Calcium Chloride Type

[WiscBrewer]

Quick question....do home brew shops typically sell anhydrous calcium chloride, or is it dyhydrate? The stuff I have looks like tiny styrofoam balls.

I evidently need to know this for a Bru'n Water setting. Thanks!

 

[ajdelange]

See https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=501377 for how to determine what you have.

 

[WiscBrewer]

Thanks AJ! Sure looks like calcium chloride is trickier to deal with than I realized.

 

[mabrungard]

Since the research that AJ conducted indicates that calcium chloride prills have a hydration state between anhydrous and dihydrate, I typically set the calcium chloride indicator to 'anhydrous' in Bru'n Water in order to avoid overdosing with chloride. Setting it to 'dihydrate' does mean that you would end up adding more chloride that anticipated, if the mineral is dominated by the anhydrous form.

Of course, you can create your own liquid calcium chloride solution and verify its strength via its specific gravity. Conversely, you can bake your prills to drive it back to the anhydrous form.

 

[WiscBrewer]

Thank you Martin. I'll use the anhydrous setting and think I'll give baking the prills a try. Once baked, I can store them in a small vacuum sealed container. I'm hoping that'll keep them close to an anhydrous form.

By the way, Bru'n Water has been a huge benefit to me. Many thanks!

 

[ajdelange]

That's what I do (assume anhydride). Though its probably not justifiable to elevate my experiments to the point where they could be called 'research' it seems likely that a new, unopened bottle of the stuff isn't going to contain much water the uncertainty should leave us 'close enough for government work'. As natural systems seem to respond logarithmically we might suppose that having half the calcium (or chloride) we want might be a problem but getting 80 or 90% of what we want shouldn't be. If you really care you can always check the calcium content in a liter of water to which x grams of CaCl2.?H20 has been added with a hardness test kit and back out the water of hydration from that.

 

[mabrungard]

AJ, we probably never know how a mineral is handled prior to packaging, but I agree that it seems that it might be closer to anhydrous for some calcium chloride. I do like your recommendation to bake your calcium chloride to help it out. If I understand correctly, baking at 375F to 400F is what it takes to bring a hydrated form of calcium chloride back to the anhydrous state.

 

[ajdelange]

I can't remember the temperatures but 200 °C (482 °F) comes to mind. Maybe it's 200 °C (392 °F) as that's more consistent with what you are recalling. Anyway, the higher temperature is only required if you want to drive the last water off as it is the most tightly bound.