Ph and other stuff

pH can be ball parked with software calculators if you know your ingredients and mash parameters...How To Brew by Palmer (chapter 15) is a good start.

 

Personally I don't use my pH meter very often. I am content to rely on the predicted pH from my software.

I use yeast nutrient in pretty much all of my batches.

Gypsum is one of the two or three main salts used to manage water chemistry. I always try to tell people not to get intimidated by water chemistry, in practice it is much easier than people often assume. But I wouldn't blindly start adding gypsum to my beers. Once you've read up on water chemistry (How to Brew is good for this), then gypsum will be a big part of your toolkit (along with calcium chloride). Those are cheap salts and they don't go bad (although calcium chloride will absorb water if you leave it exposed to the atmosphere), so like it wouldn't hurt to buy them now, but again I wouldn't encourage you to use them until you've got a grip on what you're aiming for.

 

It's not so much about "good" vs "bad" water quality (although there is some water that's so bad that it's not worth treating). It's about what specifically is in the water and how that interacts with the recipe's specific grain bill. PM me with an email address if you'd like a copy of a brewing water treatment presentation I put together for a homebrew club audience. And read the water knowledge page at Bru'n Water. And the white papers by @utahbeerdude, available at http://homebrewingphysics.blogspot.com

 

I purchased a pH meter and never use it (it does not work while the mash liquor is hot; meaning corrections can not be made on the fly).
I calculate pH based on the grain bill and water mineral content using the calculators on Brewer’s Friend.com.

I had my water tested by Ward Labs and add gypsum, etc. based on recipe.

 

Worrying about pH and mineral additions didn't result in a discernible change or improvement in my brewing. If your water is indeed "good" and does not have chlorine, and you're happy with your beers, I suggest to anyone to go ahead and remain blissfully ignorant as there's not much if anything to gain in all this silliness. MHO, YMMV, RDWHAHB.

 

Anecdotally, my beers were just as good (or bad) before I got into water chemistry.

I’ve always used filtered water though.

1/2 Spring, 1/2 Distilled water was my method for years. Made some damn fine beer.

I mostly think focus on water chemistry is due to home brewers wanting to be like the big boys.

Imo, most of the big boys (commercial brewers) would be completely content to use something like 1/2 Distilled 1/2 Spring if they could. But when making dozens-hundreds of barrels of beer per week, it is not possible. Thus brewers must use filtration themselves and build their water in-house. Plus, they brew beer almost every day and make the same recipes hundreds-thousands of times, so it makes sense to dial in every detail to the ppm degree. They are also concerned about efficiencies and maximizing yield of sugars from the grain, of which pH plays a significant role. Inefficient control of pH = loss of efficiency = loss of money.

Just trying to put some context on this topic. Best of luck with what you decide to do. Cheers!

 

I'm a little more inclined to see water chemistry as worth the brewer's attention. It is certainly an important aspect of certain styles such as English bitters or NEIPAs.

That said it is generally a pretty forgiving area of brewing, except for elimination of chlorines/chloramines, which is crucial. I would say you've got to deal with those chemicals from day 1 if you want to make good beer. (Short answer is that you can eliminate them with a campden tablet or a small amount of ascorbic acid, aka vitamin C.)

 

I'm with @minderbender especially if you're doing all-grain. Personally my beer has improved greatly since learning what my water was like so I know when I need to use distilled/RO water. Once you've gotten over the initial shock of it, water treatment is extremely simple with any number of calculators doing all the work for you (I use Bru'n Water).

I'll add that getting the PH in a decent range varies greatly from a Lager/IPA to a big Russian Imperial Stout. So if you are struggling with a style it could be the water that's the issue.

 

I'm going to hijack this thread a little with a further question about pH, adding salts, and the brewcypher. Looking at the water tab, it talks about sparge/kettle differentiation. So, in my mind, I should be adding the needed salts/acid to my mash to my desired pH. That part is easy. For sparge, it talks about acidifying to a pH close to the mash pH and adding salts to the kettle. Won't that mess with pH in the kettle? Or is it a mute point because the wort is removed from the malt? I guess I'm confused on that part?

@VikeMan

 

Ideally you want to mess with the pH in the kettle. It will naturally decrease but adding hops will partially negate that.

Also you lose Ca when you add your salts in the mash/sparge. Up to what 50% will stay with spent grains and depending on your starting alkalinity you might lose even more.

Adding them to the boil means more of the Ca will actually make it into the fermenter.

I check pH 4-6 times between dough in and KO. For some beers it’s more important than others.

 

Adding salts to the kettle can have a minor impact on the pH (if there are still phosphates in the wort to react with), but the boil and subsequent fermentation will have larger impacts. Basically, salts you add to the kettle are for flavor, where you don't want to impact the mash pH (which is more important that "kettle pH"). Regarding acidifying the sparge water, you don't necessarily need to do that. For example, if you are using distilled/RO water or if your base tap water has low alkalinity, you can safely skip it. The purpose is to avoid having the pH of the runnings getting too high and extracting tannins from the malt. That problem is also more likely to happen with fly sparging than with batch sparging.

 

Each link will have a little advice. During the boil your ph is good if you see something that looks like chicken skin floating around. Very weird.

http://beersmith.com/blog/2015/05/07/mash-ph-and-why-it-matters-for-all-grain-beer-brewing/
https://byo.com/article/the-power-of-ph/
https://beerandbrewing.com/what-is-ph-and-why-does-it-matter/

 

@VikeMan @wasatchback
Thanks for the reply! That makes sense. I did notice that playing with brewcypher, changing the sparge salts doesn't affect the mash pH at all. I know that I'm targeting a mash pH of 5.4, boil of 5.2 and KO of 5 so any reduction from adding salts to the boil can only help that.

 

My brews have improved since I started adjusting the water chemistry.
I use a 6 stage RO water filter, test with BrewLab water test kit. Then plug the numbers into the EZ water calculator to figure out which salts to add to the mash. Testing with a meter 10-15 minutes into the mash has confirmed that the pH is always pretty close to what EZ water says it should be.

 

Water chemistry is not as hard as it seems at first. You can break it down into a few related issues. But first, pick a free spreadsheet that addresses water chemistry and download it. The ones I'm familiar with are EZWater, Bru'n Water, and BrewCipher (which is published for free by a member of this forum). These days I use BrewCipher, but it's a matter of personal opinion which one is best.

Before you start, you need to enter your water report into the spreadsheet. (If you need help with that, let us know. It can be a little confusing because people measure water concentrations in different ways. Your spreadsheet should have some explanatory text, but again, if you run into trouble just pop in here and ask a question.)

Then save a new version of the file, give it a descriptive name (like "Pale Ale brewed March 2, 2019" or something like that), and enter your recipe into the spreadsheet. The reason you have to do this is that water chemistry depends on the malts being used, so you're going to have to work with the spreadsheet every time you brew a new recipe.

All right, now you're ready to plan your salt additions for your batch. That's described in steps 2-4 below. But before we get there, we have to take care of step 1, which is making sure your water is free of certain components that might make your beer unpleasant or unhealthy to drink.

1. The first and most important thing is to make sure your water is free of chlorine, chloramine, and any contaminants (e.g. lead or arsenic) before you brew with it. Chlorine and chloramine are sometimes added by water utilities as a form of microbial control. They can be removed by adding a ground-up Campden tablet to your water at least a few minutes before you add it to your grains. Ascorbic acid (vitamin C) also works if you can get it in powdered form (like this). You don't need much ascorbic acid, I use 1/8 teaspoon for a 5 gallon batch. Whatever you use, just remember to add it before the mash, because once the chlorine or chloramine hits the grain, the damage is done.

If your water has other contaminants that you don't want in your beer (for instance lead or arsenic), you can either filter them out or use reverse osmosis or distilled water. It sounds as though you are already filtering your water, so I guess that's taken care of.

Easy so far, I hope. Next you are going to calculate your salt additions, which are intended to accomplish 3 different goals: (A) achieve a desirable level of the three main flavor ions, which are sodium, chloride, and sulfate, (B) achieve at least 50 ppm calcium (for most styles), and (C) achieve a mash pH in the desired range.

2. Let's start with the flavor ions. Sulfate tends to enhance the crisp, bitter quality of hoppy beers, while sodium and chloride enhance the sweet, full-bodied, malty qualities. It's not very common to add sodium (except in the gose style), so we'll focus on chloride and sulfate. Conveniently, each of them is easily available in cheap form, namely calcium chloride and calcium sulfate (sometimes called gypsum). At this point you need to go into your spreadsheet and play around with the additions of calcium sulfate and calcium chloride. You'll see that it's pretty easy to dial in any level of chloride and sulfate you might desire. (By the way, the reason we can't tell you how much you'll need, even for a given style, is that your water will naturally have some of these ions in it, and without knowing that we can't help you figure it out. But once you've input your water data into your spreadsheet, it's very easy.)

How much of each should you be aiming for? Well, we'll get to that a little below, and it depends heavily on the style of beer your are brewing. But as a rule of thumb, you'll probably have between 50 and 200 ppm of each. You should use more chloride if you want to emphasize maltiness or sweetness, and you should use more sulfate to emphasize crisp bitterness.

3. Next, figure out if you're getting enough calcium in the beer. For yeast health most people use the rule of thumb that you want at least 50 ppm of calcium in the water before it hits the grain. (The water will also dissolve some calcium from the grain, but the 50 ppm is measured before that. So in other words, you want to add enough calcium chloride and calcium sulfate that your spreadsheet tells you your water has at least 50 ppm of calcium in it.)

I should point out that there are some styles that traditionally use less than 50 ppm calcium. But that's pretty rare, and so for your general brewing practice you can probably aim for 50 ppm as a minimum. Note that it's just a minimum, you can go a lot higher without causing any problems.

Okay, so go back to the calcium chloride and calcium sulfate additions that you tentatively calculated in step 2, and now check your calcium level. Is it over 50 ppm? If so, you're good to go on to step 4. If not, dial up your additions of calcium chloride, calcium sulfate, or both, until you hit at least 50 ppm calcium.

4. Finally, go look at your calculated mash pH. The spreadsheet should report this, and should also indicate the target range. (For instance, BrewCipher recommends a pH of 5.2 to 5.6, measured at room temperature.)

If your pH is within the target range, congratulations! You just designed your first water profile. That was pretty easy, right?

If your calculated mash pH is above the target range (meaning you need to adjust it downward), you can add even more calcium chloride and/or calcium sulfate. This is because calcium tends to lower the mash pH through a reaction with phosphate in the mash. But you can also just add lactic acid, phosphoric acid, or whatever. Some people use traditional German acidulated malt, which is really just another way to add lactic acid. Your software should be able to handle whatever method you choose, just adjust the acid additions until your mash pH is where you want it.

If your calculated mash pH is below the target range (meaning you need to adjust it upward), you can take some of your calcium salt additions out of the mash and simply add them directly to the kettle instead. You'll still get all the calcium and flavor ions, but your mash will be higher pH. BrewCipher has an easy way to account for this, I can't remember if the other spreadsheets do or not. Again, the idea is that calcium lowers the pH of the mash, so by holding it back until the boil kettle, you can boost the mash pH.

If your calculated mash pH is still too low, then you can add baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) or slaked lime (calcium hydroxide). To be honest I am not sure I've ever done this... maybe once for a really dark beer I might have used some baking soda... but so I'm not comfortable giving a lot of advice about it. Anyway it should be pretty rare for anything but a very dark beer.

And that's it! It's not nearly as hard as people make it out to be.

 

Ward Labs can test your water for you. You will have to give them a call:

https://www.wardlab.com/BrewersKitOrder.php

Cheers!