I was listening to a podcast today and it was suggested that one could add your brewing salts, ie. Calcium Chloride or Gypsum (to keep it simple) after the beer is finished, carbonated even. Has anyone tried this on a glass by glass basis and if so, how do you then figure out how much for the keg if you liked the results?
I haven't done this with CaCl or CaSO4, but have with other things. To scale it, you'd figure that a 5 gallon keg (less the pint you tested with) would be 624 ounces. So that's 624/16 = 39 pints of beer left in the keg. So multiply the amount you determined was best in your pint by 39, and add that to the keg. Warning: You are going to need a scale accurate to hundredths of a gram to do this, unless you will be adding a lot of salts to the beer.
I can't see this working because I pre-mix my salts a few days before i brew in water/mason jars and all the salts sink to the bottom even after i shake them good. If you put these in a keg i would think all the salts would sink and be sucked into the first few pours. IDK.
Wouldn't it just be easier to add them to the mash? I could see adding them later on if you'd forgotten them, but only if it was a really special beer where you really wanted them - otherwise I'd think your beer would be just fine without the salts.
I agree that accepted practice of adding salts to the mash is simpler. I suppose this would be for experimentation or if you thought maybe hops weren’t popping or in a dark beer trying to get the maltiness to be more pronounced.
You can certainly add salts after the beer is finished. Take any homebrew or commercial example and mix some with water and a dropper. You'll see it doesn't take much to change the flavor perception at all. Gypsum really brings out the hops and bitterness whereas the CaCl will give a sweeter/rounded malt focused flavor into the forefront. I will say, you get more bang for your buck when you add it afterwards so be careful. Ever since I started learning about water chemistry and building a profile for each of the beers I brewed, it has single handedly changed the quality of my beers for the better. I was mind blown how clean and accentuated things were. I wish I got into it sooner.
