Building RO Water Profile

Your magnesium, sodium, and chloride targets are super low... to the point that you can all but ignore them. Your primary challenge is to hit that huge bicarbonate total.

Adding 12 grams of Chalk (CaCO3), 1 gram of Gypsum, and 1 gram of Epsom Salt gets you damn close to those targets (within 10 ppm of each).

 

How do they brew dark beers and a light beer, the triple, with the same water?
How do they hit the mash pH with that alkalinity (the bicarbonate)?

You need to know they probably treat the water for the beer being brewed. You need to hit the target mash pH for the grist you have. That was not supplied so it is an indeterminate problem right now. You don't need all of that bicarbonate, so don't put it in.

 

How do you propose to get all that chalk to dissolve?
Why that much alkalinity? It is counterproductive to add alkalinity if the beer does not need it. Most beers don't need that much.

 

It is not necessary to add carbonates to mash, you can add them at boiling.

 

As aobrehm has posted above it is a good way to go, but take into a count chalk must be added during boiling instead of mashing to avoid raising up mash Ph. Don´t know if he has figured that chalk is only soluble in a half.

 

He means that chalk doesn't dissolve very well under mash conditions. For this reason, many people don't use chalk. Others use more chalk than "should" be needed, to account for the fact that it won't all dissolve. I think at least on of the water calculators out there contains a factor for this. Personally, I just avoid chalk. There are other ways to increase alkalinity/pH.

 

Most of the Water reports for Belgian breweries is pretty alkaline. That is what may be coming into the brewery from a well or from a city supply. Breweries treat the water to make it suitable for brewing. That is the part we don't know, what is it that they do to the water.

Edit - he does talk about treating the water. He doesn't address how to dissolve the chalk. Try it on a sample, the chalk just sits at the bottom. Nature has CO2 working for it. If you want to dissolve chalk, put it in water in a 2l pop bottle, use a carbonator cap on the bottle, hit it with CO2 and shake, repeat until the chalk is dissolved.

If you look up what Stan Hieronymus wrote about Westvleteren 12, the grains are pils and pale malts. The color comes from dark candid sugar. You won't hit a mash pH with those grains and the water listed.