Using RO water plus additions to build perfect water...

Google "ez water calculator" or "bru n water" to find good water calculators. They can help you determine your overall mineral content after adding certain salt additions to your base water. As for what water contents to aim for, they typical differ depending on style. The "Water" book by Palmer might be a good place to start, although I'm speculating since I haven't read it yet.

 

Starting with RO/Distilled is arguably the best way to build your desired water profiles. That's what I do probably 95% of the time. In addition to EZWater and Bru'nWater (both of which are very good), you could also check out BrewCipher, which has utahbeerdude's water model built in, and has one advantage in that it's also a general brewing spreadsheet, so your grain bill automatically feeds the grain pH contributions to the water model part.

 

before you go down the road of correcting your brew water, let's be sure that you don't have other issues in your brewhouse.
i'm not sure your brew water is broken and needs fixing. tweaking probably, but that is different.

if you are using bottled water with RO, your beer should be good in the least. maybe not spot on for the style, but the terms "rough hops" and "tons of esters" indicates there may be some other areas to fix before water. it could be something as easy as using too much cluster or some other catty hop. might be lack of oxygen in the lag phase. maybe not a healthy starter. maybe tannin extraction. or poor/loose recipe design.

true, could be water related. though my thinking is that you have an all-grain issue. not a water issue.
Cheers.

 

Agree with your other comments, but as for the one's I quoted I'd say that....

50% bottled water + 50% RO water = very soft water which will require salt additions for most styles IMO

 

Using all bottled water, whether it is spring water or RO should give you good water either way. If the water tastes good then it should work. I've got a RO system at my house ($300 to install) and all I add is 1 tsp gypsum. I started adding all kinds of saltes and water treatments etc., but after many batches I've found that just 1 tsp gypsum works fine. Kind of a keep it simple stupid approach. I brew mostly IPA's and have had good results. It might be something else in your brew process that's giving you the flavors you don't want. Is your correct ale temp referring to the beer temp, or ambient temp?

 

I would need 90% RO to get to very soft water and low alkalinity water with my tap water.
You don't know how poor some waters are.

 

Making yeast starters? A poor fermentation will make your beer taste all sorts of wrong, regardless of water source. And, water usually won't correct ester formation (although min calcium levels are usually required for good flocculation).

 

The OP isn't using tap water w/ RO, he is using bottled water with RO. That aside, I still did assume that the bottled water being used by the OP was on the soft side. Not all bottled water is soft so my feedback should be discounted somewhat.

 

OK I get it, poor reading after a big food and beer dinner.
My water still sucks.

 

For many styles, RO + 1 tsp gypsum is not going to get the mash pH into the best range. Nor is a 'calcium and sulfate only' water profile going to yield the best flavors for many styles. It may work to your satisfaction for your IPAs, but it's oversimplified advice that's bound to disappointment eventually.

 

agreed.
without knowing the mineral content of the bottled water and not calculating the produced water, any random guess as to how to achieve soft water is just that, a random guess. not to mention that brewing water is more involved than soft, very soft, hard or whatever. unfortunately, there is a lot more to it than that.

as I and others have said, brewing water chemistry can only be simplified to a point. it doesn't have to be rocket science, but it is science none the less.
Cheers.

edit

I do agree with Koopas reassessment.
Cheers.

 

I refill my water bottles the 5gal kind up at the store on a machine that does RO water. Carbon filtered, RO, UV light, yadda yadda. Works pretty well for me.

Use that as my blank slate, and I've pretty much dialed in some water profiles from other places into beersmith and have a profile for Hoppy beer, Darker/Maltier beers, Pilsners, and an "all around" profile.

Try to keep it simple though. You can get a bit overboard and I feel there is a point of adding and tweaking that can be lost if your other processes aren't sound as well.

Grab some gypsum, cacl, lactic acid, epsom salt, baking soda, table salt and some chalk, although I feel the chalk is a bit wasteful, and pretty much only worth it in the mash and not a kettle addition.

 

Depending upon how technical you want to get with all of this, there are a couple of papers here that discuss water chemistry for the homebrewer. There is also a water spreadsheet for calculating estimating mash pH. As Vikeman has stated, this spreadsheet has been incorporated into BrewCipher.

 

To build the perfect water for brewing would need more knowledge,information and technology,IMO.
A raw aproach to build a decent water would be :

Starting from pure RO water

For 5 gals of beer 1,25 qt water per pound of grain for an average OG wort, all additions to the mash.

Pilsen

2 grs ClCa
3 grs SoCa

Light colored Ales

2 grs ClCa
2 grs ClCa

Malty beers

4 grs ClCa
2 SoCa

IPAs

2 grs ClCa
4 grs SoCa

Amber colored beers

3 grs ClCa
3 grs SoCa
1 gr Baking Soda

Dark beers

3 grs ClCa
3 grs SoCa
2 grs Baking Soda

This could be a rough beginning very distant from the best options. It is most likely that many mashes of pale beers would need some acid addition to hold Ph mash in the correct place.Just a beginning

 

Forget chalk as it doesn't actually dissolve in water w/o CO2. Use Pickling Lime instead as it too is Calcium Carbonate and it readily dissolves in water for the mash. Per Bru'nwater, neither chalk nor pickling lime (nor baking soda for that matter) should be added to sparge or kettle, only mash. I found Pickling Lime at Fred Meyer (Krogers) and Bi-Mart (local to North West).

 

My bag OG chalk is on the do not need shelf. Even at mash pH it takes 3 hours or more to dissolve. Pickling lime and baking soda (if you have low Na) are what I use.

Palmer has a good write up on chalk and how it should not be relied on in Water.

Edit - pickling lime is CaOH2, caustic stuff.

 

Good advice. Minor fact check: pickling lime (aka slaked lime) is actually calcium hydroxide.

 

I have never tried pickling lime, but if it adds calcium it might be a good thing. For dark beers I end up cross-controlling by acidifying with CaCl2 and/or gypsum and then having to counteract with baking soda. Does pickling lime let you use a lower overall salt addition?

To the OP, before you start designing water you probably should first invest in:

1) a lab analysis of a sample of your starting water. You could probably assume zeros across the board for RO water but if it is like mine and downstream of a softener it may have a lot of sodium.
2) a pH meter (not strips), plus cleaning, storage and calibration solutions. Some meters can also test total dissolved solids, which is handy to verify that your starting water is as expected.
3) a scale accurate to at least 10ths of grams. Use this for measuring salt additions.

You can probably get all of the above for under $200, but to dial in water recipes you need to know where you're starting from and be able to accurately measure your additions and results. Otherwise I would recommend only minimal gypsum and/or CaCl2 in RO water to ensure 50 ppm calcium or so.

Also, if you do not already have a stir plate, grain mill, chiller and oxygenation system forget messing with water and get those first. They are much better bang for the buck.

 

Good to know, I always wondered why it would readily dissolve if it was the same as chalk when chalk won't. They do the same thing though, add calcium and up the bicarbonate levels which raises the pH when it is too low (from dark malts, typically).