Water help needed

[Ianflean]

Hi all,

I'm doing my first commercial batch soon on a 500L system. The water at the brewery is incredibly soft:

Ca: 46
mg: 4
na: 9
cl: 11
so: 7
PH: 7.7

I know it's quite lucky to have this as base water, but i'm worried as my first batch is a pale ale with Enigma and H. Blanc hops which I want to shine.

I've not touched water chemistry before as the minerals / salts in the water at my home were much higher.

I'm pretty sure using gypsum and other salts is allowed (I'm in Germany so the purity law comes into play) if used before the mash.

Any tips on how much gypsum / calcium chloride to use and what I numbers I should be targeting?



Secondly, the owner of the brewery likes to get beers out of primary and into secondary after 7 days, and his fermentation room is a constant 15 degrees. Would US-04 do the job in 7 days? I've been told US-05 might not get it finished in time... any other tips for a good, fast working neutral ale yeast at that temp?

Thanks!

 

[saltymirv]

For homebrew use I recommend Bru N Water highly. I would assume it works just as well on a commercial scale. I really like the "pale ale" water profile they give to do pale ales and IPAs, I think its 300 SO4 and 55 Cl. Post up your mash and sparge water volumes and I can run your numbers for you, but for future batches you should look into getting the spreadsheet yourself

For the yeast, whenever I use US-05 its done in 3-5 days, although I use it at about 18C normally. You could also look into WLP090 if that's available. Its known to attenuate very aggressively and have a neutral character

 

[Ianflean]

Thanks a lot!

Not tuned in the recipe perfectly yet as not 100% sure about the system, but will be about 290 / 300L mash - 380L sparge.

Maybe I should just brew pilsners

 

[saltymirv]

That's some great water for pilsner

So here's what I got for your additions: http://imgur.com/a/uYwEq

The water volumes are in gallons but they are just converted from 300L/380L/500L. The salt additions are in grams.

Note also that it recommends some lactic acid in the sparge. You may want to add some in the mash as well, I like to get my light beers down in the 5.2-5.3 mash pH range. Don't take that lactic acid amount very seriously though, you didn't include a bicarbonate/alkalinity with your water profile, so I made an estimate on your bicarbonate amount. I also made up an estimated grain bill, which will affect your pH as well.

Here's a link to the download page for Bru N Water so you can input everything to your specifications: https://sites.google.com/site/brunwater/home/files

 

[Ianflean]

Thanks for your help!

That sulphate number scares me Is ppm pretty much the same as mg/l?
alkalinity is "0,14 mmol/l" whatever that means.. it's a German water report so I don't understands some of the volumes.

Malt bill is 88% pale ale, 5% carapils, caraamber, 2% acidulated which should get my mash PH down to 5.4.

Thanks again!

Ps, can't see WLp090 anywhere here, so I guess it's really down to US-05,4, Nottingham or Mangrove Jack's west coast. I'd like to use dry yeast ideally.

 

[saltymirv]

No problem, I'll let you fill in the the full water report and grain bill to dial in your pH if you want to. The amounts of CaSO4/CaCl2 that I posted will be the same regardless of grain bill and alkalinity.

Yea ppm is the same as mg/l. mmol/l is milli-moles per liter, like in chemistry class. Its basically how many molecules per liter.

As far as the yeast I'm not familiar enough with commercial systems to be able to answer that. I imagine the fermentation process is much more exothermic on a bigger scale like that compared to a 20L homebrew setup, so US05 may still work ok. You'll have to experiment or ask someone who knows better.

Good luck!

 

[ajdelange]

For starters, 46 mg/L Ca is not particularly soft water but more to the point using that with the other numbers gives a wildly unbalanced report and so something is wrong here. Should it be 4.6 mg/L? Or, given that it is a German report, is it in some other units (like mmol or mEq per liter)? Perhaps if you could post the report we could make more sense of it.

In any case 0.5 gram of CaCl2 per 20L of soft water is a good starting point for any beer.

Yes, mg/l and ppm are so close that trying to distinguish between them is useless effort. But are you sure that the number for sulfate is mg/L as sulfate?

 

[55x11]

For starters, 46 mg/L Ca is not particularly soft water but more to the point using that with the other numbers gives a wildly unbalanced report and so something is wrong here. Should it be 4.6 mg/L? Or, given that it is a German report, is it in some other units (like mmol or mEq per liter)? Perhaps if you could post the report we could make more sense of it.

In any case 0.5 gram of CaCl2 per 20L of soft water is a good starting point for any beer.

Yes, mg/l and ppm are so close that trying to distinguish between them is useless effort. But are you sure that the number for sulfate is mg/L as sulfate?

pretty close to Hamburg water profile reported by brewers friend:
Hamburg Wasser Neugraben
Ca+2 Mg+2 Na+ Cl- SO4-2 Alkalinity pH
33 3 9 10 12 110 (HCO3) 8

http://www.hamburgwasser.de/wasseranalysen.html?download=121

Hamburg Wasser Rothenburgsort, Germany
Ca+2 Mg+2 Na+ Cl- SO4-2 Alkalinity pH
68 6 19 29 33 164 (CaCO3) 7.7

http://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/water-profiles/

 

[Ianflean]

Wow, the internet never fails to amaze me

Here's the report (brewery is just East of Hamburg, unbelievable skills 55x11

https://www.hamburgwasser.de/tl_files/PDF/wasseranalyse_grossensee93d3-2.pdf?download=116

 

[ajdelange]

Now that report does balance nicely because, in contrast to your earlier reported alkalinity of 0.14 mmol/L this one shows 2.5 which largely balances out the 2.3 mEq/L of calcium hardness. Although they list the hardness level as 'weich' (soft) that 2.3 mEq/L is a respectable level of calcium but one that leaves you some room to use calcium chloride to get the chloride level up to a more solid value (fuller body, rounder beer) and gypsum to elevate the sulfate if you want that. I'd suggest that you be sure you do before dumping in a lot of gypsum following some profile you got from a spreadsheet.

Also 2.5 mEq/L alkalinity is 'respectable' (125 ppm as CaCO3) and will have to be dealt with if mash pH is to be correct. The 2% sauermalz you mentioned earlier should take care of this.

 

[Ianflean]

Now that report does balance nicely because, in contrast to your earlier reported alkalinity of 0.14 mmol/L this one shows 2.5 which largely balances out the 2.3 mEq/L of calcium hardness. Although they list the hardness level as 'weich' (soft) that 2.3 mEq/L is a respectable level of calcium but one that leaves you some room to use calcium chloride to get the chloride level up to a more solid value (fuller body, rounder beer) and gypsum to elevate the sulfate if you want that. I'd suggest that you be sure you do before dumping in a lot of gypsum following some profile you got from a spreadsheet.

Also 2.5 mEq/L alkalinity is 'respectable' (125 ppm as CaCO3) and will have to be dealt with if mash pH is to be correct. The 2% sauermalz you mentioned earlier should take care of this.

Thanks, but "Saurekapazitat" (2.5) is acidity, and "Basenkapazitat" (0.14) is alkalinity. Now i'm really confused.

 

[ajdelange]

No, Sauerkapazität is the "acid capacity", IOW how much acid a sample can absorb before reaching pH 4.3, i.e. the alkalinity. Basenkapazität is the amount of base the sample can absorb before its pH rises to 8.2. These end points are listed on the report and confirm this interpretation. Furthermore, if you assume that the alkalinity is 2.5 and compute the acidity you get a number pretty close to what they list as the measured acidity. Further still to this if you interpret Sauerkapazität as the alkalinity you have a profile that balances quite well. If you interpret Basenkapazität as akalinity you are way off.

 

[Ianflean]

No, Sauerkapazität is the "acid capacity", IOW how much acid a sample can absorb before reaching pH 4.3, i.e. the alkalinity. Basenkapazität is the amount of base the sample can absorb before its pH rises to 8.2. These end points are listed on the report and confirm this interpretation. Furthermore, if you assume that the alkalinity is 2.5 and compute the acidity you get a number pretty close to what they list as the measured acidity. Further still to this if you interpret Sauerkapazität as the alkalinity you have a profile that balances quite well. If you interpret Basenkapazität as akalinity you are way off.

Great, thanks for the correction. I took the words in their literal meaning. Chemistry scared me at school so i've no real idea about all of this. I'll try to find a relatively simple book about this topic and try to learn, it's interesting and I guess the next step to improving the beer

Thanks for your help!