Water/mash efficiency

10-30 ppm magnesium won´t hurt your beer, it is a good nutrient for yeasts

 

I prefer the former way.

 

If you fly sparge keep in mind that some added salts are not very solvable,so while you are sparging it is important to stir sparge water to resuspend non-dissolved minerals.It is not fair to end sparging and find there is a huge quantity of minerals in the remaining water.

 

Since some don't work well in plain water, I tend to put all mine in the mash. I just crush the grains, measure out my salts, and then mix the whole thing with the mash water as usual. My only treatment for my sparge water is phosphoric acid, if it needs it.

 

How do you know beforehand if your sparge water needs phosphoric acid, and how much?

 

I just try to get my sparge water to 6.0 pH. Sometimes I forget, but it doesn't seem to be a big deal. I mainly have the acid to treat mash water for really pale beers (3-4 SRM)
EDIT: I think the most I've ever added was about 3 or 4 ml.

 

Well, it is not a standardized way but if it works fine for you, welcome!

 

I would not agree with that they are all the same. Palmers has a model to color that is an old model that needs to be updated. The newer ones take the grainbill into account. It turns out that the crystal malts have more acidity than the roasted malts. So going by color does not work, you end up adding too much in the way of alkalinty for dark beers, and end up with alkaseltzer beer.

I don't know about the one you posted. I use Bru'nwater and will say that it is the state of the art right now. Ezwater is said to be good also.

 

Brewers friend looks to be very much a water calcualtor and not a mash pH calculator. Those are 2 different things. Look at Bru'nwater. At least bookmark it so that you can get back to it when you understand more.

Edit - I lost any respect about the Brewer's Friend site when I saw this.
"(eg, as if you were using water from the river Trent)."
Wow, I might be turning into Ron Patinson. I say that with utmost respect for Ron.

 

Do any of the yeast additives/nutrients contain any of the chemicals that we are talking about? Like magnesium?

I think that WL is something like dead yeast, not sure about Wyeast.

 

Some of those yeast nutrients have dead yeast that are loaded up with zinc.

You get enough magnesium from the mash that the yeast nutrition needs are covered. You don't get enough zinc from the mash.

I have all but stopped Mg additions to my water.

 

Interesting and thank you.

I know that you answered this, but I only get have 4 ppm of Mg and it looks like I might want to cut my mash water 50/50 (at least for pale beers). How much Mg do I get from the mash? Or more importantly could it put me over the recommended 16-36 range? Everything thing is a balance and there might be times that I add Epson Salt to boost SO4 without adding Ca as Gypsum would.

 

You get enough Mg from the mash to make the yeast healthy, but it won't put you out of range. You want 5 ppm or a little more and you get that from the mash.

The answer came from the Brunwater water knowledge page.

 

Hadn't seen that one before. Let's see... It certainly will help you figure out how much minerals to add to reach a targeted level, but it doesn't do anything to help you figure out what those targeted levels should be, in the context of attaining an acceptable mash pH for specific grain bills.