What's the most baking soda you ever added to a dark beer recipes mash?

[Silver_Is_Money]

If you want to synthesize water with 100 ppm alkalinity for some reason then do it shooting for 8.38 pH. Then you only need 2.53 grams of bicarbonate and no acid at all.

Thanks for correcting me. Then the correct answers are 2.53 grams of baking soda for 4 gallons, and 5.06 grams for 8 gallons to create 100 ppm alkalinity water at these respective volumes. The essence of this is that to hit pH 5.4 with his stout recipe forum member 'cire' was in effect starting with water that had this much baking soda (or actually its equivalent) already added to it by nature and locational circumstance. That is the real point I was trying to make here. I had no intent to suggest that acid was required, sans that brought to the mash by the grist, but rather to emphasize that if this level of bicarb is required for the posters recipe to hit 5.4 pH in the mash, it would not have doughed in at 5.4 pH given a mash in RO or distilled water, but rather at something rather noticeably lower than this. Perhaps even at 5.0 pH or lower.

But then what has become of your baking soda modifier formula in this case? Would not it require (per your formula) about ballpark a bit more than 5% more than 2.53 or 5.06 grams of baking soda respectively (for 4 gallons of mash water, and for 8 gallons of mash water) for cire to hit 5.4 pH during his mash, if he had started with RO or distilled water instead of his naturally sourced 100 ppm alkalinity water? This is how I initially derived 2.68 grams and 5.36 grams respectfully of 4 gallons and 8 gallons.

I'm expressing the independent cases for 4 gallons and 8 gallons only because I do not know if cire sparges or does no-sparge, so I guessed at 4 gallons of 100 ppm alkalinity mash water for the case of sparging, to be followed by 4 gallons of sparge water, and I guessed separately at 8 gallons of 100 ppm alkalinity water for the case of no sparge, and for both cases with his naturally 100 ppm alkalinity sourced water, but while looking at duplicating his 5.4 mash pH from the perspective of starting out with RO or distilled instead.

I hope the above brings clarity to what I had written earlier that confused you.

 

[ajdelange]

. I don't believe there is a problem with some stirring.

The problem is called "stirring error" as discussed in No. 90. It can be compensated for as described there.

 

[ajdelange]

Now you appear to be saying the exact opposite.

I don't think so but I'll do what Mohammad did and say whatever I wrote last stands. In my response to your post I did not realize that when you said mEq you meant total Ca++/Mg++ associated mEq and not mEq/L. Clearly what brings about the effect is the total amount of the ions and not their concentrations in one part of a blend of waters the other of which may have none of or a different amount of these ions. My response reflects this. I don't believe I've reversed myself but allow that I might have done.

 

[ajdelange]

Then the correct answers are 2.53 grams of baking soda for 4 gallons, and 5.06 grams for 8 gallons.

At pH 8.38. At other synthesis pH's other amounts would be needed. This is an important point. If you tell me "I want this ion profile" my first question to you will be "At what pH?". Be wary of any calculator that purports to provide water synthesis without asking that question of you.

The essence of this is that to hit pH 5.4 with his stout recipe forum member 'cire' was in effect starting with water that had this much baking soda (or actually its equivalent) already added to it.

We can't know that as he didn't tell us the pH of his source water nor give us the alkalinity end point titration pH. It is those things that determine the amount of carbo in the water. From that and the pH we can determine how much bicarbonate and carbonate ion are present.

That is the real point I was trying to make here. I had no intent to suggest that acid was required, but rather to emphasize that if this level of bicarb is required for the posters recipe to hit 5,4 pH in the mash, it would not have doughed in directly at 5.4 pH given RO or distilled water, but at something rather noticeably lower than this. Perhaps at 5.0 pH or lower.

Certainly the pH is would be lower if he mashed with water free of alkalinity. Using a Kolbach factor of 7 it appears that his water would have a proton deficit of 1.25 mEq per kg of malt in his grist. Were he able to remove the alkalinity but retain the Ca++ and Mg++ that drops to -1.85 . Thats 3.1 mEq/kg acid he doesn't need to get from dark malts. As his buffering appears to be about 0 .0212 pH per mEq per kg its evident that his mash pH would drop by about 0.066. That's not quire enough to get him below 5.0!

But then what has become of your baking soda modifier formula in this case? Would not it require (per your formula) about ballpark 5% more than 2.53 or 5.06 grams of baking soda respectively (for 4 gallons of mash water, and for 8 gallons of mash water) for cire to hit 5.4 pH during his mash, if he had started with RO or distilled water instead of his 100 ppm alkalinity water?

His reported alkalinity is 1.6 mEq/L. To get his water to pH 5.4 would require about 88% of that amount in acid for each liter of water he uses which would be 2.25*1.6 mEq/kg malt. Evidently the dark malts he is using provide that much acidity (and then some for the base malts' alkalinities).

All the calculations here use the QAcid function with the pKs of carbonic acid. The protons absorbed per mole at pH are QAcid(pH, 6.38,10.38) + 1. THe baking soda "modifier" is thus built in. Were he to move to distilled water keeping the hardness as hypothesized above he would lose 3.1 mEq/kg from the waters alkalinity and have to make it up in order to maintain pH. The proton absorbing capacity of sodium bicarbonate is, to pH 5.5 is Qacid(5.4, 6.38,10.38) + 1 = 0.904 mEq/mmol and he would thus need 3.1/0.904 mmol of sodium bicarbonate per kg of malt. Since that's associated with 2.25 L of water the requirement would be 84*3.1/0.904/2.25 = 128 mg/L

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

The above is why I will remain mired in gen 1 software development, whereas A.J. is blazing the gen 2 trail. I strive to get one close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades, but A.J. wants to hit bullseyes every time. I tip my hat.

Who will take up the task of making the Excel exclusive VBA code for A.J.'s voltmeter compliant with LibreOffice basic? This task is out of my league.

 

[ajdelange]

The above is why I will remain mired in gen 1 software development, whereas A.J. is blazing the gen 2 trail.

I think what you are saying is that you didn't understand any of No. 94. If you want to write software that predicts mash pH you need to understand the basics of the chemistry. This is much simplified by recognizing that each mash component has a charge associated with it and that when you mix it with other mash components its charge will change. In some cases we don't know what the initial charge is while in others we do. In both cases we can, however, tell what the charge change is from the mash pH. Some items experience an increase in charge and others a decrease. As the charges lost by one item must be taken up by another the process of estimating mash pH is simply one of calculating charge changes at hypothesized mash pH's until one that causes the sum of all the gains and losses to be equal to 0.

Many of the functions in the Voltmeter calculate either charge or charge change. Those are easily ported into any programming language (all arguments are passed to them - i.e. none of them take input from spreadhsheet cells) and if that's part of a spreadsheet program, make it easy to write brewing spreadsheets invoking those functions. It occurred to me this morning that Martin could easily put some of these functions into Brun Water making it a Gen II program if he wanted to. They are universally applicable and usable in any spreadsheet program. There is also a Newton Raphson function to which you pass an initial guess and the name of a function you want to zero.

Other of the Voltmeter functions are there to make Voltmeter work. They are mostly associated with gathering the user inputs from their locations throughout the spreadsheet and are, thus, peculiar to the Voltmeter. They would not be of use in general. Users of the first set of functions would have to write their own routines to do this job of getting inputs into the functions that calculate charges. The function that is passed to the Newton Raphson would be an example of one of those that would have to be written by a user of the charge functions.

I strive to get one close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades, but A.J. wants to hit bullseyes every time.

Unless you are willing to make the investment in at least understanding the very basic sum of charge changes equals 0 concept you will never be able to produce a robust spreadsheet. The Voltmeter can help you do this but as long as you insist on shunning Excel it is unavailable (unless there is some other imitator that runs VBA code.

Who will take up the task of making the Excel exclusive VBA code for A.J.'s voltmeter compliant with LibreOffice basic? This task is out of my league.

As I have just had to "master" Excel's programming environment I am certainly not interested in diving in to another programming environment. I still miss FORTRAN!

As noted above the "meat" here is not VBA eclusive. The fundamental functions can be ported to any language (even FORTRAN).

Do you have any programming experience? If so you should have no trouble porting VBA to LibreOffice's version of Basic. Where the challenge would likely lie would be in understanding how macros work in that environment. For example, in VBA you go to a particular worksheet accessed from a Developer's tab, type

Function Myfunction (arg1, arg2...)
Dim result as Double
result = arg1 + arg2^2
Myfunction = result
End Function

Upon returning to the main spreadsheet you can type =Mufunction(1,2) in any cell and get 5 back. Little doubt in my mind that LibreOffice will have similar capability.

In VBA I can run Myfunction from within another function with statements like

result = Myfunction(1,Sheet2.Range("A1").Value)

and have it fish the value out of cell A1 on Sheet2. LibreOffice will have similar capability but the syntax is doubtless different.

If you have never written a line of code then this is going to be overwhelming but if you have then it shouldn't be hard.

 

[ScrewyBrewer]

The above is why I will remain mired in gen 1 software development, whereas A.J. is blazing the gen 2 trail. I strive to get one close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades, but A.J. wants to hit bullseyes every time. I tip my hat.

Who will take up the task of making the Excel exclusive VBA code for A.J.'s voltmeter compliant with LibreOffice basic? This task is out of my league.

There was nothing I could find that could port Excel VBA to LibreOffice Basic automatically. It's the old incompatiblilty issue all over again. So much for code once run anywhere. I found out from a friend the Mac version of Excel isn't compatible with Windows Excel Add-ins either. I subscribe to Office 365 for $99 a year for 5 licenses.

 

[ajdelange]

I'll have to check into that. The sample spreadsheets I have been sending you guys were all developed on a Mac so I assume that, at least, one can run a Mac developed spreadsheet on a PC and presumably coversely. xlam's may be a different matter. I've pulled out all the functions that are specific to the sample spreadheet (i.e. those that take a particular cell in that spreadsheet as an input) and compiled the remainder as an xlam. I finally, and it wasn't easy for me to do, bought a laptop that runs Windows. I have not tried running the spreadsheet as is on Windows (I haven't even installed it and would not be considering doing so did I not have one license left on that same $99/yr license you mentioned) nor opening a new one and trying to import the xlam. Worst case I would copy the source to the Windows version and re-compile there.

BTW, when I try to download your sample xlam the download button clicks but nothing appears in my downloads file.

 

[ScrewyBrewer]

I'll have to check into that. The sample spreadsheets I have been sending you guys were all developed on a Mac so I assume that, at least, one can run a Mac developed spreadsheet on a PC and presumably coversely. xlam's may be a different matter. I've pulled out all the functions that are specific to the sample spreadheet (i.e. those that take a particular cell in that spreadsheet as an input) and compiled the remainder as an xlam. I finally, and it wasn't easy for me to do, bought a laptop that runs Windows. I have not tried running the spreadsheet as is on Windows (I haven't even installed it and would not be considering doing so did I not have one license left on that same $99/yr license you mentioned) nor opening a new one and trying to import the xlam. Worst case I would copy the source to the Windows version and re-compile there.

BTW, when I try to download your sample xlam the download button clicks but nothing appears in my downloads file.

Hi AJ Its not clear to me which post you are referring to?

 

[ajdelange]

In No. 65 cire posted a recipe with malt amounts, reported a measured mash pH of 5.40 and asked what the new spreadsheets would predict. I posted a couple of answers aroung 5.4 and can't now fathom how I might have gotten them. I must have mis-entered data. Here is a summary of what I found after checking and re-checking. Note, as always, that I don't know what malts he used. I can only substitute malts on which I have some data which reasonably seem similar to what he specified.

The deficit numbers in the table are with respect to pH 5.4, the reported measured pH. Note that there are only 2 malts that are acidic with respect to pH 5.4 and that they total 8.25% of the original weights he specified (the kg numbers in the Wt kg column represent the percentages he originally specified - I used a total of 100 kg of malt). In my experience black malt additions of less than 10% will not get a mash below 5.55 or so especially with alkaline water. These calculations support that. Look at the deficits for the base malts and the water. Note the sauermalz. That's not in his specification. That addition is how much sauermalz you would need to get these other malts to pH 5.4 with this water. Without that much sauermalz the estimated pH is a bit above 5.6. You can look at the numbers in more detail and see that it takes this much sauermalz just to offset the Maris Otter.

So something is wrong here. How can he possibly measure 5.4? And yet he did. But to explain it we have to assume that the dark malts provide 144 mEq/kg more protons in the mash than my best guesses as to malts that resemble his choices do. That's quite a stretch from the 27 and 55 mEq/kg that my choices would provide. The other possibility is, of course, that the base malts are less acid demanding that the Maris Otter I chose. I noted above that if the Maris Otter deficit were reduced to 0 at pH 5.4 that this would obviate the requirement for so much additional acid. The Maris Otter deficit would go away at pH 5.4 were it's pHDI = 5.4. Can we immagine a pale ale malt with a DI mash pH this low?

Other possibilites are another dark malt that got left out of the list, a typographical error, and that one of the listed malts is a super malt. And, of course, the one that always pops into my mind, an error in the pH reading or and error in recording/reporting it.

In any case the relevance to the Gen I vs Gen II question is that errors in the number here are (barring a humiliating bug I haven't found yet in the new Gen II functions) totally attributable to the malt models - not to the estimation method.

 

[ajdelange]

Hi AJ Its not clear to me which post you are referring to?

No. 97

 

[cire]

Sorry if my posting has put a spanner in the works, my intention was to hopefully provide a little help.

Fuller details.
The base malt was from that at the front of the picture. I don't think it is particularly different to the others except that from Simpson which is extra pale malt.

6250g Bairds 1823 MO
1050g Flaked Barley
350g Flaked Oats
500g Flaked Barley
200g Chocolate Malt

The base malt, roast barley and chocolate malts were by Bairds.

Flaked barley and flaked oats by Crisp.

They were mashed in 19 litres of liquor with alkalinity of 80 mg/L as CaCO3........
Calcium 83 ppm, magnesium 35 ppm, sodium 29 ppm, sulfate 125 ppm, chloride 144 ppm.

The pH meter was calibrated before and checked afterward read 5.40.
The sample was of recycled wort into a thick glass jar at -10 centigrade. The wort was swirled until cool then transferred to a small plastic vessel. Temperature measured using an infra red thermometer and the wort stirred with the pH meter probe then kept still for reading to stabilise which in wort occurs swiftly.

11g of calcium chloride were added incrementally during the sparge to avoid pH rising and to improve clarity and break formation. A pH reading taken during the sparge was lower at 5.30.

400g of invert sugar by Ragus was added providing 45 litres at 1053 in the FV.

Can it be that the malt used here are more acidic?

Final pH of beer was 3.83.

 

[ajdelange]

Sorry if my posting has put a spanner in the works, my intention was to hopefully provide a little help.

Don't worry about spanners. If I find a problem as a result of this or gain some insight then you will have helped.

Can it be that the malt used here are more acidic?

It would have to be that. The acid has to be coming from somewhere. In the snap below I've taken out the Maris Otter and the two black malts and susbitituted a dummy MO that has a pHDI of 5.5 and buffering of -35 for it. That makes it appreciably less alkaline than the MO's I know about. Are those parameters possible for MO? I really don't know. I also subsitituted a dummy black malt for the two black grains. This has a pH DI of 4.5 and buffering of -80. Are those credible numbers for black malts? The -80 is but I've not seen one with pHDI that low but maybe it's quite possible. As you can see from the bottom the deficit at 5.4 is now 0.9 mEq/kg malt at pH 5.4. This pseudo mash predicts 5.42. That's in striking distance it seems. So I guess I have gained some insight. It seems there are indeed malts that are appreciably more acidic than similar ones I have encountered.

Final pH of beer was 3.83.

Now that strikes me as pretty low for anything other than a Gueze or something similar.

 

[cire]

Final pH of beer was 3.83.

Now that strikes me as pretty low for anything other than a Gueze or something similar.

Yes, that's another difference we have. My beer was casked, not bottled, which does have a slightly lower pH, but ale yeasts from North America would seem to typically finish at pH 4.4 to 4.2, at the lower end of range for lagers, while top fermenting commercial British yeasts do usually finish between pH 4.1 to 3.7 as advised here.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

I just ran cires recipe in MME version 3.00 and I needed to add 1.9% Sauermalz to hit 5.40 pH. Before the Sauermalz addition the mash pH was 5.54.

 

[ajdelange]

... as advised here.

I checked the page "here". At the bottom they say that when measuring beer pH either a fixed temperature should be used or a meter with ATC employed. This makes it clear that they don't understand what ATC does. Interestingly enough I got asked a question during one of the early presentations on the charge balance method by the lab director of a rather large supplier to breweries this side of the pond that revealed the same misunderstanding. Makes you wonder.

 

[cire]

I checked the page "here". At the bottom they say that when measuring beer pH either a fixed temperature should be used or a meter with ATC employed. This makes it clear that they don't understand what ATC does. Interestingly enough I got asked a question during one of the early presentations on the charge balance method by the lab director of a rather large supplier to breweries this side of the pond that revealed the same misunderstanding. Makes you wonder.

Yes, it's very sad that a brewing consultancy and manufacturing chemist at the very forefront of their industry for best part of a century nave become prone to such errors. It is one of many errors when their technical date sheets have been revised like changing from grains per gallon to mg/l or assay of acids. Originally there would have been no meter with ATC and no doubt the task would have been passed to some youth who should have known better.

I've spent time with my pH meter checking calibration and cleaning the probe to find no error worthy of comment. DIpH of the MO was measured and having downloaded Mash Made Easy Metric V3.00 found it fit perfectly. My Chocolate Malt had a DIpH of 4.35 which is lower than suggested but should not make the difference you fond. The last of that Roast Malt was used in that particular brew and my current stock is from a different company so I can give no value for that.

I've tried and failed to learn how to drive the software, I can input in all the necessary values but am unable to determine what should be done to produce predicted mash pH.

 

[ajdelange]

And that di pH was?

 

[cire]

Sorry, I posted my reply in error before it was finished. pH 4.35.

DIpH of MO was 5.72.

 

[ajdelange]

That seems quite reasonable to me and removes the base malt being much less basic that usual as the cause of the discrepancy. And I'm back to a predicted pH of 5.6.

 

[cire]

That seems quite reasonable to me and removes the base malt being much less basic that usual as the cause of the discrepancy. And I'm back to a predicted pH of 5.6.

However it wasn't. The meter's calibration was checked, as was it's stability. Then the probe was cleaned with a appropriate cleanser and afterwards calibration was again checked. The variance both before and after cleaning was insignificance.

Now this measurement was taken within perhaps 10 to 15 minutes. For this I am a novice, having made this type of measurement only since joining this forum. Usually I will measure mash pH, both for test and actual brew, at intervals when convenient, but only those when the mash was stabile would be entered into the brewing log. The possibility exists that an early reading measured pH 5.6. The possiblity exists that had the reading in the above picture been taken after 30 minutes it might have been different, it would seem it would. I also wonder what might have been measured if alpha and beta amylase had been present as they would in a mash with a pale malt present.

Standing by the resulting pH I measured and reported here, and as so far I have found Mash Made Easy anything but easy, would you care to advise what level of calcium or alkalinity would suggest a mash pH of 5.40?

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

Standing by the resulting pH I measured and reported here, and as so far I have found Mash Made Easy anything but easy, would you care to advise what level of calcium or alkalinity would suggest a mash pH of 5.40?

In regard to what specific recipe, including initial water analyticals, grist component quantities, and water quantities (mash and sparge)? Using minerals alone to bring mash pH into the target range is not typically a good idea.

Which part of MME is confusing you?

 

[cire]

Living in Britain and drinking its beer with great satisfaction for most of a century, adding minerals is the way to make good beer. Mash pH is vital, but it is not exclusively achievable by excluding calcium, in fact it is easier to achieve with calcium present and from my own experience, with greater stability.
MME is confounding me as I assumed it would predict mash pH. So far I have entered all parameters including desired mash pH, but there is nowhere I have so far found predicted pH or any control I can operate that will force the display of predicted pH.

I'm sorry about this, I should have kept up to date with software. I first used a computer in 1963 to check a calculation in 6 minutes that had taken me six weeks manually. I gave up computing in the eighties while writing code in assembler for the IBM PC to concentrate on brewing, never thinking the two would come together in the way they have in the matter we are currently discussing.

I was curious to eliminate any errors I might have made compared with the output of a piece of software of a kind I've never used or considered writing.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

cire, what spreadsheet version are you attempting to run Mash Made Easy on? What operating system? Can you post a screen shot?

You do not tell MME how much acid or baking soda to add. It tells you. All you do is feed it your recipe, your desired minerals, your source, and dilution waters, and enter your desired target mash pH. It then kicks out either acid to be added (as lactic, phosphoric, and acidulated malt), or how much baking soda to add, in order to achieve your selected target mash pH.

It is known to not work on Excel versions earlier than 2003. It also apparently does not work in Apache OpenOffice per one report. It runs on Excel 2003 and later, LibreOffice, and (per reports) Google Sheets. LibreOffice is a free download with no strings attached, and it would be my choice.

 

[ajdelange]

would you care to advise what level of calcium or alkalinity would suggest a mash pH of 5.40?

Understanding that my suggestion is based on the models of the malts I use to represent what I think the malts you are using are like and somewhat reassured that your measurement of the DI mash pH for MO seems in line with what I have measured I'll offer this summary snapshot of how I think the mash might look under the microscope:

I understand that you may not be up to speed on the concept of "Deficits" but the idea is that mash components all have intrinsic pH's (with a malt it's its DI mash pH, with the water it is the water's pH, with sodium bicarbonate it is 8.4 and so on). When we mix up all the mash components to bring the pH to 5.40 we must supply protons to mash components that have intrinsic pH higher than the desired pH (the MO, for example) and thus must supply other components with intrinsic pH's less than the target pH which will give off protons when brought to the desired pH (such as high kilned malts, sauermalz or acid). The DI pH of a malt is a major determinant of how many protons it will absorb or emit when brought to a particular target pH. But this also depends on the buffering characteristics of the malt. In the picture columns list malts. Their weights, in kg, are the percentages as you gave them so the totals malt mass is 100 kg. Their DI pH's are given in another column and the buffering characteristics by the numbers in the columns labeled with the a's. The proton deficits with respect to pH 5.4 are in the Def. mEq/kg column. Note that these are per kg. A positive number in this column means the malt named for that row requires protons to be brought to pH 5.4. A negative number means that malt yields protons when it is brought to pH 5.4. Multiplying the per kg deficit for each malt by the mass of that malt gives that malt's deficit for the 100 kg mash. Divide each of these by the total mass of the malt to get the deficits for your mash.

For the mash to be at the desired pH the protons absorbed by malts (and other mash components) with deficits (the water) has to be the same as the protons released by malts (and other mash components) with negative deficits (added acids). The sum must be 0. The water contains a reported alkalinity of 80 ppm and contains some calcium and magnesium ions which react with malt phosphate to release protons which cancel some alkalinity. The water here is 225 L to get your 2.25 L/kg thickness and the deficit of that water with the reported alkalinity and hardness is 137 mEq. Scale by the mass of your mash if you like.

Looking at the deficits column we see that the MO, the flaked barley, and the flaked oats all have appreciable deficits and only the black malts have surfeits to offset them. While the black malts are pretty acidic (per kg) relative to the alkaline malts there just isn't very much of them and the total grain bill winds up requiring 9.69 mEq/kg malt to get to pJH 5.40. In addition to that another 1.37 mEq/kg malt is required (at the specified mash thickness) to get to pH 5.40 so that the total is 11.06 mEq. We need to come up with 11.06 mEq more protons per kg than the malt models we are using suggest we have. The roast barley and chocolate just aren't providing enough protons. The ∆pH column shows approximately what the influence of each table item is on the pH. The estimated pH for this mixture of malt and water is 5.61. We need to get 0.21 lower than this to reach pH 5.4. The MO line on the picture shows that eliminating the base malt - all of it - would take care of that and indeed we see that doing so would remove 10.55 mEq/kg out of the 11.06/kg we need to get rid of. Taking out the base malt isn't a very good idea. We also see from this column that the influence of the roast barley are chocolate malts are tiny, respectively -0.05 and -0.02 pH. To fix things with the water would mean getting 11 mEq/kg from calcium which, as it takes 7 mEq to get 1 mEq surfeit would mean adding 77 mEq or 38.5 mmol of a calcium salt per kg of malt. At the 2.25 L/kg thickness that would be 38.5/2.25 = 17.1 mmol/L and result in increasing the calcium ion over what is already in the water by 40 times that or 684 mg/L. That's a lot of calcium!

A more practical approach would be to add lactic acid or Sauemalz. The rule of thumb for Sauermalz is 1% of the grist for each 0.1 pH reduction. Thus you'd need 2.1%. Using Sauermalz in the calculator says 3% would be needed. With lactic acid the calculator says 0.97 mL/kg for this mash. That works out to 2.25*0.97 = 2.18 mL/L mash water. That's not too much nor is 3% Sauermalz. That is probably the approach I would take but I would most certainly do a test mash!

Finally I'll mention that when I make stouts with similar low percentages of black grains and water of about the same alkalinity and hardness as yours I get pH's of 5.5 - 5.6. Thus I have confidence that the models in the picture represent the malts available to me over here. I'll also comment that all potential errors in the numbers in the picture would be attributable to errors in the malt models. None of the calculation approximations used by Gen I calculators are used here.

 

[z-bob]

What's the most baking soda you ever added to a dark beer recipes mash?

Zero. The darkest beer I've brewed was a porter with 90% 2-row, 6% black patent malt, and 4% crystal 20. It still needed a considerable amount of lactic acid. That beer was really good. I will brew it again, but tweak it slightly (90% pale ale malt, 5% black patent, 5% C20) And it will again need about 5 ml of lactic acid for a 4 gallon mash. My light-colored beers need about 6 ml of lactic acid.

I don't think the malt color makes *that* much difference. It does make some difference, and maybe some of y'all are brewing with distilled or deionized water. I'm using dechlorinated tap water that comes from deep limestone wells.

 

[ScrewyBrewer]

Even though metric isn't my first language I setup my software with the recipe @ciro posted to compare my results using Gen1 calculations.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

SB, it appears that you might have missed his alkalinity and minerals. Alkalinity 80 ppm, Calcium 83 ppm, magnesium 35 ppm, sodium 29 ppm, sulfate 125 ppm, chloride 144 ppm.

 

[ajdelange]

Living in Britain and drinking its beer with great satisfaction for most of a century, adding minerals is the way to make good beer.

I'd only want to change "...is the..." to "...is a ..."

Mash pH is vital, but it is not exclusively achievable by excluding calcium, in fact it is easier to achieve with calcium present and from my own experience, with greater stability."

pH can be set anywhere you want it in calcium free water and I would think your control of it would be more predictable if not stable as there is no continuing phosphate reaction which is going to depend on length of boil.

Clearly the Germans and Czechs are of the opinion that acid is the way to control pH sans minerals as they make some very fine beers with very soft water (though they make some great ones with minerally water too).

I gave up computing in the eighties while writing code in assembler for the IBM PC

Little wonder!

to concentrate on brewing, never thinking the two would come together in the way they have in the matter we are currently discussing.

Well this object oriented stuff may be as bewildering as assembler but at least with assembler you felt you were really controlling the machine.

I was curious to eliminate any errors I might have made compared with the output of a piece of software of a kind I've never used or considered writing.

MME is confounding me as I assumed it would predict mash pH. So far I have entered all parameters including desired mash pH, but there is nowhere I have so far found predicted pH or any control I can operate that will force the display of predicted pH.

Would you be interested in trying the Voltmeter? It runs under Excel and is based on the proton deficit method sketched out above but I'm not sure you really need to embrace or understand that method to use it. I does estimate pH whenever you change an input value. It's really a sort of evaluation module for the functions that it relies on so its very beta. In any case, if you'd like to try it PM an email address.

 

[ScrewyBrewer]

SB, it appears that you might have missed his alkalinity and minerals. Alkalinity 80 ppm, Calcium 83 ppm, magnesium 35 ppm, sodium 29 ppm, sulfate 125 ppm, chloride 144 ppm.

This is about as close as I can get to the @ciro recipe's water profile...