Adding salts after boil

[Biscuits]

For Christmas my wonderful wife got me Randy Mosher's book Mastering Homebrew and I was glancing through the water section and got to thinking...obviously mash pH is important and certain ions have their effects on the mash as well, but is there any information out there on adding salts after the boil...like, the addition of gypsum or chloride to the wort?

 

[ajdelange]

Many brewers add salts, acids and bases to the mashing liquor and/or the mash itself. Fewer add them to the kettle pre boil and fewer still to the finished wort. If you wind up with post boil wort whose pH is way off you have serious problems with your process and you should concentrate on fixing those rather than on trying to adjust the bad wort pH.

As a consequence of this I'd expect that you aren't going to have much luck finding info in the literature on this but perhaps you will.

 

[Biscuits]

Thanks. I suppose I should also clarify that the salts aren't necessarily for pH correction but rather for their taste contributions. For an example, gypsum, could gypsum be added to wort to enhance the flavor/bitterness/what-have-you?

This may have been a post for the Deep Drunken Thoughts section.

 

[ajdelange]

Yes. In fact you can get some idea as to how these salts will influence the flavors by adding to the finished beer and some do exactly that as part of the iterative process of mineral addition determination. Clearly it is easier to make all the mineral additions at once but I suppose that if you decided you wanted increased sulfate content and were at already low mash pH (such that the extra calcium from an extra gypsum addition might push you too low) you could defer that addition until after the mash.

 

[JasonG]

I brewed an india red ale yesterday morning. Did not realize until I had already started the strike water that I was nearly out of gypsum! I actually sent my wife to the LHBS, only to find that they too were out of gypsum!

I went ahead and brewed it with the little gypsum I had (even without the higher calcium the mash pH was 5.1 and needed to add some NaHCo3 to bring it up). My plan is to pick some up tonight and add it to the fermenting wort, in order to bring up the calcium and sulfate levels for yeast health/taste only.

I have not done this before, so I'll try to remember to report back, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work.

JG

 

[Biscuits]

Great, I look forward to seeing what the results are.