EZ Water Calculator issue

[kaffeenjunkie]

I use R/O water with 4ppm NA for my water.

Grain bill
5 lbs Two Row Pale Malt
1 lbs Crystal 40
1 lbs Cara Pils
1 lbs Honey malt

8.6 gal mash water / no sparge (BIAB)
Without any additions EZ Water pegs my pH at 4.78
Add;
2 gm Gypsum
5 gm Calc Chloride
2 gm Gypsum

EZ Water pegs my pH at 4.67

In order to get my pH to 5.4 EZ water recommends 16gm of baking soda.

I hesitantly used half when I went to brew and even then was highly skeptical. You can certainly guess what happened. pH came in around 8.
I used some lactic acid to bring it down and added some time to my mash.
I still got my boil gravity and OG to come out fine and no doubt I will have beer in the end.

I just want to understand why EZ would ask for such a large addition of baking soda. Perhaps the formula in the spreadsheet got messed up somehow?

 

[ajdelange]

Something is definitely amiss here. Spreadsheets can get screwed up if cells with formulas aren't protected but the usual result of such is a completely unreasonable answer. I guess you could try downloading another copy and running the numbers again. If you get the same answer then the focus shifts to you misinterpreting something or having a half pound of sauermalz in there that you aren't aware of. There is no way the grist you specify can give you a pH that low with RO water.

 

[kaffeenjunkie]

Something is definitely amiss here. Spreadsheets can get screwed up if cells with formulas aren't protected but the usual result of such is a completely unreasonable answer. I guess you could try downloading another copy and running the numbers again. If you get the same answer then the focus shifts to you misinterpreting something or having a half pound of sauermalz in there that you aren't aware of. There is no way the grist you specify can give you a pH that low with RO water.

Thank you AJ. I will download EZ again. I wish it were simple as having a half pound of sauermalz but in this case, none were used.