billy bignutz wrote:Water profile and additions.
Hi Dr Smurto (or anyone that does water additions). I noticed some time back that you said you were going to tank water and would have to start adding salts. I have no choice but use tank water and water additions as I live rural and was wondering what water profile you use and what additions for your particular volumes of mash in and sparge waters. Being a light coloured ale my calculations require a lot of acid additions to get the PH down.
I am really looking forward to my first attempt at this brew - a 50L batch straight off.
Not a fan of calculating pH, the buffering capacity of the malt itself is ignored. Designed by engineers whose total knowledge of chemical equilibria could be chiselled on a grain of rice with a shovel. Along with their understanding of chemistry in general. But i digress. Measure the pH. If it is out (and i would wager it probably is not) then you can attempt to adjust the pH.
Yes, I've been using tank water for a number of years now and always adjust the chemical profile to suit the brew i am doing. For the Landlord I use my 'Yorkshire' profile. When i talk about profiles these are not historical water profiles which I'd wager no commercial brewery actually uses but a profile I have created to favour a particular flavour or style. In general, sulfate for hoppy beers, chloride for malty beers. An oversimplification but it works. My most common water profile is called 'Balanced' and is designed for the vast majority of my beers which are brew to be balanced between malt and hops. This profile has a sulfate:chloride ratio of ~1:1.
My Yorkshire profile for 35L of tank water (<0.1 ppm of the brewing relevant salts as measured via ICPMS) requires 5g of calcium sulfate, 6g of calcium chloride and 3g of calcium carbonate. The way i tend to deal with this is dissolve the calcium sulfate and chloride in the 35L of water and dispense from this for the mash and sparge water. I add the calcium carbonate to the kettle as it doesn't dissolve in water at neutral pH. Another way of adding the salts is to calculate how much water you need for the mash as a % of the total water and add that % of the salts. Add the rest to the tun when the sparge water goes in (assuming a single batch sparge).
I would advise putting your tank water through a carbon filter before using it for brewing to strip out any organics/biological contaminants in there. My water tastes pretty good and i often drink it unfiltered but i still run it through a carbon filter for brewing (and for the espresso machine).