Beginners Guide to Water Chemistry and Brewing Salts

[FlyingWombat]

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Water chemistry is often seen as the final frontier for a lot of home brewers, sort of like the last thing you can master after understanding all the different elements of the brewing process, and can truly make an average beer a good beer, and a good beer a great beer! But for some reason, something about water chemistry seems a little daunting and scary to learn and understand, but there are great tools and calculators (such as Brewfather) that calculate salt additions for you, and here we have written up this quick guide to give you an idea of the basics so you can start dipping your toes into the world of brewing chemistry!

Blog: https://www.theflyingwombat.com.au/bl...
Calculator: https://www.brewersfriend.com/stats/

 

[Beerngineer]

Nice writeup! I like the typical ranges for each salt. One thing I would like to see would be an example salt calculation for 20L of a few different styles so that I can see if I'm in the ballpark. I'm always insecure after using a calculator and find myself pouring a bunch of powders into the water I just filtered.

 

[gunhaus]

This is handy to
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/a-brewing-water-chemistry-primer.198460/

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

direct link to blog: https://www.theflyingwombat.com.au/blog-posts/guide-to-water-chemistry-brewing-salts

eta: 'cliff notes' for 'A Brewing Water Chemistry Primer': https://www.bertusbrewery.com/2012/02/water-chemistry-how-to-build-your-water.html

also: With tap water, there are a couple of 'how to' articles (one from 2008, one from around 2016) on water adjustments. The 2016 article is over in the 'UK sister/brother' site. Looks like content from these articles has not found its way into LLM generated output. (Yes, I 'play' with ChatGPT prompts).

eta: also: https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/...ore-advanced-water-treatment-in-post-1.64822/ For those who have tap water from variable sources, this article appears to "have you back".