BrunWater Estimated pH Question

[Teesquar]

There are a few of my recipes that I'll use the water profile from the city of the type of beer I'm brewing, such as Munich, London, Burton, etc.

I'll set up the profile in BeerSmith and transfer the water addition amounts into the appropriate cells on the Water Adjustments tab. A few of the profiles require baking soda and/or chalk which causes the sheet to not indicate the amount under the sparge listing and just show "Not Recommended".

I'll take the adjusted "Total Mineral Additions" under the Mash listing for the Baking soda/Chalk and revise my BeerSmith recipe to match the lower amount and only add them to the mash.

My question is does the estimated mash pH take into account just using baking soda/chalk in the mash or is the amount that would have been in the sparge listing also calculated into the estimate?

 

[doomy86]

Be careful when taking water profiles from cities because it is not known exactly how the brewers there treated their water. It could be that they boiled it or added minerals themselves.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

Be careful when taking water profiles from cities because it is not known exactly how the brewers there treated their water. It could be that they boiled it or added minerals themselves.

Precisely!

It is almost inevitable that the breweries in major cities with terrible brewing water are heavily modifying it in order to correct it. Boiling, slaked lime treatment, etc...

Most of the reported water profiles for major brewing regions do not ion balance, so they are impossibilities to begin with. Likely they are averages over time, or averages of a range of waters found around each region, and they are certainly not definitive reality for any single water source due to the impossibility of their gross cation/anion imbalances.

Chalk does not dissolve very well into water at all without the presence of CO2 to assist it. Most of it simply drops out and does not accomplish what you believe it to be accomplishing. I.E., it does not contribute, even if your software may be telling you that it does.