Water profile and question on full, dry and balanced

[Chorgey]

I'm running Bru'n water and there are selections for different types of water profiles. Selections are full, dry and balanced for the following 'colors'...
Yellow , amber, brown and black

Can someone describe in layman's terms the difference or pros/cons of full, dry and balanced? It may sound idiotic but I'm at a loss.

Thanks and Cheers!

 

[dmtaylor]

It's all about mouthfeel. Dry is basically thin and watery, or in the case of water profile, tends to accentuate the hop bitterness. Balanced is "normal". Full will give you a thicker, more syrupy character, and tends to accentuate the malt character. These are very exaggerated terms though. In reality it's more like splitting hairs. If you serve two beers with slightly different water profiles and ask someone to tell you which one is dry and which one is full, I'll bet ~75% of people can't detect any difference at all.

 

[Sammy86]

I'm running Bru'n water and there are selections for different types of water profiles. Selections are full, dry and balanced for the following 'colors'...
Yellow , amber, brown and black

Can someone describe in layman's terms the difference or pros/cons of full, dry and balanced? It may sound idiotic but I'm at a loss.

Thanks and Cheers!

Here ya go:

Colors are for the colors of the beer.

Dry= Lagers, Brut IPA, Golden Ales, Kölsch...think easy drinkers

Balanced= Where your hop flavors and malt flavors are balanced

Full: Generally, stouts, porters some of your bigger beers.

 

[mabrungard]

Dry is basically thin and watery, or in the case of water profile, tends to accentuate the hop bitterness. Balanced is "normal". Full will give you a thicker, more syrupy character, and tends to accentuate the malt character.

Sorry Dave, that misses the mark. While those descriptors do refer to mouthfeel perceptions, they aren’t as you describe.

It’s more to do with how malt flavor is perceived. In the case of Full, the elevated chloride content helps malt flavors to linger longer on the tongue and palate. In the case of Dry, the elevated sulfate content helps strip or clear malt flavors off the tongue and palate. The Balanced profile lies between those Full and Dry extremes.

If you want a beer to display more than its malt flavors, using water chemistry to manage how long malt lingers, is a key skill.

 

[dmtaylor]

Hmm. I wonder how the beer is perceived when using a huge amount of both chloride and sulfate. I mean, let's talk 300-400 ppm of each or more. Like Burton ales. I don't know that I've tried doing this in my own brewhouse, at least not recently. Adding salts to extract beers using spring water, this could be part of the twangy thing that I've experienced, and I suppose I brewed way too many of those 20 years ago before I knew better. My impressions of an over-salted beer include bitter, metallic, and malty as heck, all at the same time. But I guess this is beyond either "dry" or "full" or "balanced" to the point of being "stupid".

I see no argument against the second half of my initial response.

 

[mabrungard]

Hmm. I wonder how the beer is perceived when using a huge amount of both chloride and sulfate.

It’s known as ‘minerally’

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

going slightly off topic (source water for extract-based recipes vs all-grain water profiles)

Adding salts to extract beers using spring water, this could be part of the twangy thing that I've experienced, and I suppose I brewed way too many of those 20 years ago before I knew better. My impressions of an over-salted beer include bitter, metallic, and malty as heck, all at the same time.

A while back, with some DME-based recipes, I was 'experimenting' with adding minerals in the glass to dial-in the flavor. When I went too far, those where some of the off-flavors that I encountered. For my taste, it doesn't take much additional CaCl or CaS04 to over-mineralize. Ading both CaCl and CaS04 (as a flavoring addition) was almost always a bad idea.

More generally, I suspect that many problems with extract-based recipes can be explained by one of two things: bad source water (excess minerals, excess alkalinity, chlorine/chloramines) or stale LME. When they made the extract, they took just the water out - so seriously consider putting just the water back in. Otherwise, know the mineral content and alkalinity of the source water and know what "low mineral / low alkalinity" means for the brand of extract being used (mineral content varies by brand).

 

[mabrungard]

Some LME and DME producers have rather mineralized water serving their facility and that mineral content ends up as part of their finished products. It's important to know this possibility and to temper your subsequent salt additions based on that.