Working out water chemistry

[markm1878]

Hi, i'm at the point now where i'm looking at water chemistry. I've looked at my water report and taken the following info;

CaCo3 = 89
Ca = 36
Sulphate = 45.367
Chloride = 21.054

These are all mg/l (which i'm assuming is the same as ppm?) and I took these from the averages column of the report (is that the way to do it?)

I looked for magnesium, sodium, carbonate and alkalinity as HCo3 as they were mentioned in something I read.

I have a book with some recipes and one of them call for the following;
Calcium 150ppm, sulfate 300ppm and chloride 30ppm.

I wanted to know where to start. What would I need to add to get to these levels? I am waiting for a call from my water supplier (welsh water) who will hopefully fill the gaps listed above.

Thanks for any info that can be offered.

[AnthonyUK]

Have a look for the BruNwater spreadsheet. There is free version which has most of the paid for functionality.
It is quite daunting to start with but once you have the data it is pretty straightforward.

[markm1878]

Thanks for the reply. Am i right in taking the average provided on the water report? Are the figures i do have useless without those i dont have?

[Matt12398]

If we're being scientific mg/l is not the same as ppm.

[markm1878]

No but I understand its very close?

[AnthonyUK]

The main thing is to get your alkalinity right so a cheap Salifert test kit will do this with a fair degree of accuracy.
Once you have this right and enough calcium then the rest is tweaking for flavour.

[Charles1968]

If we're being scientific mg/l is not the same as ppm.

Actually they're almost identical.

[Charles1968]

Hi, i'm at the point now where i'm looking at water chemistry. I've looked at my water report and taken the following info;

CaCo3 = 89
Ca = 36
Sulphate = 45.367
Chloride = 21.054

These are all mg/l (which i'm assuming is the same as ppm?) and I took these from the averages column of the report (is that the way to do it?)

I looked for magnesium, sodium, carbonate and alkalinity as HCo3 as they were mentioned in something I read.

I have a book with some recipes and one of them call for the following;
Calcium 150ppm, sulfate 300ppm and chloride 30ppm.

I wanted to know where to start. What would I need to add to get to these levels? I am waiting for a call from my water supplier (welsh water) who will hopefully fill the gaps listed above.

Thanks for any info that can be offered.

What's the recipe? You really don't need to match those mineral levels in practice. Even rough ball park doesn't matter much. Water chemistry does matter if you're brewing very pale ales or lagers, but for most beers it can be ignored.

The main reason to treat water is to keep your mash pH down. You need to know alkalinity for that, which probably means buying a £10 Salifert test kit and measuring it.

The fig in your report for calcium carbonate is probably a measure of hardness "as" calcium carbonate. In other words, it isn't the level of calcium carbonate (yes it's very confusing).

[Charles1968]

The main thing is to get your alkalinity right so a cheap Salifert test kit will do this with a fair degree of accuracy.
Once you have this right and enough calcium then the rest is tweaking for flavour.

+1

[markm1878]

Ok thanks. Do you have any links? Are the salifert tests to measure the calcium presumably to make ph adjustments to the liquor before mashing? I know quite a few brewers use ph strips to measure the mash ph, would that be good practice to make sure the earlier adjustments worked?

Unless i've got that totally wrong ofcourse

[Charles1968]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Salifert-KH-Alk ... B001EJ3DOG

The Salifert kit measures alkalinity, which is not quite the same as pH. The pH of your water doesn't matter much - it's the pH of the mash that's important. Alkalinity is a measure of your water's capacity to stop the mash pH falling into the right range (buffering capacity). You want a mash pH of about 5 to 5.5 for really nice, bright tasting beer with smooth bitterness and minimal chill haze. Above 5.5 tannins start to creep in, dulling the flavour, adding haze and potentially causing noticeable flaws like astringency above 6, particularly if you over sparge. High alkalinity is always caused by bicarbonate in the water. Alkalinity is effectively a measure if the bicarbonate level.

pH test strips are a waste of time. They're too approximate and the colours are easy to misread. The salifert kit measures alkalinity with a titration test that's very precise and easy to do. If you want to measure mash pH, a digital device is better, but it isn't necessary to measure it at all.

Once you know your alkalinity and other key mineral levels, you can use online calculators to predict your mash pH - no test needed. There are good water chemistry calculators on brewers friend and bru'n water. There's also a good one on this site, but the others are better as they help you blend water sources.

There are various ways of treating water to get mash pH down. Simply boiling it to remove hardness isn't the best way as it removes calcium, which, counter intuitively, actually helps acidify the mash. Adding acids, gypsum and calcium chloride all help. You can also blend in well-boiled water or soft water (tesco ashbeck, asda Eden falls, demineralized water from aquarium or pet shops). If you're starting with hard water you have to take care that chemical additions don't make the water start to become salty, but the water calculators will help prevent that. You can also bring mash pH down by adding darker malts. Malts containing melanoidins are best, eg Munich, Vienna, aromatic and melanoidin malt - melanoidins are very acidic. Crystal malt can also help. You can also use acidulated malt, though it can add a tart flavour in large amounts. Generally speaking, darkers beers turn out better if you brew with hard water as they correct the mash ph. For pale beers you need to take more care with water chemistry (unless you have soft water to start with).

When you've got your head round it you can tweak mineral levels for flavour - high sulphate levels emphasise hop bitterness and higher chloride than sulphate gives smoother beer with more emphasis in malt.

The best article I've found on water chemistry is in the link below - when you can understand the graph a quarter of the way down you've cracked it.

https://sites.google.com/site/brunwater/water-knowledge

[Aleman]

For an alternative view (read non US influenced ) on water chemistry you might want to look at these posts here

[Charles1968]

For an alternative view (read non US influenced ) on water chemistry you might want to look at these posts here

Lots of good info there, but the explanation on bru'n'water is the best written one I've seen and the science is the same in the UK and US. I think it's much easier to figure out water chemistry by avoiding forums and looking for expert articles - forum threads quickly become rambling and disorganised and the good posts are often hard to tell apart from the less well informed ones.

[Aleman]

The one thing that is different between US and UK is that the water here is generally much harder, and higher in bicarbonates than in the vast majority of the US. This has had a significant impact on the flavour profiles of the beers and beer styles brewed here, In the US where the mineral content of the beer is significantly less, (and I could be uncharitable and say that the flavour content of the beer since prohibition is also significantly less ), then the flavour profile of 'traditional' UK ales may well appear to be 'over mineralised' compared to it's counterpart brewed using the US approach.

I can't get my head round the concept that if your sulphate is over 150 then chloride must be below 50 as espoused by Martin on here a few times. . . . London (a significant brewing center) water has precisely that profile (in fact the chloride content has been reported as over 200mg/l in some breweries ) so Fullers et al must have been doing something right. I'm also not convinced that the argument regarding residual alkalinity (based on Kohlbachs 1950's paper) is truly representative of all conditions . . . . and the maths based on that, plus experimentally derived formulae incorporating that work while it may appear to be correct, again does not apply in all cases. I've done a series of test mashes using various water profiles and various grists, and generally each time the mash pH settles in the 5.2-5.7 range. The times it doesn't, at the extremes of grist and profile like stouts in near RO water, then a simple profile approach has remedied the situation. . . That simple approach when plugged into bru'nWater predicts a different mash pH to that achieved.

I do agree with you on forum posts becoming confusing, I must find the time to pull all mine together into one coherent article

[AnthonyUK]

I'm pretty sure Martin is not THAT critical regarding mineral content but I understand that some people find that there is a certain flavour profile if sulphate and chloride are both high which he does point out e.g. BruNwater mentions phrases such as x should remain below y unless....
As with all thing people have to find there own preferences using the information available and through experience.

The topic of Burton comes up quite often but I've yet to see any definitive answer as to what exactly did the Burton breweries do to the water and the use of multiple wells on individual sites all with their own unique profile doesn't help.
As Burton is quite a unique area I don't tend to try to replicate geographical water profiles but rather the basics mentioned above.
For me Burtonisation tends to mean adjusting the water for brewing rather than replicating that areas water.

Fuller's have stated recently they use regular Thameswater tap supply since their well became contaninated years ago with only a Gypsum addition.
The full report for Fuller's area shows a 1:1 sulphate chloride ratio - http://secure.thameswater.co.uk/water-q ... rsmith.pdf