad as a stout with 65 grams of chalk thrown into it.
Further to this it takes appreciably less than 65 grams in 5 gal to get an RA of 707 Each 100 mg CaCO3 contributes 100 mg alkalinity "as CaCO3" (which is why we specify alkalinity that way). It also contributes 100 mg of hardness "as CaCO3". So it's effect on RA (alkalinity minus hardness/3.5) is 100*(1-1/3.5) = 100*2.5/3.5 = 71.4 mg as CaCO3. For an RA of 707 mg/L you would actually thus need 707/71.4 = 9.9 units of 100mg or 990 mg/L. That's 18.7 grams in 5 gal - a lot less than 65 grams but still way to much. So you are misleading users in 2 ways. First, by advising that they should have an RA much higher than it needs to be and second by telling them that more chalk is necessary to reach those RAs than is the case.
The reason you calculate such bizarre amounts of chalk is that you assume that it is already converted to bicarbonate. It takes acid to do that. If I supply enough acid to bring the calcium carbonate to pH 8.3 then the results (211) are about what the EZ spreadsheet calculates (203). This is a small difference and depends on the pH used to define alkalinity. If I use 4.7 then I get 203 for the RA. If I increase the acid by 10% beyond that the pH drops to 7.31, the alkalinity to 439 (from 485) and the RA to 157. If I add an equal amount of acid of the same strength to the EZ spreadsheet the alkalinity doesn't change (!) and the new RA is 182 so there are obviously problems there too.
I also offer that when I brew stout it usually comes in between 60 and 80, that I brew it with untreated water that has an RA of about 50, that I do not add chalk and that the pH is a lovely 5.5. This demonstrates that water with an RA of 50 produces a "pH suitable for this color: 60 - 80 SRM. I was just talking to my LHBS op yesterday about this. He said he once made the mistake of adding chalk to his stout and got, surprise, beer that's main characteristic was a pasty, chalky flavor.
Now for light beers things aren't so bad. I'll be doing a Kölsch tomorrow with nothing but enough CaCl2 (in RO water) to get to about 50 ppm Ca++. EZ tells me SRM 2 - 7 and that's fine. But I do my Bock same way. It's much darker at 25.8 SRM and EZ is telling me that I need an RA of 179 and 20 grams of chalk. That's ridiculous too. DI water plus some CaCl2 doesn't need base, it needs
acid (and I use it in the form of sauermalz).
He even listed you as a reference in his book. I guess he asked you the wrong questions.
I think he asked the right questions - I seem to remember his running the nomograph by me but clearly I didn't make my opposition to the concept clear enough or he chose to ignore it. I have no idea where he got the data from because if I try to do a color to RA fit I get a slope about 1/7th of his and Pearson's r is less than 50%. This is not a good basis for a "law" or even a rule of thumb.
I must say the spreadsheet has been working quite well for me...
I assume from this that you brew mostly light beers.
... and I'm not crazy about the "try this then try that" method you seem to propose alot.
When discussing mash pH I advocate the use of a pH meter to see to it that the goals which the RA adjustment purport to meet are actually met. In fact most beers will require some acid (and you will find that statement in professional brewing texts). But I recognize that many people cannot afford or do not wish to buy a pH meter. Given that then the only method for hitting mash pH properly seems to be diluting to get RA down and the use of lactic acid in its safest form - acidulated malt (safe in the sense that 1% of the grist by weight is pretty hard to screw up as opposed to mis-measuring or mis-calculating the liquid form of the acid.) Sauermalz does effect flavor and so it gets down to try 2% and see if you like the beer. Then try 3%. Is it better? Like it or not there are
no simple solutions. Trial and error will rule the day. That's why a skilled commercial brewer makes such good beer. He brews the same stuff week after week after week and learns which tweaks make his product better and which worse. And that's basically how you learn to make good beer to. It is quite possible that a beer with a 2% sauermalz addition might taste better than one with 3% even though the latter had a lower mash tun pH.
pH has a solid basis in brewing science. We want it low (though exactly how low is subject to debate). With sulfate and chloride it entirely different. These are stylistic ions and thus one must experiment to get the desired levels. It is not by any means universally accepted that there should be a certain ratio of sulfate to chloride in a particular style of beer (except most German lagers where the ratio should be 0) and thus, setting a chloride-sulfate lever, while it would be nice if it did work in all cases, doesn't. I'm not even sure they could be considered dependent in a spider diagram. I, for one, do not like what sulfate does to hops in any context but then I prefer continental lager to British ales in general.
That being said, if the spreadsheet is truly crap then I'll make changes or scrap all together if convinced to do so.
I've talked about where several things are wrong and I'd like to be able to tell you how to fix them simply but it just isn't that simple. All of water chemistry is pretty simple until you recognize that the heart of the matter is the chemistry of carbonic acid. To properly model that you have to consider the pH of the solution and see to it that it balances electrically at all times. I can show you how to do that (and am willing to do so) but it will not be simple. If you go to my website (
www.wetnewf.org) you can download the spreadsheet I use for this kind of calculations. A "simple" spreadsheet wouldn't need all the stuff in there about non-ideal solutions but you do need to model pH properly. The best way to "fix" the EZ spreadsheet at this point is to take the color dependence out or at least lower the slope of the RA vs SRM line appreciably. Then, a huge caveat about how this should only be used as a rough indicator as to what color traditional beers might have had based on the waters from which they were brewed.
