Recent content by mabrungard

30 ppm TDS is typical when your raw water source has 700 ppm TDS. I expect that some locations with much lower raw water TDS would show a lower RO TDS for that reason. The RO profile shown in Bru'n Water is an actual Ward Labs result.

At the typical dosing of gypsum in brewing, the temperature of the water has NO effect on gypsum solubility. If your gypsum doesn't dissolve when stirred into the water and kept suspended by stirring for a minute or so, then the gypsum probably isn't pure and may contain chalk. If a drop of acid...

For adding alkalinity to mashing water, I highly recommend brewers use baking soda. It's chemically stable and the small amount of sodium that is added to the mash is diluted when the sparging water (that doesn't contain baking soda) is added. Sodium is actually desirable in darker styles. I...

Some of those recommendations are valid and some not. The soft water recommendation is not valid and doesn't provide much guidance anyhow. The Edinburgh area is a coal mining area and coal deposits are prone to contributing sulfate to groundwater. While Edinburgh now gets their water from...

The RO profile presented in Bru'n Water represents the performance of a well operating membrane that is fed raw water that's over 650 ppm TDS. The Bru'n Water RO TDS is 30 ppm which is about 96% rejection and that's par for RO performance. If you are measuring TDS out of your machine that is...

Dave, I don't find that 5.6 is ideal for pale beers. That extra couple of tenths does bring out a little more tannin into the finished beer and I'm not a fan of that. In addition, the higher starting work pH means that the yeast have to work harder to acidify the wort into a safe beer pH. And...

Since you're creating another beer with the remaining partigyle, the ionic makeup of the sparging water can differ from the first runoff beer. The main thing I caution is that the alkalinity of the sparging water still needs to be low in order to reduce the tannins that may be extracted. A...

If you're using acid malt to acidify your mash, the first thing I would be concerned with is the strength of the acid malt. The Supporter's version of Bru'n Water has an acid strength factor that you can use to tune the acidity of the acid malt in practice. The free version is purposely striped...

My indirect assessment of oxygen pickup sources during mashing was that dough in is not a large source, but the oxygen in the mashing water is a significant source. I came to this conclusion by measuring sulfite content (from SMB use) in the wort at various stages and by performing a...

With sugars, we're not dealing with ions, but relatively large molecules. In the case of a syrup, the amount of water between those individual sugar molecules is much less than what we have in a typical wort. In a syrup, the molecules are packed closely enough that they are in closer contact and...

Dusseldorf is on the Rhine, as is Koln. I'll be using a Koln profile. It has modest concentrations of sulfate and chloride that will work in Alt.

I'm in preparations for brewing an Alt for a fall festival, so this subject is salient. I've long hated 1007 yeast for an odd flavor that I detect. This has manifested in both homebrew and commercial brews that I've tasted in the last 2 and a half decades. In my preparations, I did send a...

I wrote an article on wort boiling in the May/June 2019 issue of Zymurgy that covers this subject. The bottom line is that hop bittering utilization is pretty well maximized at about the 60 minute mark and its generally a good economic decision to end there...if your goal is imparting adequate...

I've found that I only have to target 10 ppm metabisulfite in my system to maintain a residual sulfite content in the wort. I used sulfite test strips to assess I had to adjust that level to. With that said, I've found that LODO is NOT suited for all beer styles. Some beers taste better with...

That inadvertent dose of gypsum to the mashing water shouldn't be a ruinous issue. Assuming you used roughly 8 gal of mashing water and 7.4 g of gypsum and the appropriate dose in the sparging water, the sulfate is probably going to be less than 100 ppm. Not a disaster, but the resulting beer...