Water Help, WARD lab results

SkyHoptics · Jan 19, 2016

attached are my Ward Lab Results,
I have recently been struggling with batches, rooting to my water.
I make 5 gallon and 10 gallon batches

any tips and suggestions help, Thanks!

mabrungard · Jan 19, 2016

Its decent brewing water. The alkalinity is somewhat high and most of your brewing would need acid of some sort. If you haven't been acidifying in the past, you would have had a difficult time making a decent pale beer.

SkyHoptics · Jan 20, 2016

Yes, When using my "house" water it is difficult to make a light beer

any other suggestions on additives or what I can do for Beer styles across the spectrum

Thanks!

mabrungard · Jan 20, 2016

Time for you to spend some time on the Water Knowledge page of the Bru'n Water website.

rappell · Jan 20, 2016

Get yourself a pH meter, some brewing salts, acid malt and the ez water calc spread sheet (http://www.ezwatercalculator.com/) and start managing your water. You'll be surprised at the improvement you will see. Happy brewing&#55356;&#57211;

trentm · Jan 21, 2016

SkyHoptics said:
Yes, When using my "house" water it is difficult to make a light beer

any other suggestions on additives or what I can do for Beer styles across the spectrum

Thanks!

As mentioned above you will need to use some form of acid in almost all styles to get the pH down to target (phosphoric, lactic, or acid malt are all good choices). Your water has enough calcium for yeast, hot break, and precipitation of calcium oxalate. However you can still add more as up to 100 ppm is OK. For flavor ions, your chloride is low for perhaps all styles and the sulfate may be just right for certain styles (malty) but low for some hoppy styles. To get in a small ballpark, for malty styles perhaps 1 teaspoon of CaCl2 per 5 gallons is all you need. For a hop forward beer perhaps 1/2 teaspoon of CaCl2 and 1 teaspoon of CaS04 per 5 gallons will give a nice hop profile and still present a good malt backbone. Remember sulfate and chloride are flavor ions so you can adjust them to taste and what's neat is you can spike a finished beer with either of these ions to make adjustments in the next batch as long as you don't go too high in the initial adjustments. But also remember that our source of chloride and sulfate come with baggage, either calcium, sodium or magnesium. All three of which can cause issues in beer above a certain level. If you find yourself wanting more sulfate, you might consider adding some epsom salt along with the CaSO4 as with the adjustments above you are getting near the 100ppm calcium which is approaching the max IMO. Let me also suggest you take a look at the sticky here and perhaps get Gordon Strongs book "Brewing Better Beer". In it he takes a look at a simplistic approach to water adjustment. If you really want to get your mash pH correct a decent pH meter is a must as the water spreadsheets may or may not be able to accurately predict the pH of your mashes.