Water issues

[Krivis]

Hello everyone, I'm in a bit of a pickle. Recently Ive been trying to narrow down all the issues with my brews and one of the biggest ones that I recently realized is water. I come from Lithuania and we have REALLY hard water. My tap water is very heavy with hco3 being in the 300mg/l . The softest one from the store I could find was Neptunas with these specs:
Ca2+: 41mg/l
Mg2+: 7mg/l
Na+: 2,4mg/l
K+:0.9ml/l
HCO3–:154mg/l
Cl–: 5mg/l
SO42–:6,2mg/l
SiO2: 29mg/l
ph: 7,8
I havent had much of a problem until recently because Ive been brewing only baltic porters and our traditional farmhouse ales which required harder water. but recently I thought about making a few light lagers for summer and all of them had issues with flavour. I read that 5.2 ph stabiliser also binds and reduces hco3 and would be usefull in my situation. what do you recommed? am I stuck with dark beers or is there a solution

 

[cire]

The problem is not the hardness of that water for brewing pale beers, but its alkalinity at 154mg/l HCO3. Acid additions could reduce that to a level suitable for brewing light lagers.

Should SiO2 be 29ug/l rather than mg/l?

 

[Jag75]

Do you have access to ro water ? If so , I would suggest getting a mash program and build up your water profile . I build up my light beers , but use regular tap for my dark ones.

 

[MaxStout]

Look for bottled reverse osmosis or distilled water in the store. Some stores have a dispenser where you can fill up your own container. You can use this water to dilute your hard water to get it down to where you want it. Or you can just use the RO/distilled at 100% and add just the minerals you need--build up your own water.

The 5.2 stabilizer is a waste of money. Dialing in your water will get you where you need to be.

 

[Jag75]

@MaxStout - I've thought about diluting ro and tap water instead of building . I'm just leary of doing this with a 3 bbl batch . Maybe I'm over thinking it . I guess the only way to truly know the outcome of solids is to mix 50-50 and have that sent in .

 

[VikeMan]

@MaxStout - I've thought about diluting ro and tap water instead of building . I'm just leary of doing this with a 3 bbl batch . Maybe I'm over thinking it . I guess the only way to truly know the outcome of solids is to mix 50-50 and have that sent in .

I'm not 100% sure I'm following what you're saying here, but if you know the profile of your base water, it's not hard to compute the profile resulting from mixing with RO water. The number for each ion will be a simple weighted (by source water volume) average. Really simple when one of the two waters is RO, which you can just treat as zero's across the board (assuming good RO water).

For your hypothetical 50-50 mix, you can just divide your base water profile numbers by two.

 

[Jag75]

I'm not 100% sure I'm following what you're saying here, but if you know the profile of your base water, it's not hard to compute the profile resulting from mixing with RO water. The number for each ion will be a simple weighted (by source water volume) average. Really simple when one of the two waters is RO, which you can just treat as zero's across the board (assuming good RO water).

For your hypothetical 50-50 mix, you can just divide your base water profile numbers by two.

I don't know the profile of the base water at the brewery. It's never been checked.