Help with understanding water adjustments?

[cotillion]

Hi there. I am trying to get back into homebrewing and want to start getting my water up to snuff as part of my practices. I live in Greenville, SC, which has great water overall but probably a little high in pH.

Reports show Ca 1 Mg 1 Na 8 Cl 5 SO4 5 and 7.8 pH
https://www.greenvillewater.com/waterquality.pdf

I've tried the different calculators but don't know enough about water chemistry to feel comfortable just plugging random numbers of different salts in to try to dial things in.

Can anyone help me with a simple, base recommendation for what I should do for my water? I know a very detailed profile would depend on grains and intended beer, but I was hoping maybe there's a "general improvement by adding X g/Gal of this before every batch."

Does this exist?

Thank you for any advice!

 

[Yooper]

That's looks like great brewing water! You need to find out the alkalinity, and then you'll have all the info that you need.

You will need to use a campden tablet (one crushed tablet per 20 gallons of brewing water) to neutralize the chloramine used for disinfection.

You can add calcium chloride and/or gypsum if you use, depending on what you're making, and perhaps a little acid or acid malt in the mash to obtain the proper mash pH (depending on the water's alkalinity), but it's a great blank slate to start from.

 

[cloudybrewer]

Look at the water primer sticky in the brew science forum.

 

[mabrungard]

Wow! Very lightly mineralized, but not unexpected when you live in the mountains. That municipality is likely dosing the water with sodium hydroxide or sodium carbonate to reduce the corrosivity of that water. You can create an educated guess for the amount of bicarbonate in that water by plugging in the data that they have given you and increasing the bicarbonate content until the water report's cation and anion totals are balanced.

 

[acidrain]

First thing to realize is that it is not the water ph that you are trying to alter. Water ph has nothing to do with ph of the wort.
The crushed grain, mixed with hot water create a certain PH wort, and the minerals in the water have an effect on that.

 

[cotillion]

Thanks for the info, guys! I forgot to add the Alkalinity part, which was listed as 10 HCO3 rather than CaCO3.

If I'm adding acid to the mash water (if that's the correct time), is lactic the best to use?

I guess there really isn't any sort of generic treatment for all brews using this water? I've brewed with Gville water many times and always had solid results without any amendments, but my hope was to toe into that now as I try to create a NEIPA (just got back from Tree House and Trillium and have the bug). Given the $ on hops spent, I want to at least get it close to right.

 

[chickypad]

Great water. The reason you can't treat all brews the same is that different grainbills will lead to differnt pH levels in the mash. If you want a very simple guide to get you close enough without getting too into water calculators then you can follow the water primer instructions as someone mentioned - see link below. You can pretty much just follow the instructions for RO water with your readings. Don't forget the campden as Yooper mentioned. The acid malt will give you your acid. If you want to use actual lactic acid instead you're probably going to need to use a water calculator to estimate how much.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/threads/a-brewing-water-chemistry-primer.198460/

 

[cotillion]

Awesome - thank you. Does acid malt have any particular other side effects?

Do I just add a few ounces on top of a given recipe, or should it replace an equal amount of some other malt to not throw other things off?

 

[chickypad]

You can just add a few oz in addition to the recipe. Shouldn't have any other side effects besides adding lactic acid.