Beer stone remover

[guypettigrew]

Mine's the same as Eric's. Very useful for checking the RO water from my local aquarium shop. No, I don't keep fish, but the RO water is good for rinsing my pH probe and making up Isinglass from the dried stuff.

Guy

[Eric]

Mine's the same as Eric's. Very useful for checking the RO water from my local aquarium shop. No, I don't keep fish, but the RO water is good for rinsing my pH probe and making up Isinglass from the dried stuff.

Guy

I use DI water from Asda. Geraldine uses it in her steam iron as well, so it goes on her budget. It's always zero on the meter, and if it isn't, the probes and housing are in need of a good clean.

[Eric]

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[MashBag]

For brewing purposes, ppm and mg/l can be assumed as equivalent.

Eric.. You knew I was going to ask

[guypettigrew]

I use DI water from Asda. Geraldine uses it in her steam iron as well, so it goes on her budget. It's always zero on the meter, and if it isn't, the probes and housing are in need of a good clean.

If you want to help Geraldine balance her books you might like to suggest RO water. Mine costs 14p/litre as long as I take my own 5 litre containers to be refilled.

Guy

[FUBAR]

Would amount to £4 a brew for me if I had a meter as I treat my mash and sparge liquor separately .

Oh. Why is that?

I run about 65 litres of raw water into the HLT, measure the alkalinity and treat with AMS to get it down to about 20ppm, then check again.

This is heated to about 85 C and the required volume pumped to the MT to cool before the grain is added. If I want to reduce the alkalinity for sparging I add 2.5ml to the remaining liquor in the HLT. This drops the alkalinity by about 10ppm. I don't bother checking the alkalinity, I know it's going to be good enough.

The rest of the liquor in the HLT after sparging is enough clean out the pumps and tubing.

So, two tests per brew.

Guy

Well yes that is what I do for pale beers , but anything darker I will treat them separately .

[MashBag]

So the first brew is drinking.
I have to be honest a say the brew was very different all the way through.

Dough in - I had mini wort fountains. Never ever seen anything like that.

The krausen was less expansive and if it was a pint you would have said it had a flat head.

The beer is OK. I can taste soft water (or what I recognise as soft water) and a mineral taste. OK drinking, but will never be brewing @ 20ppm alk again. Don't like the buttery taste at all.

Fantastic learning curve. Second brew up real soon.

I have also noted soft (or softened) water takes much longer to ferment. Get the feeling my tub of acid will last a very long time

[guypettigrew]

All very strange, MB.

My liquor is dropped to 20ppm or below for the mash. Tomorrow my brew will be pale malt, caragold, flaked maize and possibly some pale crystal malt. I'll drop the alkalinity to somewhere between 15 and 20 ppm.

The yeast (WLP001) will flow out of the blow off tube in huge quantities, I guarantee. The wort will take 3-4 days to drop from about 1.050 to about 1.012.

A buttery taste is usually associated with diacetyl. This is created by the yeast during fermentation then later removed by the yeast. It shouldn't persist into the finished beer.

Not sure what the 'mineral' taste is.

I'm wondering if using low alkalinity liquor for your brew has highlighted issues elsewhere in the process which were masked by the natural high alkalinity of your tap water.

Others can no doubt offer a much more informed reply than this.

Guy

[Cobnut]

Sounds to me like you need to send a few bottles to a few folk for them to assess...

[Eric]

So the first brew is drinking.
I have to be honest a say the brew was very different all the way through.

Dough in - I had mini wort fountains. Never ever seen anything like that.

The krausen was less expansive and if it was a pint you would have said it had a flat head.

The beer is OK. I can taste soft water (or what I recognise as soft water) and a mineral taste. OK drinking, but will never be brewing @ 20ppm alk again. Don't like the buttery taste at all.

Fantastic learning curve. Second brew up real soon.

I have also noted soft (or softened) water takes much longer to ferment. Get the feeling my tub of acid will last a very long time

It should be different, that is one object of water treatment.

Proper water treatment shouldn't cause wort fountains at dough in. I don't know what can. I can understand doughballs rising above the surface when the grains are not properly sprinkled into the mash liquor. Otherwise, pass.

Krausen is usually the result of yeast type, its health, oxygenation and temperature. Brewing liquor should provide magnesium, zinc and a few minor ions, but proper water treatment won't influence those if they were initially present, unless you include an RO system to remove the vital ingredients

Soft describes water with low levels of calcium and magnesium while hard describes water with high levels of calcium and/or magnesium. Roughly, good enough for any brewer, hardness measured in mg/l Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3) is the total of calcium in mg/l multiplied by 2.5 and magnesium in mg/l multiplied by 4.1. As adding CRS to a domestic water supply cannot remove calcium or magnesium, it can have no effect whatsoever on that water's hardness.
CRS/AMS additions neutralise alkalinity, lowering the level to avoid increasing mash pH to the level where undesirable components in grains are released into the wort. The most obvious of influence of such components are haze and astringency, but there are many more, none of which will trouble the brewer who treats his liquor properly.
I struggle to understand the creation of a mineral taste when by acid addition bicarbonate becomes water and carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere and that anionic component replaced by sulphate and chloride forming brewing salts.
A buttery taste is a contentious matter in beer. As Guy remarks, Butterscotch is a taste of diacetyl, a product of yeast during fermentation. It has never been a problem in British cask beer, so called real ale, for as soon as the easy sugars are consumed, the yeast move on to other digestible items including their own waste products. In beers with no yeast present or at temperatures too low for any yeast present to function, diacetyl can be present. It is an important inclusion for some Continental lagers and the death knell for some drinkers Particularly so in certain parts of the world.

Slow fermentation is caused by unhealthy yeast, low oxidation, mineral shortage, low temperature and underpitch and has nothing to do with soft water, most particularly because that water wasn't any softer than it was in your previous brew.

[MashBag]

Can someone check my math isn't wildy off.

Treated. 30 Litre
AMS. Alc was120 target 20 added 16.3 ml
DWB. Calcium was 3 target 130 added 22g

[MashBag]

The slow fermentation is off topic, that was a completely different brew that I also treated "cos I could"

[guypettigrew]

Can someone check my math isn't wildy off.

Treated. 30 Litre
AMS. Alc was120 target 20 added 16.3 ml
DWB. Calcium was 3 target 130 added 22g

The maths for the AMS is fine. By the way, it's mathS, unless you're American, not math.

Is the calcium in your raw water really 3ppm? Astounding. Did you add the DWB to the liquor or the mash?

Guy

[Eric]

Can someone check my math isn't wildy off.

Treated. 30 Litre
AMS. Alc was120 target 20 added 16.3 ml
DWB. Calcium was 3 target 130 added 22g

Assuming alkalinity was 120 mg/l as CaCO3 and target was 20 mg/l as CaCO3, then desired reduction would be 100 mg/l.
30 litres multiplied by 100 mg/l equals 3000 mg.

3000 mg divided by 183 mg/ml equals 19.4 ml. Correct.

Calcium 3. Presumably mg/l which is virtually impossible in natural water with 120 mg/l alkalinity. Calcium will likely be the cation in around 90% of the alkalinity and is also likely to present in gypsum, is a common mineral found in areas of limestone. I would expect such water to have a calcium level of the order of 50 mg/l or more.

I don't have the figure for DWB, but that calculation also looks fine.

Most simple kits for determining calcium level in water can only rarely measure much better than 20 mg/l.

[guypettigrew]

Assuming alkalinity was 120 mg/l as CaCO3 and target was 20 mg/l as CaCO3, then desired reduction would be 100 mg/l.
30 litres multiplied by 100 mg/l equals 3000 mg.

3000 mg divided by 183 mg/ml equals 19.4 ml. Correct.

Hi Eric

How do you get to 19.4ml of AMS?

A reduction of 100ppm is needed. AMS reduces alkalinity by 183ppm for each 1ml added to 1L of raw water.

A reduction of 100ppm in 30 litres calculates as 100/183 x 30 = 16.39.

The calcium level of 3ppm is, simply, unreal. There's something weird going on with MB's water treatment. Which may have given rise to the unpleasant beer.

Guy