Water treatment help.

(That's water to the rest of us!) Beer is about 95% water, so if you want to discuss water treatment, filtering etc this is the place to do it!
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Walrus81
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Water treatment help.

Post by Walrus81 » Thu Feb 20, 2020 5:54 pm

So I've got back into brewing after quite a break.

First brews were just using a salifert test kit and adjusting using info that came with the kit and CRS.

I wanted to use some online calculators to tweak for beer styles rather than just generic treatment.

I've had a look at Bru N Water (lots of info needed) and can't seem to get it to work.

I've used GW water treatment as the control. I'd like to use Bru N Water as it has lots of target waters.

I think I'm missing something though, hence the request for help.

Water report states I have a hardness of 218 mg/l CaC03. As tested.

I have the full report as well but seem ro have no luck when attempting to use the calculators with the following info:


(All following values are mean)

Ca=73.41 mg Ca/L
Ma=6.16 mg Ma/L
Na=33.15 mg Na/L
Cl=39.63 mg Cl/L
SO4=46.91 mg SO4/L

Thanks
Fermenting:Smash AG with Brambling X

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Drinking:

guypettigrew
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Re: Water treatment help.

Post by guypettigrew » Thu Feb 20, 2020 6:39 pm

Here's how Graham's calculator can help you.

Put your alkalinity in the first box, then click the button for using CRS as your carbonate reduction method. The calculator automatically suggests 20ppm CaCO3, but you can alter this if you want to.

Then put your other values (Na, Cl, Mg etc) in the appropriate boxes below.

In the next line down, the yellow one, use the drop down menu to choose which beer type you're thinking of making. I chose dry pale ale just as an example. In the case of your water the calculator will tell you the sodium is unbalanced and asks you to click a button to sort this out.

Further down the calculator there's a box in which you put the volume of liquor to be treated. I've assumed you're making 25 L. The calculator tells you there will be 1.05 ml of CRS needed per litre of raw water to get the alkalinity down to 20, and gives you the weight of salts needed to adjust the profile appropriately after dropping your alkalinity.

You can see how it looks below.

Hope this helps.

Guy
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Walrus81
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Re: Water treatment help.

Post by Walrus81 » Thu Feb 20, 2020 7:36 pm

Thanks.

Is there a rough guide for different styles of beer as to the ammount of CaC03 for say a Belgian Blonde?
Fermenting:Smash AG with Brambling X

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Eric
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Re: Water treatment help.

Post by Eric » Fri Feb 21, 2020 12:38 am

Walrus81 wrote:
Thu Feb 20, 2020 7:36 pm
Thanks.

Is there a rough guide for different styles of beer as to the ammount of CaC03 for say a Belgian Blonde?
I'm sure there are lots of mineral profiles for particular styles, but which are of merit is another question. Different breweries use their own water profile, historically restricted to what could be achieved using the water they had.

The amount of calcium carbonate required for any style of beer is normally zero or as close to zero as makes no difference. CaCO3 is used in water reports to allow simple comparison between waters for most common purposes, but sadly brewing doesn't exactly fall into one of those catagories. Your Hardness measurement is an amount of CaCO3 that would contain an equivalent quantity of hardness as the calcium and magnesium in that water does. Similarly that water's alkalinity can also be measured in terms of the quantity of CaCO3 that when titrated would require the same amount of acid as would the total of alkaline compounds in thatparticular water.

As for a Belgian Blonde, if you want a standard American homebrewer advised profile you will likely require liquor with zero alkalinity and low level calcium, requiring acid additions to the mash liquor for an acceptable mash pH. A British profile mash liquor would have a low level of alkalinity, say 15 to 20 mg/l as CaCO3, with calcium content greater than 100 mg/l to provide a suitable mash pH. For a Belgian profile, that's the $64,000 question.
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Re: Water treatment help.

Post by Silver_Is_Money » Fri Feb 21, 2020 11:53 am

On first guess (since it wasn't specified) your mean Alkalinity (as CaCO3) appears to be in the ballpark of 165-175 mg/L. That would place mean bicarbonate at ~201-214 mg/L.

If the above proves to be accurate, then to reduce Alkalinity such that your water is at ~5.4-5.5 pH should require the addition of about 25 mL of AMS/CRS for every 30 Liters. This will add ~54 mg/L of chloride, and 74 mg/L of sulfate.
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