Help w pH for black IPA

[goondog]

Hello

beginner with water chem here. Full boil BIAB

my plan is a cipa with
1) 13# 2 row
2) 1# crystal 10L
3) 1# blackprinze 500L
4) 0.5 special roast 50L

i have tried to use brunwater and ez with my water and with 100% RO but i keep getting a requirement to add alkalinity. When i add baking soda it brings the Na way high and im having to use about 10gm of baking soda to the pH up to about 5.4
im guessing its the blackprinze driving the pH down

is that ok?

without the baking soda and alot of it i get a pH of 4.7 at room temp.

Im trying to avoid high sodium levels in the 80ppm range, but is dumping 10+gms of baking soda to alkali the strike water ok for this style of beer?? can i get away with a high Na level??

thx for any advice. im trying to figure out how to submit a screenshot of excel bc im an idiot...

 

[goondog]

hope this helps
thx!!

 

[mabrungard]

Its not a problem with the water chemistry, its a problem with the recipe. That seems like a lot of roasted grains. I find that you only want enough roast to bring the color where you want it. Roast flavor should be restrained.

 

[goondog]

Ill back the roasted amounts to about 5% instead of the posted 10% of grain bill. Maybe throw the remainder in at mash out to get color only.

Thanks for the help Martin!

 

[mabrungard]

That is still kind of high from my experience. I can obtain fairly dark color with only a couple percent of roast malts and they are contributing some roastiness to the flavor. An indirect example is my Munich Dunkel with about 1 percent Carafa Special and that gets the wort to about a brown color with virtually no roast flavors. I would think that you want some roastiness in a BIPA, but not at Porter or Stout levels.

 

[ajdelange]

Full boil BIAB

my plan is a cipa with
1) 13# 2 row
2) 1# crystal 10L
3) 1# blackprinze 500L
4) 0.5 special roast 50L

i have tried to use brunwater and ez with my water and with 100% RO but i keep getting a requirement to add alkalinity. When i add baking soda it brings the Na way high and im having to use about 10gm of baking soda to the pH up to about 5.4
im guessing its the blackprinze driving the pH down

is that ok?

No, it would not be OK as it would probably result in a mash pH of about 5.77. The exact details depend, of course, on the actual malts you use (not only their color but their manufacturer and the individual lot numbers) but assuming typical malts and that you added calcium to the extent of the typical 2.5 mEq/L (50 mg/L) you should have a mash pH of about 5.5.

Here's the proton breakdown @ pH 5.52

Malt/Amount/DI Mash pH/ Buffering/Proton deficit at 5.52
Crisp Maris Otter/83.9%/5.69/-46.6/47.6 mEq
Xtal 10L/6.5%/5.38/-30/-1.9 mEq
600L Black/6.5%/4.69/-76.4/-29.6 mEq
Xtal 60L/3.2%/4.66/-48.5/-9.5 mEq
Calcium hardness 5 gal -6.7 mEq

... which total up to 0 mEq (the dark malts and calcium derived protons just offset the alkalinity of the base malt) at pH 5.52

The main driver here is, of course, the base malt because there is more of it than anything else. The reason for the remark earlier about the actual base malt used is that the proton deficit for Munton's Maris Otter would be 92.6 while for Rahr Pale ale malt it would be 48.2 (about the same as the Crisp - Muntons appears to be an outlier).

The main contributor to acidity (negative proton deficit) is, naturally, the black malt contributing 29.6 mEq/L protons to the balance which is sufficient to cover 62% of the deficit of the base malt. Note that the crystal (I only have data on a 60L Briess malt) contributes about a third this much.

without the baking soda and alot of it i get a pH of 4.7 at room temp.

You must be entering data wrong. A pH that low is just not reasonable in a mash that is 10% dark malts. In fact, many of the black malts (including the 600L that I used in these calculations) have DI mash pH of just about 4.7 which means that you would need a grist composition of nearly 100% black malt to reach a pH this low.


HOWEVER because the dark malts are a bit tricky it is almost essential that you verify what I have said by making pH measurements on a test mash but many of us here have found over the years in brewing dark beers that, in fact, a small amount of acid is needed for pH below 5.5 (which most of us don't bother with) in these beers if the high colored stuff is kept reasonable (under 10%).

 

[JRhopharvester]

Hi,
I don't use the Bruin water calculator, but it looks to me from the spreadsheet that you're adding a lot of gypsum (CaSO4), which lowers the mash pH. Then you're having to add something basic to to raise it back up Na2(CO3). So you're additives are fighting each other. With your low carbonate and low total alkalinity, you might consider cutting out most or all of the gypsum. I never put gypsum in my dark beers...because my mash pH will be too low.
If you want to add calcium to hit a minimum level, you could add just with a little gypsum and much less sodium carbonate.

If for some reason you really wanted to leave in all the gypsum in, another approach would be to use calcium hydroxide (hydrated lime, (Ca(OH)2) ) to adjust the pH upwards instead of the sodium carbonate. Then you're not adding any sodium.

Either way, happy brewing!

 

[goondog]

Thx JR and AJ
appreciate the response! This is a little over my head but i did back off the gypsum and the black malt. I want to stay away from using lime as well. Numbers look a bit better so i may just go with it. May try adding black malt late in mash just for color.
thx again!

 

[ajdelange]

Sorry if it over your head. It is rather confusing at first.

You are missing the essential points:

1) You DO NOT need baking soda or lime to get nominally correct pH with this grist.
2) You DO NOT need to restrict the black/coloured malt additions to get nominally correct pH with this grist.

Do a trial mash with a pound or so of this grist. The pH will be closer to 5.5 than 4.7.

 

[mabrungard]

My experience is that the original grist would easily have a lower than desirable pH and it will likely be around 5.3 with the proposed salts (without the baking soda). I do find that it would require a bit of baking soda to move the pH up a little more, however I'm not sure if the pH really needs to be moved to a level befitting a porter or stout since a BIPA shouldn't be that roasty.

I did finally look at the screen shots posted and I see that you don't have any RO water in your mashing water and the Blackprinz is entered as a base malt. It is a roast malt and must be entered as such.

So, AJ's comments are pretty close to mine. No model can provide decent prediction if it is misused.

 

[ajdelange]

My experience is that the original grist would easily have a lower than desirable pH and it will likely be around 5.3 with the proposed salts (without the baking soda).

If I use the most acidic base malt for which I have data and assume that Kohlbach's factor is 1/3.5 and set the calcium to 133 mg/L I can get estimates as low as 5.38. But Kohlbach's factor is about half that (1/7). Most of the proton deficit of the base malt is being covered by the calcium/phytin interaction and the pH shift attributable to it is 0.16. That's a lot of calcium and a lot of pH shift! As we have been discussing in another thread the Kohlbach factor to the mash is more realistically 1/7 or smaller in which case the pH estimates to 5.47. That's still a lot of calcium (much, much more than I had assumed in the previous posts) but the pH shift estimate is now more realistic at 0.08. To get to a pH of 5.3 we'd need to find another 60 mEq of protons. If Martin has seen pH's that low he must have some black malt to hand that is about 3 times more acidic than any I know about. Half a pound of sauermalz would do the job.

So given that the amount of calcium is much higher than I thought I'd revise my estimated pH down to 5.5 or so. That is consistent both with data and my experience. I cannot say that Martin hasn't seen 5.3 with such a grist and water composition. I just don't see how it could happen with the malts I know about (unless sauermalz is involved somehow and a bit might be necessary here if OP wants mash pH as low as 5.4).

Message to OP should be:
1)There are uncertainties about the malts both with respect to their DI pH's, their buffering capacities and Kohlbach factors
2)People model the effects of these differently and draw different conclusions

and that given this it is essential that mash pH be checked with a test mash before the main brew.

 

[ajdelange]

Of course the other way to get a pH as low as 5.3 with a grist like this is if the base malt has unusually low buffering capacity. A value of -27 mEq/kg•pH would explain a pH as low as 5.3. I have not come across a malt with buffering that small (in magnitude) but I have seen -31 (Weyermann's floor Pils) and even -28 (Wyermann Carafoam) so its not totally beyond the realm of belief that Martin may be seeing mash pH as low as 5.3. It should be clear that the base malt properties, comprising 84% of the grist here, will be prominent in determining realized pH.

 

[TheMadKing]

Your mash water input is set to 9 gallons and you have the blackprinz input as a base malt.

You shouldn't be mashing with that amount of water for biab unless your boil off rate is 3.5 gallons per hour. My typical strike water volume is 7 gallons.

And you need to set the 500L grain as a roast malt

And you should cut your gypsum addition in half at least and not add more than 6 ounces of black malt imo