PH and Water Adjustments

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Pumpkinman906

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I have a question that I hope others can offer some input on. I am fairly clear on making water adjustments after listening to a series of podcasts about 5 times, however yesterday I realized that I may have a process flaw. We were making two batches of Irish Red yesterday and I had worked up the water adjustment according to the spreadsheets. Our water PH is 8.3. Now my understanding has always been that I want my hot liquor PH at around 5.8 before mashing in, so, I added my salt additions into the first batch and the PH only got down to 7.0. I had a really tough time getting the PH down to 5.8 using Lactic acid after adding the salts. During the second batch, I added 1.3 ml of Lactic to the water first and the PH dropped to 5.8, however, as soon as I added the mash salt additions, the PH shot back up to 7.0. My question is should I be adding the salts to the water based on the intended SRM and forget the PH as the whole idea is that the malt will buffer the PH or is my method above sound but my additions are screwed up. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
 
Don't worry about the water pH. It's all about the predicted mash pH based on SRM and all the other data in your source water. Additions go into the mash directly, not the strike water. Measure the pH of the mash after 5 minutes, then correct with acid if necessary.
 
Wouldn't adding Lactic for any further PH adjustments in the mash require stirring, therefore disturbing the grain bed? If that's ok then no problem. I was always taught not to disturb the grain bed at all, hence the question.
 
Wouldn't adding Lactic for any further PH adjustments in the mash require stirring, therefore disturbing the grain bed? If that's ok then no problem. I was always taught not to disturb the grain bed at all, hence the question.

The grain bed will be stabilized after the mash and vorlauf. You don't want to stir after the vorlauf.
 
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