Wheat beer water profile

[newnick]

Using Bru n water, which one of the water profiles would get me in the ballpark for a Wheat Beer?

 

[mabrungard]

You wouldn't want much mineralization, so the color-based profiles can be a good start.

 

[newnick]

Thank you.

 

[ajdelange]

The thing about wheat beer is it is brewed all over Germany, Austria... with a wide range of waters. For me it was always best with soft water. You should be fine with RO plus 50 -70 mg/L CaCl2. Nothing else.

 

[newnick]

I'll be using distilled water. Sounds like I don't want/have to do much to get where I need to be for a wheat beer. I'm going to run it through the program and see what it tells me to do.
Thanks again for the help.

 

[ajdelange]

I guess you missed the point. You can be anywhere you like and still have an authentic wheat beer. I am assuming you mean Bavarian wheat here using the Weihenstephan 326 strain or something similar. Given this your obligation is to find the water treatment that gives you the beer you like best. Common sense says that you should start out with as soft a water as is possible, brew the beer, taste it, add more chloride and sulfate at tasting to see if you think they improve or detriment the beer and base salt additions in subsequent batches on that. Fifty - 70 mg CaCl2 per liter RO/DI represents a pretty minimal salt addition of 18 - 25 mg/L Ca++ and 32 - 45 mg/L Cl-. You shouldn't need a program for that level of treatment.

 

[newnick]

I probably am missing the point because most of this water chemistry is over my head.
For me to understand what is very simple to you requires me to try and figure out what it means period. Apparently this is very simple and hopefully the light bulb will start flickering when I have time to sit down and look at it. Your assumption is correct with the yeast strain.
Thanks again for the help.

 

[ajdelange]

You are certainly correct in that there are plenty of opportunities for even the experienced to be confused when it comes to water chemistry but, fortunately, this isn't one of them. It represents an excellent example of the case for KISS in brewing and I always recommend that people just starting out try to keep things as simple as possible. Believe me, there will be plenty of opportunities to experience the not so simple.

Basically an all grain mash needs a little chloride in the water and a little acid. A bit of calcium doesn't hurt and as you need something to pair the chloride with and calcium chloride is a common, readily available salt calcium is often taken care of automatically. You can make a good beer of almost any style with a little calcium chloride and a little sauermalz. Using that as a starting point you can very probably make a better beer by adjusting the calcium chloride and sauermalz levels. And you may even want to experiment with sulfate but for starting out CaCl2, Sauermalz and RO water are all you need.

 

[mabrungard]

The water profile is dependent upon the style being brewed. I agree that you wouldn't want much sulfate in the typical hefeweizen, but the OP didn't specify what sort of wheat beer they were interested in. There are Belgian wheats that benefit from some sulfate to help dry them out and there are hoppy American wheats that demand sulfate to help dry them out and let the hop character through.

 

[ajdelange]

The water profile is dependent upon the style being brewed.

With wheat beer being the notable exception. See #4 and Warner's monograph.

 

[newnick]

The reason I posted the question in the first place was I couldn't find a lot of information that I could understand. I'm all for keeping it simple, I just need to try and understand the "why" part. That brings me to using the program, since someone has done all the leg work already I can just play around with it and match a profile that has been tried already. Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain a little to me. It's kind of ironic that I've been training 4 guys all day myself while getting trained on here.

 

[joshesmusica]

The guy who made that excel spreadsheet is one of the guys you're conversing with here. The other guy is the other "local" water expert. Pay close attention to what those two say!

 

[newnick]

I'm aware of that and that's exactly why I posted here. I'm paying attention too but this stuff is still bouncing off my head and that is why I'm attempting to use the spread sheet. The last two brews I did I used the spread sheet but with the next one I wasn't sure which profile to use. Now I've got an idea which one to use and I've got a simple idea of what to do with the water, all I have to do is play around with the spread sheet and try and make sense of what I'm doing.

 

[MaxStout]

Newnick - Give this water primer a look. It really simplifies the process and is very helpful for anyone who doesn't want to get bogged down by the chemistry.

 

[newnick]

That post is what got me started on this adventure a while back. I probably need to back up a bit and follow the advice there and keep it simple.

 

[MaxStout]

Try AJ's baseline from the primer. Distilled or RO water with 1 tsp. calcium chloride and 2% acid malt. Or even the soft water beers recommendation shown just below that.

 

[newnick]

I ran the recipe in Bru n water with the yellow balanced profile and looks like a small addition of calcium chloride and a small amount of gypsum would be all it takes to match that profile pretty close. If I get time tonight I'll try it with just the calcium chloride and see what happens.