What's the impact of boiling upon mineralization?

[Silver_Is_Money]

I must assume that boiling concentrates the minerals. So what am I winding up with in the end?

For example if I'm shooting for ~175 ppm SO4 and ~75 ppm Cl in a west coast IPA, and the wort runnings collected for boiling begin at ~7 gallons and wind up at ~5.7 gallons post boil, and I mash using 5 gallons of strike water followed by ~4 gallons of sparge water, with a grist of 16 lbs., and I add to the strike water 6g of CaSO4 and 3g of CaCl2.2H2O (to hit ~175 ppm SO4 and ~75 ppm Cl), what actual levels of Cl, and SO4 might I expect to find in the post boil wort (assuming no additional minerals added to the sparge water)?

Short version: Do mash spreadsheets account for boiling loss when computing mineralization values, and if not, how does one adjust for this, or should one even bother to adjust for this? And should mash spreadsheets be accounting for this?

And lastly,is mineralization normally added to the sparge water so as to achieve and/or maintain mineralization at the target levels (of 175 ppm SO4 and 75 ppm Cl for this example)?

 

[mabrungard]

It's a fool's errand to worry about ionic concentrations...in most cases. In virtually every case of correlating beer taste and perception results, they are keyed to the beginning water quality. We also should recognize that every beer production involves the loss of some of the water via evaporation. The variable then becomes: how much evaporation is lost?

Pro brewing systems reportedly limit evaporation loss to as little as 2%. However, it appears that many limit their evaporation to the 6% to 10% range. This is a big difference between pro and home brewers, we boil WAY too hard and our evaporation loss is too high. Its in this case of excessive evaporation loss, that ionic concentration during the boil will actually mean something. I've recently started limiting my evaporative loss to 8% to 10% by covering the kettle partially and reducing my heat input. That has worked very well and the beers have not suffered. There is NO DMS impact.

So my recommendation is that you reconsider how hard you are boiling your wort and the percentage of volume loss you incur. I used to lose about a gallon per hour and now I've reduced that to about 0.5 gal in total. I've also ended my long boils when I made beers with a lot of Pils malt. It turns out that you don't need to boil Pils wort for 90 minutes to avoid DMS in your beer. I just uncover the kettle for the last 10 to 15 minutes of the boil and boil a little bit harder to knock out any DMS that had been retained during my low boil.