water chemistry... have no clue... looking for help!

[joshesmusica]

I created this thread in the wrong place. but i'm wondering if you guys could help me understand if i need to do some adjustments when doing partial mash (biab) brewing.
the guy who taught me is from this country and been brewing for 30+ years, and he's never worried too much about water adjustments, and he churns out some truly great beer. but i'm honestly more into the science behind a lot of it, so i've been wondering about the water chemistry here. especially for some of my hop forward beers. the reports are attached. i'll post a translation as the first reply. thanks for any and all help!

 

[joshesmusica]

it's in norwegian, so here's the translation of each thing (i'm guessing that only the chemical and physical parameters need to be translated so i'll just skip to that):

most of the words are pretty straight forward, but i suppose some look a bit different:

dikloretan - dicholorethane
antimon - anitmony
arsen - arsenic
bly - lead
bor - boron
glykoler - glycols
mineraloljer - mineral oils
jern - iron
kjemisk oksygen-forbruk - chemical oxygen consumption
krom - chrome
kvikksølv - mercury
mangan - manganese
natrium - sodium
plantevernmidler, enkeltvis - pesticides, individually
selen - selenium
tetrakloreten/trikloreten - tetrachlorethylene/trichlorethylene
trihalometaner - trihalomethanes
hardhet - hardness


thanks for any help in advance. basically just wondering if there are any additions i should be doing or if it's pretty good.

 

[mabrungard]

Looks like great water. Very low mineralization. One component that seems to be missing is the alkalinity, but it is likely to be very low also. It appears that you could consider this equal to typical RO water quality. Adding mineralization as desired for taste is recommended.

PS: I could read through the Norwegian fairly well and the atomic symbol was listed also.

 

[joshesmusica]

Looks like great water. Very low mineralization. One component that seems to be missing is the alkalinity, but it is likely to be very low also. It appears that you could consider this equal to typical RO water quality. Adding mineralization as desired for taste is recommended.

PS: I could read through the Norwegian fairly well and the atomic symbol was listed also.

awesome thanks!
would you recommend any additions for hop forward beers? i tend to do those most often.

 

[bobbrews]

I'm not going to even try to decipher that text, however inherently bitter, hop-forward IPAs benefit from added Sulfate, usually in the form of Gypsum. Experiment with 200 ppm Sulfate and bump it up if you feel like it needs more. You want to keep the sodium, magnesium, and bicarbonate low. Chloride can be low to moderate at 30-60 ppm or so. Calcium is good in the 60-90 ppm range.

It should be said that when brewing a partial mash beer, the extract you use already contains an unknown % of minerals when it was created by the maltster. So completely correcting your wort to accurate mineral concentrations can prove to be quite difficult.

 

[McKnuckle]

Do we consider 200 ppm sodium to not be an issue? And a starting profile of 200 ppm chloride with 100 ppm sulfate as a basis for all beers? Also calcium is not listed and that's a fundamental ion. I'm confused. To me this water should be diluted and then readjusted with CaCl/gypsum to match different ion balances.

Or am I just reading the wrong column!? Maybe I am. I thought the middle column was the analyzed amounts. If it's the right column then it's a totally different story.

 

[joshesmusica]

the middle column is the accepted amounts. it is literally translated to limits acc. to drinking water regulations. the right-most column is literally translated to water works.