Bru'n Water Question

[Hello]

I received my Ward Labs water report and entered in all of the data in Bru'n water. I added a grain bill of 95% Golden Promise and 5% Rye. In trying to do the adjustments to match the target water adjustment of a pale ale, I noticed that first the Sodium shows -7.0 and the cell is red, but I cannot figure out if I need to worry about it. Next, as I add things like gypsum, epsom salt, and calcium chloride, my sulfate increases well above what the target water adjustment should be. There was no way to avoid it best I could tell.

Is there something that I am doing wrong or does this look okay? I feel like I haven't been able to lower my pH much either.

 

[MrE_the_Great]

Try this. I had to dilute with distilled water at 35% to get things here.

 

[mchrispen]

The red cell is telling you that your base water sodium concentration is too high by about 7 ppm. You can dilute that water like the MrE suggests and slightly increase your salt additions or just ignore it. The alternative is to shift to pickling lime for the additional alkalinity which will not add any sodium. It's really not practical to hit those numbers perfectly - but get close enough and a repeatable result so you can adjust for future brewing of that recipe.

I would also target an estimated mash pH of 5.4, and not let that drift up to 5.6. That is a personal preference however - but it lands right within the proper window.

 

[ajdelange]

To brew a decent beer with this water you don't need to do anything other than add a couple of % sauermalz to the grist and perhaps a half tsp of calcium chloride (for body) and gypsum to taste starting at about half a tsp. You certainly don't need to worry about 23 mg/L sodium and there is no need to be concerned that you don't match some ion profile either.

 

[Yooper]

I'm not a fan of too much sulfate. If you are, that's fine of course, but you may want to start with a much more modest amount of sulfate if you haven't used a ton of sulfate in the past. In some of my pale ales, I will use 150 ppm of sulfate, depending on the recipe.

A mash pH of 5.4 would be ideal. Ditch the baking soda completely. Consider lowering the calcium to under 100 ppm, and ditching the epsom salts as well.

 

[Hello]

Okay, I think I follow all of that. I am targeting a pH of 5.4, not 5.6. I just couldn't get it down there. I'm also not a fan of sulfate, I was just trying to match a profile. I thought that was the goal overall, but I can handle not doing that.

I'm going play around a bit more and see what happens. Thank you all for the help so far.

 

[ajdelange]

It used to be thought that it was necessary to follow a profile exactly which, to be honest, was I think because lots of engineers got into home brewing and the concept of tweaking parameters to minimize mean square error (realizable vs achievable ion concentration) was simply more than they could resist. It is indeed necessary to follow a profile but only in the broadest sense and only if you are shooting for authenticity. Bohemian Pilsners must be brewed with soft water if they are to have that characteristic of those beers that we have come to expect and Burton ales must be brewed with gypseous water if they are to resemble the original Burton ales but there is no reason that you can't halve or double the 'profiles' salt content if you like the resulting beer better.

Things in nature tend to respond to stimuli logarithmically (geometrically) rather than linearly (arithmetically) so that a change from, for example, 1 gram of gypsum to 1.2 would not probably make a noticeable difference in the flavor of the beer but doubling probably would (doubling in sound level corresponds to 3 db which is the amount of loudness recognized as being easily perceived whereas doubling light level corresponds to 1 photographer's 'stop' - these are both logarithmic units).