Corrected water profile.

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LooyvilleLarry

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I think I have learned more in the past 2 weeks than I did with 2 years of chemistry!

I am trying to modify my Louisville water to match the common Burton-On-Trent profile using BrewWater. We have decent water here .

This is the first time that I have attempted to modify water, other than adding some 5.2 buffer.

The beers that I am preparing this for are an APA, IPA, and a Blonde.

Does this look fairly close to target?
What should be done with the sparge water?

So this is what I have come up with :
Volume Treated:
5.000 gallons
====================================================================
Water Ion Profiles (ppm):
Water Ca SO4 Mg Na Cl CO3 Hrdns Alk'y
Target 268 638 62 30 36 141 NA NA
Results 259 658 61 30 47 143 898 186
Your Water 47 59 12 30 47 78 165 78
====================================================================
Error between Target and Resulting waters = 13% rms
Acidification:
About 58.8 ml 10.00% phosphoric acid is required to
adjust pH from 8.33 (186 ppm alk'y) to 5.70
Check actual water pH before adding acid,
and add acid slowly while monitoring pH.
Salt Additions:
9.420 g. Epsom Salt
2.039 g. Chalk
13.750 g. Gypsum
 
The sparge water isn't too important with regards to salts. The main idea is to make sure oversparging doesn't bring the pH of the grainbed out of range, so acidifying a little might be in order (depending on your water profile).

In a recent Brew Strong episode, John Palmer suggest that salt additions should be done in two additions, due to the insolubility of salts in ambient water:

1) Figure out total salts to add. Looks like you already did.
2) Split the total into two additions: mash addition & boil addition
3) Figure out the salt addition (from your total) to get your residual alkalinity & pH into the right range & add the salt to the mash (& stir, of course)
4) Add the remainder of salt (total - step3) to the boil. This is to hit the target flavor provile of the overall beer - specifically paying attention to the Ca:SO4 ratio.
 
Ooh, I'm not so sure about that boil addition. No offense intended to Palmer.

I learnt that, like cactus mentioned, there is a low solubility on salts. However, I've been taught to add all your salts to your grain and mash, because the various chemical reactions will use up what's dissolved (eg. Ca and P to lower acidity, etc), and allow new 'space' for more salt to enter the system.

Since there are different reactions occurring in the boil, I'm not so confident that a copper salt addition is the best course of action. That's just my opinion though.

The actual amounts of salts you're talking about seem pretty reasonable for a high-salt beer. I'd be interested to hear about how it turns out!
 
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