Brewing water questions and concerns.

First and foremost, if your water tastes bad, your beer will taste bad. That alone is a good reason to use something other than your tap water for brewing.

As far as using bottled water, the downside (beyond the obvious cost) is that you really have no idea what is or is not in it, salt-wise. If you choose to make adjustments, it can be a pain. Or to put it another way, it's impossible to get where you're going if you don't know where you're starting from. Distilled water offers a bit of an advantage in that regard, as you can pretty much just set your mineral salt counters at zero and go from there. With that in mind, you'll have to add things to get you up to brewing water standards, depending on the style you're making, the color of the malts, etc. Read John Palmer's "How To Brew" section on mashing to get an idea of recommended levels of certain salts (e.g. at least 50ppm calcium, etc.), and he has a helpful nomograph to help you figure out what you might need to adjust to hit the pH you want, as well.

If you use Microsoft Office or Open Office, I'd also recommend downloading the spreadsheet from http://www.ezwatercalculator.com/ . It can help you see what happens to some salts when you adjust others (e.g. when you use gypsum to add calcium, what are your sulfate levels doing).

Now having said all that, you can also choose to be far less geeky, buy bottled drinking water (not distilled), and brew with it. It might not be absolutely ideal, but it'll be fine. Again, the old axiom is "if your water tastes okay, it's okay to brew with". It's really up to you as to how geeked out you want to get with this.

Oh, and by the way, if you're worried about chlorination (or chloraminization, if that's a word) of your tap water, you can eliminate that concern with one crushed Campden tablet.

 

Some companies, like Deer Park, list mineral content on their websites. You just have to dig around.

For example, Deer Park has the following ion levels in their spring water (ppm or mg/L):

Ca: 22
Mg: 5
So4: 11
Na: 5
Cl: 9
HCO3: 75

"Alkalinity" is sometimes mentioned, which is essentially a combination of Ca and Mg, but it may also have something to do with HCO3... I'm not sure.

Now, let's say the target brewing water for an American IPA is:

Ca: 75
Mg: 15
So4: 75
Na: 10
Cl: 50
HCO3: 125

Based on this, you'll want to add maybe a pinch of Canning Salt (NaCl) plus a little over 1 gram each of Gypsum (CaSO4) and Chalk (CaCO3) to harden 4 gallons of water to suitable IPA levels. You could even skip the salt and get by, but at least by adding some calcium and sulfate, you are hardening the water a bit and allowing those hops to shine.

If you start with distilled water, you'll be spending a lot more $ on additives to correct it.

 

RO water is cheaper than distilled. You can buy 1 lb packages of the brewing salts at the LHBS (Gypsum and CaCl2) for about 5-6 bucks. Some you can get at the grocery store (table salt, baking soda, Epsom salt). I have a one pound bag of gypsum that will need to be replaced next fall after about 3 years of brewing. I avoid chalk as it does not disolve readily. Baking soda is better, pickling lime is better yet.

I also don't use 5.2, as it was not doing much for me using RO water and the salts. Others have found the same. It might help a little with alkaline water if your pH is high.

Read the water knowledge page here. The 5.2 section agrees with me.
http://sites.google.com/site/brunwater/water-knowledge

State of the art program for water and brewing.
http://sites.google.com/site/brunwater/

 

The Ca and Mg determine the hardness. HCO3 determines the alkalinity. Just stating the correct relationship.

 

Just as I thought. Though I muddled the terms alkalinity and hardness. Thanks for verifying.

Your chalk will be absorbed well if you add it to the mash, btw. I do it all the time when I want to add Ca without the Cl.

 

Try putting some chalk into a glass of beer, which has a pH of 4.1 to 4.5, and see how much disolves (I have tried this, along with others). Read the section in the water knowledge link that I posted about chalk. The second paragraph talks of the limited solubility in the mash.

4.3.1 Chalk - Chalk increases alkalinity. Because Chalk does not dissolve easily in plain water, chalk should only be added to the mash. The acids in the mash are weak and cannot fully dissolve chalk. To fully dissolve chalk in water, it must be dissolved with an acid. In nature, CO2 forms carbonic acid in water which dissolves the chalk. Bubbling air or CO2 through a chalk water solution can be used to dissolve the chalk, but that requires time and effort.
Evidence has shown that even in the mash, chalk does not dissolve in significant quantity and the chalk’s theoretical amount of alkalinity is not produced in the mash. That evidence shows that approximately half the chalk’s theoretical alkalinity is provided to the mash in practice. A workable solution for using chalk is to assume that only one-half the chalk’s alkalinity is added to the water. Bru’n Water software assumes that chalk is fully dissolved in the water to provide its full theoretical alkalinity. Therefore, a brewer would add twice the amount of chalk indicated by Bru’n Water to produce the target alkalinity (bicarbonate) concentration. Other brewing water references and software may assume either all or half of the theoretical alkalinity is added with chalk addition. A brewer should verify the assumption made by those resources for the amount of alkalinity added to the water from a chalk addition.

I recommend that anyone that is doing water adjustments buy a pH meter (papers are not so accurate, but are better than nothing), which is as important as a good thermometer. With a good pH meter you can check to see if the adjustments do what you think they should.

 

I'd second the suggestion of EZWater. However, if you want something simpler to start with, there's a sticky on the Brew Science forum over at Homebrew Talk, which provides some simple water recipe approaches for various styles.

 

As already mentioned, Hardness is (for all practical purposes) a measure of Calcium and Magnesium. Bicarbonate is related to alkalinity (not hardness).

 

+1. Chalk solubility sucks unless you're willing to go to great lengths. Another interesting link...
http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php?title=Building_brewing_water_with_dissolved_chalk

 

Well, there's the issue. Style. What you add depends on what you want to make. If you want a light colored, bitter ale, you'd add certain amounts of certain salts to your mash and sparge water (or to the boil instead of the sparge water). If you were making a malty, dark ale, you'd do things differently. It's not just that you need X amount of this and X amount of that, but also the ratios of one to another that make up the final product. For example, you want sulfates between 50 and 350 ppm. Chloride should be between 0 and 250 ppm. That's a lot of wiggle room for each. But a beer that's made with 225 ppm chloride and 75 ppm sulfate will be very different that one where those numbers are reversed, even though both amounts are within acceptable ranges, and not just because of the numbers, but because of the sulfate to chloride ratio. So, having said all that, you see how it really isn't a case of "just add 2 grams of this and 3 grams of that and call it good". Note that it will work that way, but it isn't really ideal.

Water chemistry isn't exceptionally difficult, but there are so many minor variables, especially when you consider that almost any salt you add is changing more than one thing (e.g. calcium and sulfate).

For a good primer on this, I'd again recommend Palmer's How To Brew at http://howtobrew.com/section3/chapter15.html . It gives you some water profiles for some famous brewing cities, covers what each salt does to the beer, etc. Then buy the book. Not many authors write a book then make the majority of it available for free on the web.

 

No, hardness is the amounts of Ca and Mg in solution.

Alkalinity (ppm of CaCO3) = Bicarbonate (ppm of HCO3)*0.83

If your water report does not have either Alkalinity or Bicarbonate, then you should e-mail them and ask for values of those.

 

Well it works for me. I must be doing something different. I get clear beers with on point pH levels and great hop flavor.

Putting chalk in a cold glass of beer is an entirely different story.

 

If you are getting 100% chalk dissolution in your mash, then I believe you have accomplished something nobody else has. Perhaps you could share your numbers, including starting water profile and volume, grist compostion, and all additives. And also, how you are measuring the pH and at what temp are you measuring it?

 

I'm in the same boat. Our city water sucks, and I'd never brew with it. I buy RO water down at the supermarket for about 35 cents a gallon, and then make some minor adjustments. FWIW, what I do is follow the method described in Gordon Strong's book: add one teaspoon of gypsum to the mash for hoppy beers, one teaspoon chalk for malty beers, or a combination of the two for beers in between, then add one half teaspoon phosphoric acid to the sparge water. (I batch sparge.) I also add yeast nutrient to the brew kettle, just to be on the safe side, and sometimes add gypsum to the boil for hoppy beers.

 

Gordon recommend CaCl2 for malty beers. Most of his recipes are for 5 gallons or so.

The acid is more for fly sparging, which Gordon will do on his system, which is like mine.