Water Calculations with Brewers Friend

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mcgster

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I have been bouncing around for the past year between Beersmith, Brewers Friend and Spreadsheets and i'm trying to force myself to use just one program. I think Brewers Friend has the advantage for me as i really like the way it logs my activity.

However, when i use the water tool it seems that i have to calculate my own salt additions, whereas beer smith calculates the best additions for me. Is this accurate or am i missing something?

Thanks!

Mark
 
Salts are 'as needed' and 'too taste' so I'd be leery of letting a program do that. If a program uses salts to balance mash pH then I'd tend not to trust it at all. We had a local Italian restaurant I couldn't eat at because all of the food was too salty. To a certain extent the need for a specific "water profile" is a holdover from what we believed were historic realties.
 
Salts are 'as needed' and 'too taste' so I'd be leery of letting a program do that. If a program uses salts to balance mash pH then I'd tend not to trust it at all. We had a local Italian restaurant I couldn't eat at because all of the food was too salty. To a certain extent the need for a specific "water profile" is a holdover from what we believed were historic realties.


I'm referring to using salts to match a water profile, I should have clarified that in my OP





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I'm referring to using salts to match a water profile, I should have clarified that in my OP
So am I. If you know you want a certain profile that is OK. If you assume you want a certain profile because that is what some predetermined 'authority' says you need, that is a different story. Matching your taste and some profile are two different things. It has been demonstrated that some of these profiles are bad guesses at best. People get the public water profile and assume that is what the brewers in those areas have used. This is often times not the case.

Have you read the primer? It really lays out how simple water adjustments can be. Once you get that down then you can decide if you need/want more complex additions.
 
So am I. If you know you want a certain profile that is OK. If you assume you want a certain profile because that is what some predetermined 'authority' says you need, that is a different story. Matching your taste and some profile are two different things. It has been demonstrated that some of these profiles are bad guesses at best. People get the public water profile and assume that is what the brewers in those areas have used. This is often times not the case.

Have you read the primer? It really lays out how simple water adjustments can be. Once you get that down then you can decide if you need/want more complex additions.

Oh yes i agree they can be quite simple! I read the primer and Palmer's "Water" which i found extremely helpful.

I tend to make my own profiles which are tweaks of ones i have used before, although i have used "traditional styles" before as well (Burton Upon Trent)

Beersmith and Bru'n water all calculate the optimal additions which is what i was wondering if brewer's friend could do as well (it seems odd that it wouldn't be able to do this) I don't mind doing my own calcs but sometimes i'm in a hurry :)
 
Brewer's Friend doubtless doesn't compute 'optimal additions' because there is no such thing. You give me a profile I can match it very very closely (if it is a realizable profile) using minimum mean square log error as the optimality criterion. But all that does in match a profile. By what criterion is any particular profile the optimum for a particular beer? Obviously optimum means 'most pleasing' but to whom? You, your spouse, your friends, your customers, a beer judge? Would the same beer be 'most pleasing' to all those people? No. So how can there be an 'optimal additions' set?

It is fine to have broad guidelines. They can be very informative but to call them optimum is deceiving.
 
Brewer's Friend doubtless doesn't compute 'optimal additions' because there is no such thing. You give me a profile I can match it very very closely (if it is a realizable profile) using minimum mean square log error as the optimality criterion. But all that does in match a profile. By what criterion is any particular profile the optimum for a particular beer? Obviously optimum means 'most pleasing' but to whom? You, your spouse, your friends, your customers, a beer judge? Would the same beer be 'most pleasing' to all those people? No. So how can there be an 'optimal additions' set?

It is fine to have broad guidelines. They can be very informative but to call them optimum is deceiving.

I wasn't meaning to spark a debate about what "Optimum" means i merely used that term because that is what beer smith uses.

While i agree there are many different salt additions that can be used to obtain different ion concentrations. Beersmith uses the 6 main brewing salts to obtain the proper ion concentration as set out in the user defined profile.

Do you know that Brewers Friend doesn't calculate additions in a similar fashion?

My question is more a software question than a philosophy one :)

I don't disagree with what you are saying its just not what i am asking.
 
I really don't know for sure what any of them do but it appears that Brewer's Friend allows you you to enter a target and salt additions and then displays the difference between the target and the result of the additions you made to the water you have. Actually calculating the salt additions given the target and base water profiles and a selection of salts is more difficult as iterative solution is required if bicarbonates and carbonates are included and/or if pH shift is contemplated. This is easily set up in a spreadsheet by using the Solver but most people have never heard of it or think it too arcane (it isn't). The idea is to minimize and error function. I find a weighted sum of the differences between the logs of the target and realized concentrations to be a good error criterion as it works on percentage errors rather than absolute errors. The weights are useful so that you can, for example, tune sulfate if that's really what you want to control while letting sodium go where it needs to.

Letting a user grope for 'ideal' salt additions by changing them while looking at 'errors' is one thing and easy to do. Having a program calculate an optimum (by some criterion) set of salt additions raises it to another level of sophistication.
 
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