Matching mineral levels in finished beer?

[PlinyTheMiddleAged]

I sent off a sample of one of my favorite west coast beers to Ward Labs as I was curious about the levels of ions present in their product. I really do like many west coast IPAs; however, after following recommended hoppy profiles (McDole's IPA/Martin's Pale Ale), I found the resulting beers to be way too minerally. I'm hoping that someone can figure out what salts to add to RO water to yield something approximating the levels below (assume grain bill is essentially 100% 2 Row - approximately 14 lb for a 6 gallon batch size). Is this a question that can be answered or are there too many variables? Boil off is simple to deal with, but all the minerals brought in by the grain are beyond me. The only way that I can think to do this is to brew a batch using some nominal additions, send that off to Ward Labs, and then use the deltas between the two tests to adjust additions.

Na 64
Ca 123
Mg 150
SO4-S 160
Cl 352

Thanks in advance!

 

[mabrungard]

That is extremely mineralized water. With 150 ppm Mg, 480 ppm SO4, and 352 Cl, it is no wonder you find the beers 'minerally'. If the 150 ppm Mg value is correct, I recommend abandoning that tap water and going with all RO.

 

[PlinyTheMiddleAged]

Martin,

Those mineral levels are from a finished beer. I'm trying to figure out what salts to add to RO water and 14 lbs of 2 Row in order end up at those levels.

Another way to state my question is: what minerals can I get out of a pound of 2 Row? Given those values, I can determine what I need to add either to the mash or the kettle to match the measured profile of that commercial beer.

This is not one of the normal "how does my water look" threads. If the beer that I sent away for testing came out of my kitchen faucet, I'd be a happy man!!!

Thanks,
Pliny

 

[mabrungard]

Then the result isn't totally surprising. Malt adds a number of minerals to wort.

It's best to assess your water quality by itself and avoid the additional confoundment of considering what the malt adds.

 

[PlinyTheMiddleAged]

Hmmm. I'm not making myself very clear...

My starting water is RO (actually it is distilled) so I know what my water quality is - it's all zeros. What I really want to know is what the malt adds.

If I know the final product (the numbers in the first post) and that I'm starting with all zeros from distilled water for mash/sparge, I can figure out approximately what salts are needed to match the final product if I know what the malts add.

Put even more simply (and hopefully more clearly), if I mash a pound of 2 Row in a gallon of distilled water, what concentrations of Na, Ca, Mg, SO4, and Cl might I expect to see in the wort.

I know how much sugars I can extract from a pound of grain mashed in a gallon of water; does anyone know what ppm of the above ions I will get along with the sugars?

 

[PlinyTheMiddleAged]

Ok, how about a simpler question...

Do grains add any sulfate to wort, or is sulfate level set by the minerals in the water?

The reason I'm asking the previous questions in this thread is because I can't get that great "pop" to my IPAs that Pliny the Elder has. Whenever I got my strike water sulfate levels to about 200 ppm, my beer tasted like gravel. So, I sent some Pliny the Elder off to get tested by Ward, and it comes back at 480 in the finished beer - way above what I thought was tolerable.

In my attempt to match the pleasant hoppyness of this iconic IPA, I'd like to match the profile of the finished beer given that I'm starting with distilled water.

Thanks again!

 

[PlinyTheMiddleAged]

Anybody? Does grain contribute any sulfate or do I get sulfate only from water or salt additions? What about chloride? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[ajdelange]

Certianly the malts contribute a lot of cations and while they seem to get most of the attention clearly they contain sulfur in the side groups of the proteins' amino acids. This added sulfur is enough to contribute to the paper-mill smell found around lager fermentations, to Junbuket, to skunking and to the sulfury taste of traditional lagers. This sulfur can find itself in any of the various oxidation states and so I suppose some winds up as sulfate. I don't have my library so I can't look up mineral content of beer but I'd guess that if a beer has 352 mg/L chloride it isn't because the brewer put that much in.

There is a wide spread supposition among home brewers that if you want hoppy beer you just increase the sulfate because the Burton beers are hoppy and the water is gypseous. While sulfate does change the way hops are perceived you don't use sulfate (or worse still, sulfate to chloride ratio) to set the hops profile of the beer. You use hops. If you try to get hoppy beer but throwing in a lot of minerals you will get minerally beer.

Craft brewers produce their very hoppy beers using lots of hops often in the form of pre-isomerized extracts and oils. This permits them to get incredible hops flavor and aroma intensity without the harsh, choking bitterness that comes from just adding sulfate.

 

[oldschool]

Anybody? Does grain contribute any sulfate or do I get sulfate only from water or salt additions? What about chloride? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I’m curious if you have made any comparisons to come to a conclusion. Did you send in two samples of your own? I’d contribute to the research project. Make some trash beer with only distilled water and one with known minerals added with same malt/hops. Of course this will vary by malt but I’d like to see the data. Not just the malt type but the water used in the malting plant will have a large impact.

 

[dmtaylor]

This is a cool old thread. My own 2 cents: From what I've heard, malt contains WAY more minerals than most water. So I feel people are much too focused on water quality when in fact it is the salts in the MALT that trumps everything else, most of the time. Water adjustments are like fine tuning the volume on your guitar amp between 10 and 11, where it's the MALT that already took it to 10.

 

[gunhaus]

This is a cool old thread. My own 2 cents: From what I've heard, malt contains WAY more minerals than most water. So I feel people are much too focused on water quality when in fact it is the salts in the MALT that trumps everything else, most of the time. Water adjustments are like fine tuning the volume on your guitar amp between 10 and 11, where it's the MALT that already took it to 10.

I have thought about this in a similar vein Dave, but I know there are foods with lots flavors that give even MORE flavor with even a minimal amount of seasoning. I think beer grains are somewhat the same. I use RO water for all my beers, and one time while making a very simple ordinary bitter that I brew frequently I forgot to add any salts to the brew. The resulting difference between my normal brew and this one was quite dramatic. It was far from undrinkable, but it was a very lackluster brew to say the least, and I believe a gallon and a half or so went down the drain to make room for another beer. HOWEVER - I brew my version of Ed Worts House Pale Ale all the time, and I intentionally brewed this without salts in plain RO water (actually quite a while before I made the mistake with the bitter), and we put it on tap with a version brewed with my normal additions. To me there was not a great deal of difference, at least not enough to fret about. My wife actually liked it a little better. So perhaps this water seasoning as you suggest is like fine tuning, and is affected by what flavors are at hand? Kinda like plain hamburger without salt and pepper is a little bland, but asparagus without salt and pepper still has a LOT of flavor going on. I know that for some time I added 1t gypsum, and 1 t calcium chloride to every 5 gallons across the board without worrying about fine tuning for styles and I was quite happy with my beers. I fuss about with things a little more now - but mainly because I like to fuss around with such things. But I agree with you that overall the malts are giving us the goodness and I think of seasonings as just fine enhancements. And just as with all cooking - LOTS of room to experiment with "seasoning to taste"

 

[VikeMan]

I know this is a zombie thread, but since it has already been resurrected.... One thing about using a Ward Lab analysis of finished beers, and/or the assumption/fact that malt has a lot more of "mineral X" than water does... It's worth considering that the Ward Lab test takes every compound (including complex covalent compounds which normally do not give up their elements as ions in a solution) and uses plasma to force an otherwise unnatural ionization. The numbers from the Ward report do not represent what free ions were in the beer. Nor does a google of, say, "Mineral X content in Barley Malt" tell you how much free Mineral X ion will be contributed via the brewing process. IOW, from a brewer's perspective, the test works for natural water, but not for beer.

 

[Pehlman17]

I have a very similar question as the OP. I reached out to Sierra Nevada about adjusting water for brewing the homebrew recipes for Pale Ale and Torpedo from their website. Scott the brewmaster was kind enough to write back to me and provided some information on their process and even provided the average minerals as measured in finished beer. Like I think the OP was trying to ask, is it possible to reverse engineer a water profile to build up from RO or distilled from knowing the finished beer amounts? Obviously not down to the exact nearest ppm, but perhaps some estimate based upon what is typically gained from barley and lost to the mash/sparge/boil. Here was Scott's response to my question:

"We use CaSO4 and CaCl2 in our beers. We don’t add magnesium or sodium chloride, just the calcium chloride and gypsum. There is Mg in our base water and in the malt of course, so the levels there are just circumstantial, we don’t attempt to adjust or control the level. Same thing on the sodium, it’s just there from the raw materials.

See below for some average values.

We have to take different approaches at either brewery because the water is different at each site, but both sites aim for the same targets. Both sites use well water. We add calcium salts to the mash and to the kettle both, just straight into the vessel.

I would think in your case if you are using distilled water to start, your additions would be easy to calculate because you are starting with nothing, so that makes it pretty easy. I generally focus on the calcium. Remember that there is a big reduction in Ca from mash to kettle (reaction in mashing/lautering and lost in spent grains), which is why we add it again to the kettle to hit the target in the wort and finished beer. For all beers we do I like to see at least 80 in wort and 50 in beer for Ca. The desired chloride/sulfate ratio determines which Ca source to use for that purpose."

Ca (ppm) Mg (ppm) chloride (ppm) Sulfate (ppm) Sodium (ppm)
BEER Pale Ale: 55 90 195 275 20
BEER Torpedo: 65 110 330 300 30

 

[dmtaylor]

This is challenging, since most of those ions are coming not from salt additions but from the malt itself. I mean, look at the magnesium, 90-110 ppm seems like a crazy high amount, and they're not even adding any. Maybe all you need from distilled are small additions of gypsum and CaCl2 and you'll be good to go. Careful not to overdo it, very easy to overdo it and make your beer taste like a chalkboard.

 

[Pehlman17]

This is challenging, since most of those ions are coming not from salt additions but from the malt itself. I mean, look at the magnesium, 90-110 ppm seems like a crazy high amount, and they're not even adding any. Maybe all you need from distilled are small additions of gypsum and CaCl2 and you'll be good to go. Careful not to overdo it, very easy to overdo it and make your beer taste like a chalkboard.

Agreed. There is likely plenty of magnesium in the malt. I've never had any issues that I'm aware of that have come about from not adding magnesium salts to my water, even using distilled as a base. The strategy that seems to work overall for me is sort of the John Palmer approach. Using gypsum and calcium chloride to get my total calcium to 100ppm relative to all brewing liquor used. I can get a good (5.3 - 5.4) mash pH using these alone for most beers in the 5-10 SRM range. Below 5 SRM I might include some acidulated malt (<1% grist), and above 10 SRM I will add baking soda to the mash as needed.

Anyway, I was surprised by how balanced the sulfate and chloride are in those examples he gave. My guess would have been that their beers would skew much more heavily toward sulfate. But I suppose it makes sense to have a good amount of chloride too when you still have that old school "malt backbone" like those beers.

 

[Group W]

Interesting. I’m bumping to follow this. Makes me wonder how mineral contributions differ between various base malts. I use mostly Great Western 2-row and don’t recall seeing a spec sheet listing minerals.

 

[VikeMan]

I use mostly Great Western 2-row and don’t recall seeing a spec sheet listing minerals.

And I suspect you never will. It's not something that anyone measures. I'm not even sure it's something that could be measured without a new standard, i.e. the specific test conditions under which the malt would be mashed, boiled, fermented, etc.

 

[Pehlman17]

There's one page dedicated this this is Scott Janish's New IPA book. A former brewer from Ballast Point conducted a bunch of experiments when they were opening their east coast location. The idea was originally in order to help them figure out how to flavor-match between the east coast and west coast breweries. I believe he published his findings and presented at an MBA conference a few years ago. What he found was that overall, malted barley itself contributed a pretty decent mineral load. There's a Master Brewers podcast (episode 066) where he discusses these experiments as well. When it came to sulfate and chloride specifically, from a mash built to produce a 10-plato beer, he found that malted barley contributed about 50-100ppm sulfate and about 200ppm chloride as measured in the pre-boil wort. It sounds like he found it to be pretty consistent across base malts of different types and from different countries. Unmalted grains however he found contributed much less in terms of minerals. So he supposed that its something about the water used in the malting process that contributes the relatively higher mineral content. Another intersting thing of note was that sulfates were metabolized by yeast during fermentation, so there was actually a decrease in their concentration in finished beer relative to its levels pre-fermentation. Chloride would also increase slightly in the boil, which he hypothesized could be coming from hops perhaps.

One experiment he mentions was a beer they brewed with water favoring sulfate over chloride at a 3:1 ratio. Even though the water favored sulfate, when mineral concentrations were measured in the finished beer, the sulfate-to-chloride ratio was about equal parts (1:1). Conversly, the same beer was brewed with water at a 1:3 ratio favoring chloride, and the found in the finished beer that the gap between chloride and sulfate levels had increased even further in favor of chloride. In triangle tests he says overall that tasters couldn't reliably tell the difference between the 3:1 beer and the 1:3 beer. However for the participants that were trained in sensory analysis, they were in fact able to consistently distinguish between the beers. And the responses from these tasters did appear to affirm that the sulfate heavy beer was brighter, more bitter, and more hop-forward in aroma. Whereas they found the chloride heavy beer to be much more full, round, and malt focused. Which seems to line up with what we tend to suggest when it comes to these ratios.

Funnily enough in the podcast episode he did speculate on the very thing the OP of this thread was asking. Whether we could learn enough about malt contributions of minerals that we might some day be able to measure them in a finished beer and then work backward to reproduce the water profiles used to create some our favorite beers. (Or perhaps we could just ask the brewers very politely )

Edit: Interesting link included here.

 

[oldschool]

Interesting. I’m bumping to follow this. Makes me wonder how mineral contributions differ between various base malts. I use mostly Great Western 2-row and don’t recall seeing a spec sheet listing minerals.

I would guess that this has a lot to do with the mineral content of the water in the malt house as well. Not only the barley contribution.

 

[dmtaylor]

I would guess that this has a lot to do with the mineral content of the water in the malt house as well. Not only the barley contribution.

I know for their malting, Briess uses ultra-pure water from the excellent Manitowoc Public Utilities water treatment system, just down the road from me, I know and have worked with many of the guys who work at MPU, and have toured the plant, and have access to their water profile. Whatever minerals are coming out of Briess are from the grain itself, not the water.

This is funny, though, because in stark contrast, to make their extract, Briess uses some of the crappiest water on the planet, from many miles west in Chilton. The minerals in their extract are largely from the water. Careful using their extract.

But anyway.

 

[Group W]

After a few days of research on this topic, and determining this is a giant rabbit hole, I brewed a WCIPA as always and moved on. I started researching barley mineral uptake, then soil amendments, malting impacts during germination, the addition by some of sulfur dioxide in the malting process, water used in the malting process, the impact of yeast during fermentation, hops contributions etc.

The OP raises a good question but then what? Martin warns of the “additional confoundment of considering what the malt adds.”

I’m just going to continue with Bru’n Water and DWHAHB.

 

[oldschool]

I know for their malting, Briess uses ultra-pure water from the excellent Manitowoc Public Utilities water treatment system, just down the road from me, I know and have worked with many of the guys who work at MPU, and have toured the plant, and have access to their water profile. Whatever minerals are coming out of Briess are from the grain itself, not the water.

This is funny, though, because in stark contrast, to make their extract, Briess uses some of the crappiest water on the planet, from many miles west in Chilton. The minerals in their extract are largely from the water. Careful using their extract.

But anyway.

Are you saying the municipal water supply they use doesn’t have or has almost no minerals?
How does the city do that? Membranes?

 

[dmtaylor]

Are you saying the municipal water supply they use doesn’t have or has almost no minerals?
How does the city do that? Membranes?

Yep, microfiltration and reverse osmosis. Pretty standard stuff these days. It probably helps that they have a team of former nuclear engineers working there (I still work at the nuclear power plant, the MPU guys used to as well, for many years).

 

[oldschool]

Yep, microfiltration and reverse osmosis. Pretty standard stuff these days. It probably helps that they have a team of former nuclear engineers working there (I still work at the nuclear power plant, the MPU guys used to as well, for many years).

Interesting. Why do they go through so much treatment for the municipal water? Is the source water really poor?

 

[dmtaylor]

Interesting. Why do they go through so much treatment for the municipal water? Is the source water really poor?

No, they just take their jobs seriously and take pride in doing their best. Might be a Midwest culture thing, might be a nuclear thing, Boomer & Gen X thing, combinations of factors. MPU is parked directly on Lake Michigan, which is a pretty decent water source, plenty of sand, silt, bacteria, zebra mussels (lots more 20 years ago), some hardness... overall reasonably clean and not too difficult to clean up. PFOS will eventually become a challenge for water treatment plants here and pretty much everywhere as soon as the government can agree on what the limits should be. But anyway.