What is the best all-around salt additions for Distilled water

[Red over White]

Once you get a handle on your base malt and what it contributes, you can play with Mg & Na. With my water and Barke pils I can't detect Na until the strike water has 80ppm. In concert with what the malt natively brings it has to be well over 100ppm and it's not unpleasant. I can detect it, but my freeloading customers don't until I point it out. Then with heightened awareness syndrome they are suddenly BJCP judges lol

I have no idea how perceptible 80ppm Na in the strike water with Rahr, Mecca Grade or any other pils malt would be though. Some findings seem to think that the water used during malting contributes to minerals carried through to the glass, seems plausible. Small incremental adjustments with your regular water & grist may help you find out how far you can push Mg & Na, it did for me.

 

[mabrungard]

Distilled or RO water can be helpful in brewing, if your tap water is a train wreck. But including some ionic content to those waters is helpful in improving beer flavor. As mentioned, some combination of gypsum and calcium chloride is the easiest approach to mineralizing the water. Adding enough to bring the calcium content to around 50 ppm to maybe 100 ppm is a good target range. Adding some measure of both tends to produce a better result than all of one and none of the other.

That is a simple approach to mineralization, but even the low alkalinity in RO or distilled water can be too much for brewing pale beers. Some additional acid can be required. Same thing can be said if you're brewing a dark beer. Then more alkalinity is needed or a dark beer can be too acrid and acidic.

 

[mac_1103]

That is a simple approach to mineralization, but even the low alkalinity in RO or distilled water can be too much for brewing pale beers. Some additional acid can be required. Same thing can be said if you're brewing a dark beer. Then more alkalinity is needed or a dark beer can be too acrid and acidic.

Wouldn't that be saying the opposite thing.

 

[bwible]

Brulosophy has shown several times now that blind testers can't generally tell one mineral profile from another, until extremes occur (at least). And (say what you will) I believe their findings to reflect reality. This said, please do not turn this into another of the hundreds of Brulosophy bashing threads.

So the big problem I see with this water is it has basically nothing for either Sulfate or Chloride. It also has low calcium and much lower sodium than my 2 reports from Ward show.

As far as the minerals, it looks like it is just a matter of bumping up the sulfate and chloride to desired levels. Alkalinity in the thing I don’t have a clue about.

I’ve taken advice from Martin in another thread about keeping sulfate and chloride both low, around 30-40 each for lagers and gotten very good results doing that. For pale ales you want higher sulfate, right? Some threads are saying 150-200 sulfate for British ales.

So would there really not be a noticeable difference between batches brewed with 40 each sulfate and chloride and something like 175 sulfate and 80 chloride?

I’m new ish to this water adjustment stuff myself - I know Silver Is Money and Martin have alot more knowlege on this topic.