Water Chemistry - Grains

[WBB]

So I’m starting to get interested in water chemistry and it’s a little overwhelming, but I think I got the basics. I picked up some gypsum, calcium chloride, and calcium carbonate. I’m using brewers friend basic water calculator to start and adjusting from distilled water. I thought about sending my tap water off to ward, but I think it changes throughout the year and what it is now might not be what it is in say July.

How do you take in account the chemistry that the malts bring into the recipe? Say I’m brewing an ESB and I want the Burton on Trent profile in the brewers friend calculate. So I put that in as my target and the source is all zeros. And then adjust my gypsum/calcium carbonate and chloride until I get all green stars in the ion report.

But how do I know if the malts are going to change the levels?

I tried using bru n water, the freeware, but it wouldn’t work on my Mac, asking for a password.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

Unfortunately, Calcium Carbonate is highly insoluble in water and therefore will not likely accomplish what it is intended to accomplish, but rather much of it will most likely eventually settle out and accomplish little to nothing with respect to changing a waters analyticals.

We really have no way of knowing if the breweries within the Burton on Trent region brew with such water straight up, or if they modify it in some way (be it mildly or radically).

I'd be interested in knowing if my 'Mash Made Easy' spreadsheet functions within either Excel (2007 or newer) or LibreOffice on a Mac. It is free and complete and can be downloaded at the web link seen below. It can be used to create water of any desired analyticals, as well as to determine the impact of the malts and minerals upon mash pH. Due to the inherent problems that calcium carbonate brings with it, Mash Made Easy does not include it in its list of available minerals with which to formulate or alter the characteristics of brewing water.

 

[McKnuckle]

@Silver_Is_Money, I use MME with Excel 2010 (I think) on my Mac. No issues. Thank you!

 

[ajdelange]

How do you take in account the chemistry that the malts bring into the recipe?

That is a loaded question!. There are two aspects to it. The first relates to:

But how do I know if the malts are going to change the levels?

The malts DO change the mineral content appreciably and in unpredictable (for practical purposes) ways. The approach we take, therefore, is that we have learned what liquor mineral content results in a good result for a particular style. For example, we know that Czech Pilsners seem to turn out best when the liquor is very soft or very soft with a bit of added calcium chloride. We thus advise brewers to use RO or DI water for Czech Pilsner and then experiment with small additions of this or that to see what lends the most pleasing result. The final answer is found by experimenting. You have to brew and drink a lot of beer to get there but isn't that basically the idea anyway?

The second part of the answer to your question relates to the mash pH estimation/control aspect of the brewers job. We do that by modeling the acid/base properties of the individual malts and combining these models with models of the acid base properties of the other things we put into beer: water and the bicarbonate it contains, acids we may add, bases we may add. The concept is actually quite simple but in years of trying to teach others to use it I have only had one success that I know of. So you are left with any of the myriad spreadsheets and calculators that others have put together which model these acid base properties sort of. Note that even using the robust method one has to determine how each malt behaves and that takes a lot of work. The end result is that except for the rare brewer who is willing to undertake that work the crude available programs aren't that much worse than the more accurate ones. Either will give rough idea. The best approach is to use one of them to get a WAG and then do test mashes to determine what adjustments to make for pH.