80 Export Scottish Ale - Water profile feedback

[wstehling]

Please feel free to poke holes through this proposed water profile for an 80 Shilling Scottish Ale. I've cobbled this together after reviewing a number of sources including DGB, Water, Noonan and others.

Starting water is RO. I use BrunWater for my water calcs.
CA = 75
Mg = 5
Na = 10
S04 = 50
Cl = 67
Bicarb = 100
Total Hardness = 208
Alkalinity = 83
RA = 26
S04/Cl ratio = 0.73

Thanks!

 

[ajdelange]

First off, don't get hung up on water profiles too much. If you do do not pay any attention to the bicarbonate. Don't know where you got this profile from but presumably it resembles the profile of some place where 80/ is brewed which very well may contain some bicarbonate but when the brewer made the beer he took it out. He had to in order to establish proper mash pH and if you put it in, you will have to take it out too. Why put it in, then? If you are trying to replicate exactly what the Scottish brewer did for Robbie Burns birthday or something like that you could shoot for authentic water but to do so almost requires the use of CO2 gas.

So ignore the bicarbonate and try to get the other ions at about the levels in your profile. Again, I don't know where this profile came from but it is apparently not a natural profile as I can't make it with simple salts and CO2. The problem with it is that it requires more calcium that it can get from the usual calcium salts without busting the chloride and sulfate limits. To get close (and you can get close) you need to use some potassium carbonate and neutralize it with sulfuric and hydrochloric acids (or use potassium sulfate and potassium chloride). In short, this is a bad profile in that it requires you to accept some other "don't care" ion. The obvious choice is potassium and perhaps that was left out of the profile you copied or you didn't copy it but you will have to accept 16.9 mg/L of it.

Now we did use sodium bicarbonate, calcium carbonate and potassium carbonate to do this synthesis and that does put some bicarbonate into the system but the acid takes it right back out. The amount left is 5.27 mg/L at pH 5.4 and you do want to do the synthesis at pH 5.4 (or whatever your planned mash pH is) because the resulting mix has exactly the ion contents you specified with the exception of bicarbonate which is immaterial and potassium which isn't part of the profile bust most important of all, the alkalinity WRT mash pH is 0.

In summary, you can't get that ion profile without the use of potassium salts and hydrochloric or sulfuric acid. Lactic or phosphoric acid will also be required. Now if you are willing to accept appreciable deviations from those ion concentrations there are simpler things you can do. But it is fun to take a profile and see what you have to do to reproduce them exactly. If you want to know what some of those simpler things are then post again.

 

[wstehling]

Thank you AJ. Pretty much exactly what I was looking for.

Where did the profile come from? My own head actually, but based on a compilation of recommended ranges for the style.
I put the profile together in Brunwater and ensured that the cations/anions balanced, and thought that would suffice.

So I chalk this up to furthering my understanding of water chemistry <pun not intended>.

You touched on something that has always mystified me and that is the use of bicarbonate if an acid addition is needed just to wipe it out and bring the ph back into line. So "ignore the bicarbonate...", it really doesn't get much easier than that I suppose.

I'm not married to this profile, I was merely monkeying around with creating one specifically for this brew.

I would be interested in hearing what your "simpler things" are though to help further my education here.

 

[ajdelange]

Certainly he simplest would be to start with RO water and add various amounts of salts, using any of the spreadsheets/calculators, to see what the ion concentrations are adjusting your additions to get the ion concentrations more or less where you want them. I often assume that one's taste buds respond in the same way as his ears and eyes meaning that a 1 dB change in a stimulus is about the smallest detectable if the person is focused on looking for differences. This is equivalent to a change of about 25% so that if you had sulfate at 100 ppm in mind you probably wouldn't notice much difference in perception between what you hoped for and what you got in the range from 75 to 125 ppm sulfate.

 

[wstehling]

I took your advice and ignored bicarbonates.
I now come up with this:

Ca = 71
Na = 18
S04 = 75
Cl = 90
Tot. Hardness = 178
Alkalinity = 13
RA = -38
S04/Cl ratio = .83
According to BrunWater with my grain bill this lands my ph at 5.4, with no acid addition.

Thoughts?

 

[mabrungard]

Take a look at the boiled Edinburgh profile in Bru'n Water and you will notice that they have a modest amount of sodium and sulfate in their water. Having made many Scottish 70's and 80's, I have found that including somewhat elevated levels of sodium and sulfate (not as high as the Edinburgh profile) does work very well for this style. In fact the use of sulfate in this style reinforces what I've said all along...sulfate does not make beer bitter! Sulfate helps dry the finish of the beer. In a malty beer like a Scottish, that drying helps create a beer that is still easy to drink without being cloying.

Please stop using the SO4/Cl ratio. It will just get you into trouble. In the case of the profile you present above, reduce the Cl content by about half and you will be more pleased with the result.

 

[wstehling]

Thank you Martin, I really appreciate the way that you and AJ both take the time to teach on all these different forums.

I will do as you suggest with the Cl and give it a run this weekend and report back in a few weeks.

 

[ajdelange]

Take a look at the boiled Edinburgh profile in Bru'n Water...

Given the problems I found with the Black Malty profile in the other thread I thought that might be a good idea. With the boiled Edinburg thread the calcium and magnesium requirements are in line with what can be provided by the neutral salts but the demanded sodium level cannot be met with sodium chloride alone as to do so would put the chloride over. In this profile we, therefore, need lots of sodium bicarbonate. If we let the synthesis algorithm run allowing it to alter pH it shifts it to 8.38 because at that pH bicarbonate has no proton deficit and we can use as much as we like. The penalty is, of course, the proton deficit wrt the mash tun pH and acid will have to be used later to cover that.

mg/L Synth
CaCl2.2H2O 0.04
NaCl 64.51
MgCl2.6H2O 31.09
CaSO4.2H20 135.55
MgSO4.7H20 165.12
Liters/Liter 0.00
CaCO3 0.00
NaHCO3 108.25
CO2 0.00
HCl 0.00
Ca(OH)2 0.01
Na2CO3.H2O 0.00
Sodium Lactate 0.00
Potassium Lactate 0.00
Lactic 0.00
Sulfuric 0.00

Weights Errors, % Errors, mg/L Target Realized
1 -0.0010% 0.00 Calcium 33 32.9997
1 0.0005% 0.00 Magnesium 20 20.0001
0 -4.4127% -0.06 mmol Carbo 1.34800 1.2885
0 -4.4127% -3.56 Bicarbonate 80.64 77.0856
1 -0.0025% 0.00 Sulfate 140 139.9964
1 -0.0026% 0.00 Chloride 50.00 49.9987
0 0.0000% 0.00 Nitrate 0 0.0000
0 0.0000% 0.00 Nitrite 0 0.0000
1 -0.0011% 0.00 Sodium 55.0000 54.9994
0 0.0000% 0.00 Potassium 0.00 0.0000
0 0.0000% 0.00 Fe(II) 0 0.0000
0 0.0000% 0.00 Fe(III) 0 0.0000
0 0.0000% 0.00 Ammon.
Wt'd RMSE Wt'd RMSE,% RMSE, mg/L
7.69792E-06 0.0018% 0.9871 Target pH 8.3815
Wts &#8800; 0 RMSE, (Wt &#8800; 0) RMSE, (Wt &#8800; 0)
5 0.0018% 0.0017
Alk, as CaCO3 Max (Wt &#8800; 0) %
65.84 0.0026%
mg/L Synth mg/L Src


To make it at pH 8 requires some acid
mg/L Synth
CaCl2.2H2O 3.19
NaCl 74.61
MgCl2.6H2O 9.19
CaSO4.2H20 117.00
MgSO4.7H20 191.68
Liters/Liter 0.00
CaCO3 0.00
NaHCO3 93.74
CO2 0.00
HCl 0.00
Ca(OH)2 6.40
Na2CO3.H2O 0.00
Sodium Lactate 0.00
Potassium Lactate 0.00
Lactic 17.51 -0.1944 mEq/L 0.063983553 ml/gal
Sulfuric 0.00

but not an excessive amount and the fit is very good

1 -0.0002% 0.00 Calcium 33 32.9999
1 -0.0001% 0.00 Magnesium 20 20.0000
0 -17.2280% -0.23 mmol Carbo 1.34800 1.1158
0 -17.2280% -13.78 Bicarbonate 80.00 66.2216
1 -0.0003% 0.00 Sulfate 140 139.9996
1 0.0000% 0.00 Chloride 50.00 50.0000
0 0.0000% 0.00 Nitrate 0 0.0000
0 0.0000% 0.00 Nitrite 0 0.0000
1 0.0002% 0.00 Sodium 55.0000 55.0001
0 0.0000% 0.00 Potassium 0.00 0.0000
0 0.0000% 0.00 Fe(II) 0 0.0000
0 0.0000% 0.00 Fe(III) 0 0.0000
0 0.0000% 0.00 Ammon.
Wt'd RMSE Wt'd RMSE,% RMSE, mg/L
7.69086E-07 0.0002% 3.8233 Target pH 8.0000
Wts &#8800; 0 RMSE, (Wt &#8800; 0) RMSE, (Wt &#8800; 0)
5 0.0002% 0.0002
Alk, as CaCO3 Max (Wt &#8800; 0) %
56.16 0.0003%

Again, we don't want it at 8, we want it at mash pH say 5.4

CaCl2.2H2O 0.00
NaCl 67.68
MgCl2.6H2O 25.63
CaSO4.2H20 130.93
MgSO4.7H20 171.74
Liters/Liter 0.00
CaCO3 0.00
NaHCO3 103.69
CO2 0.00
HCl 0.00
Ca(OH)2 2.01
Na2CO3.H2O 0.00
Sodium Lactate 0.00
Potassium Lactate 0.00
Lactic 109.02 -1.1766 mEq/L 0.398306245 mL/gal
Sulfuric 0.00

which requires more acid, of course, because he synthesis at pH 8 has alkalinity of 56. Note that this isn't the specified alkalinity of the table entry for this water (alk = 66). That's because the water in the table doesn't exist.

Thus we see that this profile suffers from the same problems as the Black Malty but not nearly to the same extent.

It seems clearer that the way to fix this table is remove the bicarbonate column which is useless info as its entry is just an artifice to obtain electrical balance without regard as to whether the profile can actually be made and replace it with the mEq/L acid required to make the profile at pH 8 (which we assume is the pH for all entries in this table). The alkalinity column should then be changed to indicate the alkalinity of the real profile i.e. the one the brewer can actually produce. It would also, of course, be very useful if the recipes which produce the realizable profiles in DI water, including the requisite acid, were given.

A quick check of the Edinburg profile (not boiled) reveals that it can be made perfectly (with less than 2% error in the bicarb even) at pH 8 using CO2 as the acid with limestone. This is natures acid and the ideal acid and we usually have some sort of trouble if we try to substitute another acid in a synthesis. The fact is that much of the cation content of a natural water is there as the bicarbonate. It's complicated.