I would say that the need to add something to the water for extract brewing - depends.......
I think there's an agreement that the topic is mis-titled.
This looks like this a good starting point for how to approach experimenting with minerals in extract-based recipes.
If you want to add brewing salts to your water, I urge you to brew the beer without the salts first and see how it tastes. This is where water adjustment gets tricky for extract brewers: You don’t know how much sulfate or chloride is already present in your malt extract. It doesn’t matter whether you are brewing with dry malt extract or liquid malt extract; the minerals are still there.
The "missing" piece is a (relatively) easy approach for "dailing it in" (something more accurate than "trial and error") with the first batch.
Learning Lab: Water Treatment for All (Craft Beer and Brewing, 2019) isn't quite it: brewing four batches, one of which may be over-mineralized, probably isn't appealing to many. Blending (in the glass) bottles of "untreated" and "Balanced" could be one way to salvage an over-mineralized batch.
I'm working through an approach that would involve only the initial recipe and adding minerals in the glass. As far as I can tell, there's nothing really new in the approach. The dosing solution (in the glass) will use teaspoons and tablespoons (rather than eye droppers) as the revised recipe would use additions along the line of 0.3 grams per gallon (rather than PPM). I mentioned this in a different topic about a month ago.
... I did some "back of the envelope" calculations to get a small solution (0.2g gypsum in 100ml distilled water) so I could work with teaspoon / tablespoon additions in a 12 oz bottle. For the specific beer (probably along the lines of early 2000s APA), I found (this time anyway) that tablespoon additions were noticeable. Next step will be to put together a lookup table: 1 tablespoon of solution is an x.x gram addition to the recipe. Tablespoon measurements (and 12 oz bottle pours) are not precise measurement, but they may be to be "close enough".
Currently, I'm brewing (side-by-side) two early 2000s APAs, using a different brand (Briess, Muntons) of "light DME" in each batch. Tasting early sampling of hydrometer samples, I noticed a difference. Maybe the differences disappear when the beer gets into the glass, although things I've mentioned earlier in this topic suggest that the difference will carry through to the glass.
