Water Help with Black IPA

[farmskis]

I am going to brew a black IPA here in the near future. My thoughts are to follow the primer and add some calcium chloride and gypsum (to help with the hops) and skip the sauermalz because of the roasted malts. My water is closest in line with Pilsen. Any other suggestions? I used the calcium chloride and gypsum on my last brew... an IPA and I really liked the outcome! I skipped the sauermalz in that as well due to my water being so soft already. Will I run into any problems trying to create a darker beer with my soft water?

 

[mtnagel]

I brewed the Wookey Jack clone on here and used the advice from the brewer at Firestone Walker that was given in the thread:

Wookey Jack brewing salts - we use RO treated water with a 2/3 Gypsum 1/3 CaCl- addition to get the total Ca addition up to 100ppm. Kettle 2

Here's what my finished water came out to:
Ca - 100 ppm
Mg - 10 ppm
Na - 22 ppm
SO4 - 214 ppm
Cl - 21 ppm
HCO3 - 64 ppm

Beer came out great so I think that is a good starting point.

 

[farmskis]

Thanks! It looks like I am along the right track. The numbers will help me figure out amounts to add.

 

[ajdelange]

There is the potential to have and overly low pH if you use too much dark malt. The question, of course, is 'How much is too much?' Unfortunately, the answer is 'Enough to push your pH too low.' This is really the place where a pH meter is worth its weight in gold. If the roast stuff is less than 20% of the grist you should be OK but if one of the highly colored grains in unusually acidic you could undershoot at that level. Barring access to a pH meter I guess my advice would be to keep the roast stuff at 15% or less. That should give you plenty of color and a reasonable pH.

 

[farmskis]

Good point! I believe the darker malts are maybe 10%. So I should be ok.

 

[troglodytes]

I brewed the Wookey Jack clone on here and used the advice from the brewer at Firestone Walker that was given in the thread:

Here's what my finished water came out to:
Ca - 100 ppm
Mg - 10 ppm
Na - 22 ppm
SO4 - 214 ppm
Cl - 21 ppm
HCO3 - 64 ppm

Beer came out great so I think that is a good starting point.

I'm resurrecting this dead thread as opposed to a new one as I'm about to brew a Wookey Jack Clone and I had a completely different water profile in mind. My current plan for a profile is as follows:

Ca: 51
Mg: 2
Na: 39
SO4: 75
Cl: 75

My thinking was that I'd want Sulfate and Chloride roughly the same. With the roasted grains I wouldn't want to much bitterness and risk it being acrid. And I don't want Chloride too high because you want the some roast to come through, but more importantly this is not a porter but a hop driven beer so you a level of dryness. Is my thinking flawed? I'll copy the water profile in the original post if its proven to work with this recipe, but the +200ppm sulfate levels look like it would be way too high for a recipe with 6% of the grist being 500L or darker.

 

[mtnagel]

I'm resurrecting this dead thread as opposed to a new one as I'm about to brew a Wookey Jack Clone and I had a completely different water profile in mind. My current plan for a profile is as follows:

Ca: 51
Mg: 2
Na: 39
SO4: 75
Cl: 75

My thinking was that I'd want Sulfate and Chloride roughly the same. With the roasted grains I wouldn't want to much bitterness and risk it being acrid. And I don't want Chloride too high because you want the some roast to come through, but more importantly this is not a porter but a hop driven beer so you a level of dryness. Is my thinking flawed? I'll copy the water profile in the original post if its proven to work with this recipe, but the +200ppm sulfate levels look like it would be way too high for a recipe with 6% of the grist being 500L or darker.

Sorry for replying 6 months later, but did you ever brew this? I've been out of brewing for a year or two and so I wasn't checking in here, but I've brewed a couple times since Covid started and the Wookie Jack clone I linked above was the last beer I brewed a couple weeks ago and just kegged it a couple days ago and had my first pour of yesterday. Here's the water profile I used this time, which seems a little more reasonable than the 10:1 SO4:Cl ratio

Ca 100.0
Mg 7.0
Na 36.0
SO4 171.0
Cl 55.2

My thinking like you said is that you want a level of dryness, which is why SO4:Cl ratio is ~3:1 but honestly, I can see dropping the SO4 a bit but maybe not to the 1:1 you have. But I'd love to hear what you thought if you did brew it with that profile. As I said, only had 1 pour off a freshly kegged beer, but it's as tasty as I remember. Nice bitterness with some roastiness and I wouldn't say it's acrid at all.

 

[mtnagel]

Ok, so went back to this:

Wookey Jack brewing salts - we use RO treated water with a 2/3 Gypsum 1/3 CaCl- addition to get the total Ca addition up to 100ppm

And when I plug that into Bru'n water, with 0.92 g/gal gypsum and 0.46 g/gal CaCl2, I get a finished water profile of:

Ca 100
Mg 0
Na 0
SO4 135.0
Cl 77.3

which matches his statement. No clue what I was thinking before, but I think I'll try to use that next time. I can get very close with my tap water, though obviously it will bring in some Mg and Na, but I think that's okay. That's a 1.75 SO4:Cl ratio, which seems like a good balance between dry to accentuate bitterness, but not too dry to hopefully accentuate the roastiness as well.