PH Test puzzle

[brewfarmDan]

I ran my first ever 10 gallon batch this weekend with a lot of new equipment and also my first time using well water. I had some good feedback on well water and the best advice was to run my first batch on bottled city water. BUT I really wanted to avoid hauling water on every batch so I went for it with well water. A couple weeks ago I serviced the home water treatment system and had the treatment store test the water, they reported PH as neutral. Saturday I added the grains to my new pre-heated 70 quart Coleman Xtreme, stirred the mash, cooled a sample to room temp on a SS Spoon, and tested the PH with a "Precision Labs" test strip that I purchased at the Brew Store the day before. The strip read on the yellow end indicating near 4.6 PH. I had premixed some "5.2 PH Stabilizer" expecting that I would need to lower the PH and was surprised (maybe panicked) and dug thru a box of old brewing stuff and found some Calcium Carbonate for raising PH. I added in steps till I reached 2 teaspoons (the max per my 15 year old notes on the label) and was still reading somewhere around 4.8 to 5.0 well bellow my range of 5.2 -5.8. At this point I decided to run as is and at least get brew notes for my first ever Batch Sparge, new Large 16 gal kettle, home made 50' X 1/2 immersion cooler, and 12.5 gallon SS Conical Fermenter.

After the Boil I was ready to transfer to the fermenter and took an Original Gravity expecting it to be below target and it came exactly per recipe at 1.050? At that point I tested the Tap water PH with the strip and it read 4.6 which had to be wrong. Could I have got old bad strips or? I ordered a digital PH Meter today. Anybody know what happened? The good news is that it is bubbling away and hopefully will turn out ok

 

[Conan]

What kind of beer was it? Some grains lower pH drastically.
I started using 5.2 stabilizer but didn't notice a difference in my beer and did not buy another tub of it. Are you looking to get into building your water or just playing with pH? Kyle

 

[brewfarmDan]

Conan ... It was a British IPA. Also as I noted above the test strip read below 5 on the tap water (after I brewed) which was tested 7.0 just a couple weeks ago? I am going to take the test strips to the Brew store today and see what it reads on their water. Thank you

 

[brewfarmDan]

Kyle ....I missed part of that.......... I am brewing with well water for the first time and am just trying to figure out how to get the PH close enough for the mash conversion so I don't have to haul city water. Thanks again

 

[hunter_le five]

The general consensus is that 5.2 PH Stabilizer is garbage, and PH strips can often be pretty finicky/unreliable. I suspect your digital meter will work much better for you.

 

[Gavin C]

pH 5.2 does not do what it purports to. Read @AJDelange posts on this. Like many who read up on the product I trashed mine.

PH strips are ineffective as a Homebrewing tool. Again I am going off the advice of experts in the field of water chemistry. A good meter is what you need. 3 in particular are recommended by the resident guru on HBT.

Calcium carbonate has no usefulness in altering the mineral content of your water. It takes days to react. When added to strike water you will see the result is just cloudy water.

This is not opinion but fact verified by the author of Bru'n water. Again the best place for CaCO3 is the trash can. if you want to disolve it more rapidly you need to add CO2 at very high pressures.

The white cliffs of Dover are chalk. They have been around for along time and have not disolved away.

 

[brewfarmDan]

Thanks Gavin. After reading more reviews on the PH meter I ordered it may not be any good either. I will check the strips today. The good thing is that my Original Gravity was spot on so if I get good tasting beer I think I will keep using the well if not I will fill bottles at a friends who is on municipal water from a local lake that is said to be good brew water

 

[Gavin C]

No worries. Glad to help out. The pH meter I got is the Hach Pro+. You can see it here.

 

[ajdelange]

Here is a quick catalog of the home brewing mistakes that we have most frequently addressed on HBT. We had hoped our posts would have by now largely eliminated these from the list of goofs new brewers fall victim to.

1)Making mineral adjustments to water without knowing what is already in the water
2)Adding alkali to mash based on the color of the beer or more broadly without verifying by, preferably, measurement or at least calculation, that it is necessary
3)Using calcium carbonate as a source of alkalinity
4)Using 5.2 pH adjuster
5)Relying on pH strips for pH measurement
6)Assuming that a jar labeled 'calcium chloride' contains 100% calcium chloride or that one labeled 'lime' contains 100% calcium hydroxide .
7)Relying on chloride to sulfate ion concentration ratio as a predictor of beer bitterness and maltiness.

Note: I think everyone is in agreement that 1 - 6 represent mistakes but 7 might be considered controversial.

Apparently we have not been as successful as we had hoped and BrewfarmDan hit 5 out of 7. All of these have been discussed here (though mostly in the Brew Science thread) but apparently he hasn't seen any of this discussion. My question is as to how to vector new brewers to this basic information in the hopes of saving them some lost beer. I don't think sending beginners off to Brew Science is the way to go as it gets pretty deep there. Maybe a list of these in a stickies here and the beginners forum?

To BrewfarmDan: before you do anything else get a sample of your well water off to Ward Labs. This will tell you what is in it. It is only with that information in hand that you can hope to make informed decisions as to what to add or remove.

Comment on Calcium Carbonate: While it is true that I first noticed that adding calcium carbonate to beer was ineffective for the intended purpose based on time history measurements of the pH of laboratory mashes it was an in vitro experiment that really brought home how dramatically slow it is to dissolve at mash pH. To make a long story short I was in the process of trying to make pure calcium chloride by dissolving pure calcium carbonate with pure hydrochloric acid. Towards the end of the experiment I found myself with a suspension of calcium carbonate (milky solution) at pH 3 after an acid addition. This condition persisted for hours though the pH continued to creep up over that entire time period. In fact, as I recall, pH was still climbing the next day indicating that calcium carbonate was still dissolving. If it takes that long to react in a beaker full of HCl it's clearly going to take even longer in a mashtun exposed to the much weaker acids of malt.

 

[Gavin C]

I hit 3,4,and 6

I need to read up on CaCl2 as I am still making errors in that regard. I suppose it's due to the crystaline nature of it with crystaline molar mass not equalling the molar mass of CaCl2?

 

[brewfarmDan]

Thanks AJ. The Calcium Carbonate was recommended to raise PH in the mash in one of my old Dave Miller brewing books, it is probably 20 years out of date . A lot has changed since then and the biggest is these great brew sites where you can get immediate feedback and the cutting edge information. I have not looked in the science forums but I guess it's time. Thanks for the detailed response

 

[ajdelange]

I hit 3,4,and 6

I need to read up on CaCl2 as I am still making errors in that regard. I suppose it's due to the crystaline nature of it with crystaline molar mass not equalling the molar mass of CaCl2?

The problem is contamination. The contaminant is water from the air. Put some calcium chloride on a small dish and leave it for a few days, then come back and check on it. It will be gone and in its place there will be a syrupy liquid.

How to deal with this is described at https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=501377

 

[ajdelange]

Thanks AJ. The Calcium Carbonate was recommended to raise PH in the mash in one of my old Dave Miller brewing books, it is probably 20 years out of date . A lot has changed since then and the biggest is these great brew sites where you can get immediate feedback and the cutting edge information.

There are a lot of sources out there much more recent than Dave Miller that advocate the use of it for mash pH adjustment. I see that I joined HBT in 2010 - five years ago and I did so because I noticed that there were so many posts advocating the use of lots and lots of chalk in beers based mostly on the color of the finished beer. There were books, websites, nomograms, magazine articles etc that advocated that approach. It sort of became my mission to stop people from using chalk where it wasn't warrented if I could. The amounts of chalk advocated were huge based, I think, on the fact that most of the calculators at that time only accounted for half the potential alkalinity of chalk. The fact that it didn't dissolve seemed at first to be good news as only half the potential damage would be done to the beer but then I realized that some of the microcrystals which didn't dissolve in the mash would be carried through to the kettle and beer where they would continue to reach potentially even during fermentation.

 

[Gavin C]

On the batch I added chalk to I am getting very poor head retention in the finished beer. A stout with flaked barley in it to augment head retention. Could the chalk content reacting slowly in the FV contribute to this? The kreusen was almost non existent also.

 

[ajdelange]

Can't say more definitively than "possibly". Many biochemical reactions are mediated by pH. If you add chalk to most stouts you will push the pH too high for at least some parts of the process. Given that the reactions which lead to the formation of proteins in the right molecular weight band for good head formation are among those that are effected by pH it is quite possible that the chalk is responsible. But we can't prove that. If you do everything else the same way but withhold the chalk and the problem goes away that is good evidence that it was the chalk.

 

[Gavin C]

Can't say more definitively than "possibly". Many biochemical reactions are mediated by pH.

reactions which lead to the formation of proteins in the right molecular weight band for good head formation are among those that are effected by pH it is quite possible that the chalk is responsible.

If you do everything else the same way but withhold the chalk and the problem goes away that is good evidence that it was the chalk.

Thanks for the swift reply. I will be redoing the stout (Yooper's Oatmeal) at some stage in the future with ommission of chalk and hopefully improved head retention.

I am happy with every other aspect of the beer. This is the only beer I have made where I have noted this issue. The glass looks almost untouched after drinking. As you say there are a myriad of other possibilities.

 

[bloodysafety]

Hey dan - I grow things for a living and have and use many different types of ph meters. As long as the one you ordered can be calibrated AND you actually calibrate it you should be ok. You should calibrate regularly and with the cheap 10$ ones you need to calibrate every time you turn it on. Most meters do fine with 2 point calibration some need 3. You can order calibration fluid or go to the local hydro store. Also well water suffers from ph swings. Mine, for example, hangs around the mid 6es in winter and shoots up to almost 9 in the summer. :2cents:

EDIT: are you concerned with ph because of taste or because of yeat health? just wondering. im a brewing noob

 

[ajdelange]

Hey dan - I grow things for a living and have and use many different types of ph meters. As long as the one you ordered can be calibrated AND you actually calibrate it you should be ok. You should calibrate regularly and with the cheap 10$ ones you need to calibrate every time you turn it on.

The problem with the cheap meters is that they do not hold calibration i.e. they drift. If the drift occurs slowly (and all meters do drift to some extent) then it is only necessary to calibrate daily. If they drift so fast that they can't hold calibration for more than 5 minutes they are pretty useless for brewing (or much of anything else IMO). If you see a pH meter listed as having 0.5, 0.1 or 0.2 accuracy it is probably because the thing drifts that much in a few minutes. There are tips on how to do a stability check, calibrate a meter etc. at
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=302256
You do not want to buy a cheap meter. It will let you down. The Hach Pro+, the Milwaukee 102 and the Omega pocket offering (don't remember the model number) have all been more or less vetted on HBD. This is not to say that there aren't others out there that may be suitable but these three have been used by HBD members who have done the stability check on them. All are around $100.

Most meters do fine with 2 point calibration some need 3.

The meter must be calibrated at two points which span the pH range you want to measure. For brewing, the range of interest is usually 5.0 to 6.0 in mash and down to 4 in kettle and fermenter and so we calibrate with buffers at 4.0 and 7.0. These buffers are sold with tolerance of ± 0.02 pH (you can spend extra and get ones made to tolerance ±0.01 pH). With 4 and 7 buffers you will (provided the meter makes good voltage and temperature readings) get accuracy down to better than the buffer tolerance so there is not need for an additional buffer in the 4 to 7 range nor will another buffer help much if the voltage and temperature measurements made by the meter are noisy).

When calibrating the meter measures voltages at pH1 and pH2 (the two buffer pH's) and determines slope (rate of change of voltage with pH) and offset (voltage at one of the pHs). Knowing the pH for one of the buffers, the offset and slope it can do linear interpolation between the two buffer pH's and determine the pH that corresponds to any voltage. If you do a two point cal at 4 and 7 the meter will do linear interpolation between 4 and 7 which is fine for any mash/wort/beer related measurement. If you do a three point cal, say 4, 5 and 7, then it will interpolate between 4 and 5 for any pH in that range and between 5 and between 5 and 7 for any pH in that range. As, noted above, that won't get you improved accuracy. If, OTOH, you are working above pH 7 (titrating water to find acidity or titrating a pH 10 water sample to 8.3 to measure its M alkalinity) you should calibrate with 7 and 10 buffer (or any other pair that spans the range in which you will be measuring). Then the meter will interpolate between 7 and 10 for any voltages which fall in that span. If you are doing, for example, a complete alkalinity determination on a water sample with a high pH the first titration end point is 8.3 and the second 4.3 so you should do a three point calibration using 4, 7 and 10 (or similar) buffers.

Also well water suffers from ph swings. Mine, for example, hangs around the mid 6es in winter and shoots up to almost 9 in the summer.

Something very fishy there. What's this water's alkalinity?

 

[bloodysafety]

It's my understanding that well water ph swings because of seasonal changes in TDS caused by factors such as temperature and precipitation it is also not treated and therefore more variable then treated "city" water.

Also, I wasn't trying to imply that you SHOULD use a cheap meter I was just saying that in my personal and extensive experience with them even the cheap ones will do if the right amount of attention is paid to them. No matter what you are doing you should always buy the best you can afford. In some cases for some of us it will be a 10$ chinese toy and for some of us 100$ is nothin'. As long as you calibrate regularly and are aware of potential inaccuracies things will be O.K.

I like the Milwaukee calibration fluid sachets myself. They are rated at +/- .01, cost 1.29 (compared to hannas 1.59) and I don't have to worry about contaminating the solution over time.