Water chemistry question

[Bacon488]

I am looking at a water report from a brewery in Grodzisk, Poland for use in a Gratzer/Grodziskie. Part of it confuses me.

It lists "total hardness," "permanent hardness," and alkalinity as ppm CaCO3.

In BeerSmith I don't have input fields for those parameters. I do have HCO3, but I don't know how to deduce that number from the above items.

Any help?

 

[LoneWolfPR]

Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3) is Chalk which should be in your program I would assume. It's a common brewing additive. As for the others, I've never been quite sure what all those mean other than they are a measure of the minerality and alkalinity of the water. Try to find the ppm of Calcium, Bicarbonate, Magnesium, Sodium, Chloride and Sulfate. If you can find all those you can usually come pretty close to recreating that profile using distilled water and combinations of various brewing salts. When recreating a water profile I like to use this online calculator to assist: http://www.brewersfriend.com/water-chemistry/

 

[Bacon488]

Thanks. Yeah, I use chalk all the time, but the software only calculates additions--it doesn't have a way (a direct one, anyway) to tell it how much CaC03 is already present. It functions pretty much identically to the calculator you linked.

I actually managed to track down a table from Palmer. Table 13 at the link.

http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter15-1.html

Rearranging things, it appears that HCO3 = 61/50 * alkalinity. So I've got the inputs I need.