No. Taste some baking soda dissolved in water and see if you think that's a pleasant taste.Sorry for steering this discussion a bit off course but I have a question regarding bicarbonate. Are there any advantages, taste-wise, to having bicarbonate in your brewing water?
That would indeed be silly because 'neutralization' here doesn't mean what you may remember from your high school chemistry where it means bringing the pH to 7 (neutral) but rather bringing the pH to around 5.3 where 91 mg of each 100 mg of bicarbonate added will be converted to CO2 gas. If the 'desired' level of bicarbonate requires you to add acid to get proper mash pH then it is not actually desired at all.I know that if I choose a particular style in the Bru'n Water spreadsheet, it will give a "desired" bicarbonate level. I brew exclusively with RO water which I have a water report for (with typical CaCl2, CaSO4 and acidulated malt additions) using BIAB and make a lot of milds and ESBs. If bicarbonate adds nothing to the taste profile of the beer, then it seems silly for me to be adding NaHCO3 to hit the desired level just so I can neutralize it with an extra ounce or two of acidulated malt.
The 'desired' level idea is relict from the days when we thought that to have a good Munich style beer we needed to have water like that in the Isar. That's not really so. To have a good Munich style beer the stylistic ions (chloride and sulfate) and total minerals should be in concentrations similar to those in the liquor used by the breweries which may have small resemblance to the source water though in many cases it will (Pilsen water). The Isar contains quite a bit of bicarbonate but the first thing a Munich brewer does is get rid of it. The desired level for bicarbonate is generally 0. There will be cases where the proportion of high kilned malt used in a brew will pull the pH too low if there is no offsetting alkalinity and in those cases some is needed. One could, I suppose, merge that into a 'desired' profile but if that is done it apparently leads to the kind of confusion you are experiencing which, if I understand it, is that you selected a profile, merged it with a grain bill, got a high pH and added acid to correct the high pH. Better, IMO, to determine typical sulfate and chloride levels for the beer you want to brew, set those with salts, see what the pH estimate is and add one or the other (but not both) of bicarbonate or acid to correct.
If you brew a beer with no bicarbonate at all surviving and carbonate it to 2 volumes assuming its pH to be 4.3 it will contain 50 mg/L bicarbonate from the added gas. If you started with water with alkalinity 100 when you made this beer only about 1.3 mg/L bicarbonate from that source would be left in the finished beer so yes, finished beer does contain bicarbonate but it comes from carbonation, not bicarbonate in the water (or the vast preponderance of it does).But if bicarbonate does, at low levels, add something positive to the beer, then I'd guess I'd add it.
It's very astute of you to have picked up on this. It isn't really something that should keep you awake at night, though. If you add some bicarbonate and then some phosphoric acid to 'neutralize' it then you have effectively added some sodium phosphate to your beer. No need to do that but a little won't hurt.I haven't worried about it and just went with the very low level of bicarbonate that is in my RO water even if it's far below the "desired" level for a style/color of beer. Everything seems ok to me but I'd change protocols if I heard different from the water experts here. Thanks!