Bell's Two-Hearted Ale water treatment?

First, before anything, what is your water profile? If you are not certain of the water you are beginning with there is not much use trying to model a water for a specific beer you are trying to clone.

What makes you think Bell's is using aggressive water treatment? As in, if you do not know the profile of the base water or the treated water, how do you now it is aggressive?

Basically, where is your water and what are you trying to do with it? Know those 2 questions and then we can discuss treatment options.
Cheers.

 

Here are a clone recipe for Two Hearted.
It's not the only one out there but it gives you some idea of the hopping level.

 

Here's a second
Both of these seem pretty balanced for an IPA. Not a ton of early boil hops, which create the most bitterness. A bit of a contrast in dry hops, with one using three and the other one oz. Both use centennial. Maybe it is really centennial hops that you don't like.

 

Is this the only Two Hearted that you've ever had, or did you mean it was one of many that you've had but this one was different? I've never had a Two Hearted that comes across the way that you describe, so I'm inclined to think your taste buds were off that day or you happened to get an old one or some other outside factor was involved.

Either way,you'll unlikely be able to match your water to Bell's water, mostly because no one here would know the exact profile of their water. I suggest that if you want to brew a clone, determine what your water profile is and then adjust it to an ideal profile for an IPA.

 

I was thinking that might be it. Do you drink other IPAs? As I suggested in #4, Two-hearted is pretty balanced for an American IPA. If you look back 10 or so years ago, many brewers were trying to out-do each other by adding more bitterness to their IPAs, but Two-hearted more or less stayed the course and, consequently, might be lower in bitterness than many IPAs these day. The exceptions are the more recently developed New England IPA style, which emphasizes hop flavors and aromas over bitterness. If you don't really like bitter beers, that's no problem, because there's practically at least one style of beer for everyone out there. If you want beers that are less bitter than an American IPA, you are in luck, because that is pretty much every other beer style. Hope you find something you like and brew it to your hearts content, even if not two-hearted.

 

They add gypsum, see the second recipe link. 55 IBU is not too high for a 7% IPA. They say they use Kalamazoo city water, find the profile for that as the base.

 

Looks like the correct answer. Good to know. Thanks.

 

Man I drink two hearted now and don't get much bitterness at all. I remember it was one of the first IPA's I really liked and I wasn't much into bitterness back then. If you think it is too bitter, cut back on one of the recipes listed here, or make another beer that isn't as bitter to you

 

It could be the gypsum/hop combo that doesn’t agree with you. If you find yourself brewing iPas maybe start out using a balanced gypsum-chloride ratio. If from there you want less hop emphasis, reduce gypsum and maybe raise chloride. Or alter the hop level and timing. There are several dials for you to play with here. My guess is those that directly involve hops (variety, timing, and amount) are more important to your palate than the sulfate level, but ultimately, it comes down to your preference.

 

Do you mean Sam Adams Boston Lager? If so, that's a far cry from Two Hearted or any IPA. Is there an IPA that you like?

 

After reading the Sam Adams comment, I went back and reread the original question. Seems the OP doesn't want what he is doing in his water treatments to make his beer turn out like an IPA.

 

But is it that he doesn't want it to taste like an IPA? Or is it that he doesn't want it to taste like something specific to Two Hearted? I kind of suspect the former, and that what @Shawn3997 interprets as aggressive water treatment is really plain old IPA-level hop bitterness.

 

A few things:
- Gypsum will not turn a balanced beer into a bitter bomb.
- If you want to add calcium you can also do it with calcium chloride (not just gypsum)
- Calcium is not really an attenution driver. The main thing it does in the fermenter is aid yeast flocculation.