Can someone please help me with what salts I need to add for my pale ale recipe. I'm using RO water from a local brewery. Making 5 gallons. Grain bill is 11.75 two row .80 American / crystal 40l .6 American carapils I figure I will need around 13 gallons of total water. Thanks in advance.
Question, what do you want from your final beer? Smooth and full body leading into a balanced bitterness, or a dry, crisp, bitter snap? Also, 13 gallons is way overboard. 5 gallons, plus 1 for boil off, plus 1.5-2 for grain absorption, and another 1 for kettle and mashtun losses is 9 gallons.
So if i plan on 1.2 quarts of water per pound, that would give me 13.15 pounds of malt. 13.15 * 1.2 = 15.78 / 4 = 3.945 gallons of mash in water. So say 4 gallons, I have always doubled that, to get my sparge water, so that would be 8 gallons, plus 4= 12 gallons of total water, is that not right?
Recommend you try the free BrunWater excel worksheet. It will adequately inform your water chemistry additions, as long as you use RO. It does a great job if you are not using RO, but then you need water analysis data, too. And that 13 gallons of water appears to be a mistake. You are using probably 2x as much sparge water as you need. That extra 4 gallons might buy you a little bit of mash efficiency at the cost of needing a longer boil and power to get you down to a 5 gallon batch. Not worth it, if that is the motivation.
How much volume do you have before the boil? Go for Gypsum if you want Dry and Crisp. Tablespoon should do it.
You just need 4 gals for mashing and 6 gals por sparging, starting from RO water : 2 grams calcium chloride and 4 grams Gypsum for mashing water 3 grams calcium chloride and 6 grams Gypsum for sparging water Very simple.
