german pilsner water

[MHBT]

hello yall, im about to brew a german pilsner and would appreciate some critiquing on the water i plan on using, i put all the inputs into the water calculator and this is what i got, give me your opinion on what you think and if im going in the right direction, recipe is keith ciani's GOLD cut to 5 gallon batch with the addition of 1.8% acidulated malt. want a bitter hoppy G pils

starting with distilled neutral ph 7

adding 7.6 g gypsum
1.5g epsom
0.78g canning salt
2.4g calcium choride

resulting profile is (ca 75) (mg 4.6) (na 9.5) (s04 150) (Cl 50) (HCO 0)
estimated mash ph 5.32

grain bill 10 lbs german pilsner
4oz acid malt

also was just planning on mixing all these salt additions to the full volume 8.5 gallons and using 3.75 gallons for the mash and 4.75 gallons for the sparge instead of adding the additions to the mash and sparge water separately anyway i just trying out things seeing how they turn out your thoughts would be appreciated thank you

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

It looks fine, but I can't imagine any possible case where it would ever be necessary to dip into the hundredth decimal place for mineral additions. This is truly ballpark stuff, and there is simply no magic to anywhere near such precision. In reality few to none of us know the water profiles used by any of the commercial brewers. And I seriously doubt that they sweat the details to anywhere near the degree of homebrewers.

That said, for a Pilsner you could probably get by with closer to ballpark 40-50 ppm calcium and ballpark 60-75 ppm SO4. Your 150 ppm SO4 is in the realm of IPA's.

Distilled water is generally well below pH 7, but source water pH is quite close to irrelevant anyway, so that's another issue where there is no need to sweat the details.

PPM is a terrible way to measure mineralization to begin with. If you mash with 4 gallons of water at 50 ppm calcium, and I do an identical no-sparge batch and mash in 8 gallons at 50 ppm calcium, my water has twice as much calcium present for which to react with the grist, albeit both waters claim the exact same 50 ppm. This alone should help guide you into realizing that a lot of this water mineralization stuff has affinity to the proverbial smoke and mirrors.

 

[Yooper]

For a pilsner, the most ideal water has very little to no sulfate, and a mash pH of 5.4 or so. It depends on the hops you're using, but noble hops seem to get very harsh (instead of firmly bitter) when the water has sulfate in it. Definitely no epsom salt is needed, and you may want to reconsider the gypsum. I wouldn't use the table salt (can't see a reason for it), and you could use calcium chloride if you really want to. If you want to get to 40 ppm with the calcium, you could add calcium chloride and a little bit of gypsum to get there, but don't use anything else and don't add much.

100% distilled or RO water is perfect. You can bring the calcium up to 40 ppm if you feel you need to, to prevent the possible of beerstone formation, but many pilsner brewers don't even do that.

 

[MHBT]

thank you for the input, i was under the impression that german pilsners have more sulfates to make them more hoppy and bitter then bo pils, i do not want a soft bo pils i want a more hop foward german so i chose the light and hoppy profile. i am tinkering around with the spreadsheet and from your advice i cut alot of the gypsum out and boosted the calcium chloride which now gives me 56 calcium 75 chloride and 34 sulfate everything else is zero, does this seem more suitable for a hoppy german pilsner? thanks again

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

Some of the latest research I've come across (I wish I could remember where) is indicating that both chloride and sulfate ions enhance hop bitterness. And I also came across one reference (Brulosophy perhaps) which indicated that sodium does likewise (as opposed to much existent literature indicating that sodium has a smoothing or mellowing effect). This is another reason why I believe that much of what we presume today with regard to minerals flavor and hop impact is merely smoke and mirrors. It's as if someone says something, then 10 people come along and parrot it without doing any verifying research, and then 100 more parrot it, etc...