Extract Porter questions - Briess DME mineral profile

Whether it would be an issue would depend on the makeup of the steeping grains, the makeup of your water, and the volume of water. But in general, steeping in larger volumes of water will result in a higher pH (compared with lower volumes of water), resulting in more tannins extracted. Just as with all grain brewing, I'd recommend simulating the steep in one of the many mash pH calculators to make sure the pH is predicted to come in at something under 6.0.

 

1) Steeping volume doesn't much matter IMO. However I think steeping for 1 hour is a waste of time, as it's not a mash, just a steep. About 10-15 minutes should be plenty to get flavor and color without overdoing it or wasting your time.

2) I don't know exactly how Briess treats their water, but what I do know is that their brewers are highly trained and degreed, and they make the extract in Chilton, AND I know how to find the municipal water quality from the following website: https://dnr.wi.gov/dwsviewer/ContamResult/Search

And based on that, I see that the water in Chilton is extremely alkaline, and high sodium, but otherwise unremarkable. I have no doubt that Briess would need to acidify this water to bring pH in check, likely due to carbonate which unfortunately is not a parameter provided by the DNR, and they would probably want to do something to knock out some of that sodium. Parameters I did find, current as of 2017 or 2020:

Calcium 28
Magnesium 15
Sodium 170 (yeah this is quite high!!)
Sulfate 67
Chloride 28
Hardness 130
Alkalinity 360

If I were them, I'd probably be blending this with RO water, or starting from scratch RO. I don't know which option they choose.

3) I've not used Briess extracts very often. When I do, I use distilled water, assuming they know what they are doing with water chemistry to give a good result. Pretty safe bet as far as I can tell...

Yeah, so I have a Briess guy in my homebrew club, and he's been through all the Siebel etc., and has written detailed scientific papers, and he's just one example of many, so I know these guys know their stuff. Yeah I literally live within 10 miles of the Briess malting plant, right down the road in Manitowoc on the big Lake Michigan. Water in Manitowoc is very very soft, best I've ever seen anywhere except Plsen. I know several guys who work at the water plant there. So water in the malting house is of no consequence. The extract plant could be another story altogether -- Chilton is a few dozen miles west of here.

Not sure how much this all helps, if at all, but now you know what little I know. Cheers.

 

Why not contact Briess and ask your question? If they reply, please post the results in this thread.

Cheers!

 

Do you have any ad blockers installed. I do and submitted a test request and received the same message you did. After I suspended the ad blocker, the contact form was submitted and the page displayed the following:
"Thanks for contacting us!
We will be in touch with you shortly."

ETA: also rec'd email confirmation from Briess saying they would be in contact with me shortly.

 

If you want to post your specific question/s here or in a PM I'd be willing to act as a liaison by submitting them to Briess and relaying their response.

 

And perhaps also ask if Briess recommends that their extracts be utilized with Distilled/RO water to better 'manage' the mineral aspect.

Cheers!

 

No sweat.
Out of curiosity (before I make contact with Briess again) try this link and see if it helps. The page looks a tad different from the one I used yesterday, but it might be because of a cookie that was set when I temporarily 'trusted' their site.
https://about.briess.com/contact-us/

If you still can't access it, I'll make good on my offer.

 

Happened to do that about 30 min ago. Will keep you posted.

 

I remembered this from the AHA forum.

https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=13520.0

 

Crazy.... so I was actually kind of in the right ballpark. This might explain some experiences regarding "extract twang".

 

What I sent to Briess:
I’m a member of Beer Advocate and frequent their Home Brewing forum. One of the users there has some questions about a Briess product but is having a challenge with the Captcha when attempting to use the Briess Contact Us page.

A quote from the user:
"The main thing I want to know is the mineral profile of the water used to make DME (that is, not the mineral content of the DME itself, but rather the minerals in the water). Obviously I only care about minerals that are relevant to brewing, so I guess calcium, bicarbonate, sulfate, chloride, sodium, and magnesium."

He mentioned Golden Light specifically, so if your water profiles are different for the various Extract products, I’m sure that’s the one he’d be interested in.

In case the profile is considered proprietary information, or the information can't be provided for other reasons, is distilled and/or reverse osmosis water recommended to manage the mineral aspect?

Any help/suggestions are appreciated.

Response today from Ryan Wessley at Briess:
"Thank you for contacting Briess Malt & Ingredients. Unfortunately, we can’t share a lot of the information you requested below, but we can share the following.
Here are approximations of some brewing mineral presented on a 12 Plato basis, that is a wort made with DME and distilled water.
Calcium 150ppm
Chloride 18ppm
Magnesium 10ppm
All else proprietary

Thank you again for contacting and brewing with Briess."

 

It is unfortunate that Briess in unable to provide complete information.

I took note of “Chloride 18ppm” which is quite low.

For reference:

“Chloride: Chloride accentuates a fullness or “roundness” of flavor in the beer, enhancing the malt sweetness. It is generally used in the 40-100 ppm range in many beers, but in the New England IPA style, the chloride is often over 100 ppm, up to 150 ppm.”

https://www.brewersfriend.com/2018/02/13/brewing-water-basics-putting-it-all-together/

It seems to me that brewing with Briess DME and solely using distilled (or RO) water would be suboptimum as regards the amount of chloride. You would need to add ‘something’. The typical way to augment chloride in brewing water is adding some Calcium Chloride (CaCl2) but this would also increase calcium content as well which is already quite high at “Calcium 150ppm”.

Using tap water which has some chloride but not high in calcium is a strategy here.

Cheers!

 

Good luck finding that. And if you do, it will likely be high in Sodium, which was one of the concerns about Briess extract earlier in the thread. You can't get around cation/anion charge balancing just because the ions are are coming out of a tap rather than a salt bag.

It's beginning to look like Briess' water is a $hit show.

OTOH, Briess said that the concentrations they are quoting are for wort, not for the water that went into it. Depending on how the wort was tested, those may not all have been free ions before testing.

 

I suppose luck is smiling on me.

My municipal tap water is high in Chloride and low in Calcium.