water for stout

[paddyporter]

hello everyone im paddy and im from ireland and im doing my first all-grain this week. im doing a dry irish stout since i drink guinness when im out. ive a good few kits and a couple of partial mashes under my belt and feeling reasonable confident except when it comes to water. heres some information i gleamed from my local council as written
hardness 254 mg/l
hardness ca 270 mg/l
sodium 14 mg/l
sulfate .59 mg/l
ph 7.5

there was no magnesium or bicarbonate or calcium. unless they are used in the hardness somehow, maybe someone more knowing could clear that up please

as far as i know the hardness suits a stout and might not be a bad thing.

is there anything from that information you would recommend i do for my water? heres the recipe so you know what effect the grains will have on ph

maris otter
roasted barley
flaked barley
acid malt

hope this makes sense to you guys and if there is anything else you want to know just ask and ill do my best to find out, and heres a link for my local water analysis if you care to look my local district is newcastle west
also if you decide to look in the link there are two parameters to narrow down on the left hand side namely,water type-drinking public water supplies and scheme-newcastle west

http://www.lcc.ie/waterworks/

 

[ajdelange]

Small problem here. You list hardness as 254 mg/L (which doubtless means mg/L 'as calcium carbonate') and then list calcium hardness as 270 mg/L which is greater than the total hardness. Do you perhaps have these two numbers reversed?

As there is not much sodium, nor sulfate the question becomes 'How much chloride?'. As chloride is usually at pretty low levels that means that you very probably have a lot of alkalinity - 200 mg/L as calcium carbonate or so. Alkalinity is one of the most important parameters to the brewer but not to most other people so a lot of water reports don't list it. As it is so important you might want to consider testing for it yourself which is quite easy to do using inexpensive kits sold at aquarium hobby and swimming pool suppliers.

The big question for you turns on the actual amount of alkalinity. If it turns out to be around 200, as I suspect, you will need some acid malt but not too much. Certainly no more than 2%. This assumes that your roasted barley is at some reasonable percentage as it would be for the traditional Irish dry stout.

Others may advise you that you will need to add alkali because of the dark malt cautioning that if you don't do this you will get a dry, thin, tart beer IOW just what you are looking for in an Irish Stout. Nevertheless I would really only feel completely secure that I had the right amount of acidulated malt by checking mash pH with a pH meter. I find that the traditional recipe comes out to pH 5.5 with water of alkalinity of 50 or so. You probably have 3 - 4 times this and so will certainly need some acid malt and I think you can use a couple of percent with confidence.

 

[mabrungard]

That is a typical central Irish water...full of hardness and alkalinity. It is not well suited to brewing a dry stout since that style depends on an acidic presentation. That water is better suited to other stout and porter styles that don't depend on the beer being more acidic.

Guinness, Murphy's, Beamish, and even Harp breweries use water with relatively low mineralization. In the case of brewing dry stouts, Guinness uses two separate mashes. The main mash uses the 2 row barley malt and raw barley. Their low alkalinity water is well suited to that mash with a little acidification. The roast barley is separately steeped and it produces an acidic liquor that is added later to the base malt wort.

In the case of this water, you may be better off replacing all or most of the tap water with distilled or RO water. An alternative would be to acidify the tap water significantly to create the acidic notes this style is known for.

AHA members will get a more in-depth analysis and presentation on Irish water in the next issue of Zymurgy. It explains why dry stouts are produced with low alkalinity water.

Another thing you should consider for your tap water is to send it off to Murphy's for a more complete water analysis so that you can better assess what is in the water and help you determine what the next step is. Ignore Murphy's recommendations on what to add to your brewing water and visit the Bru'n Water site to learn more reasonable water treatment alternatives.

Enjoy!

 

[paddyporter]

thanks for the replies guys, im ordering my grains today and first thing ill do is throw in a ph meter no sense in not having one if i going to be doing all-grain

heres the grain bill in full
64.9 6.00 lbs. Pale Malt(2-row) Great Britain 1.038 3
10.8 1.00 lbs. Roasted Barley Great Britain 1.029 575
21.6 2.00 lbs. Flaked Barley America 1.032 2
2.7 0.25 lbs. Sauer(acid) Malt 1.035 2

is 2.7 too much for a first experiment before i can get the water tested as im sure i will be doing a lot of dry stout as its my favorite drink so there will be plenty chances to get the right mixture and i think a bit of acid malt is a good start bearing in mind the roasted malt will also have an acidic affect

chloride is at 24mg/l and unfortunately those hardness results are correct but the hardness ca is averaged over 4 years and there is one unusual reading of 30 mg/l that is throwing it off a little whereas hardness is only over a year and much less comprehensive

just had a look at murphys website and it looks great, ive actually been looking for something like this that catered for the homebrewer

 

[ajdelange]

Without knowing the proton deficits (alkalinities) of the base malt or the flaked barley and the proton surfeit (acidity) of the roast barley with respect to mash pH it's hard to estimate what that mash pH will be. In this case it is even harder because we don't know the proton deficit (alkalinity) of the water. The amount of roast barley you propose to use would nominally give a decent mash pH with nominal alkalinity water (50 or so). As you most likely have a much higher alkalinity you will have a higher mash pH and your proposed level of acid malt addition will lower it by 0.3. The hardness in the water will lower it another, say, 0.1 so you will be 0.4 pH below a distilled water mash. Given a nominal mash pH of 5.5 with 50 ppm alkalinity you might go to 5.7 with 200 ppm and thus back to 5.3 with 3% sauermalz. That's probably OK. Perhaps it would be better to use 2/3 the proposed amount to try to keep things around 5.4.

This should get you going but sauermalz isn't really the way to combat alkalinity in stout. As your sulfate is low and so presumably is your chloride a better (or at least less Teutonic) approach might be to use CRS, a blend of sulfuric and hydrochloric acids. Sauermalz contributes flavors of its own. Or you might want to consider decarbonating by boiling as the beer will be better if less 'minerally'. All these things can come later though.

 

[paddyporter]

cheers ajdelange, the reason im using acid sauermalz is because in another thread it was recommended for that sour taste in guinness which i like and due to its affect on ph i thought sure why not kill two birds with one stone

sorry but just to clarify are you saying to use two thirds of the proposed amount in the recipe ive listed above

the main thing is i reckon ill go ahead and brew and see what needs tweaking after and the most important thing is to get the water treated so i know what im dealing with and where to go from there. essentially its a bit like flying blind without it but since im going to be brewing a lot of stout i dont mind using this as an experiment as i can always go back when i have the proper data and see where i went wrong

thanks again

 

[ajdelange]

cheers ajdelange, the reason im using acid sauermalz is because in another thread it was recommended for that sour taste in guinness which i like and due to its affect on ph i thought sure why not kill two birds with one stone

OK - I understand but it is primarily the yeast that set the pH of a beer - not the pH of the mash. Obviously if you make the pH really low or really high (i.e. outside the band the yeast want to go to) you will make it hard for them to do what they want to do and clearly, if you go far enough you can influence the sour quality of the beer. For example, Weyermann offers a Berliner Wieße that uses, I think, 10% sauermalz and that tastes sour like a Weiß beer. I don't think 3% is going to pull you that far but a properly made Irish stout will have that dry, tart quality to it if brewed at normal mash pH. At least that has always been my experience and my stout mash pH always seems to come out at 5.5. Clearly there is more to tart flavor than just pH. For example, phosphoric acid sour is very different from lactic acid sour is different from sulfuric acid sour even at the same pH.

sorry but just to clarify are you saying to use two thirds of the proposed amount in the recipe ive listed above

Yes, that was my suggestion but I think you would be OK with the full 1/4 pound as well.

the main thing is i reckon ill go ahead and brew and see what needs tweaking after and the most important thing is to get the water treated so i know what im dealing with and where to go from there. essentially its a bit like flying blind without it but since im going to be brewing a lot of stout i dont mind using this as an experiment as i can always go back when i have the proper data and see where i went wrong

With that approach I don't see how you can go wrong.

 

[paddyporter]

thanks a lot ajdelange, im going to take your advice for the 2/3 i think its a better starting point