building ro water????

[Fat_Bastard]

I have a question about using 100% ro water.I have read palmers water book and have a basic grasp of the concepts.

I have been told by a lot of brewers that they don't bother to add any treatment to their sparge water,they just use 100% ro.

My question is why wouldn't you want to make your sparge water the same profile as the mash?
by using 100% ro water for sparge you would be diluting the mineral profile you used for the mash.

what am I missing here? is the mineral levels only important for the mash and not the finished beer?

 

[ajdelange]

My question is why wouldn't you want to make your sparge water the same profile as the mash?

In general you would and it is certainly easier (IMO) to treat all the water to be used in a brewing session the same way. The thing people get hung up on is that if the sparge water is alkaline the pH of the runoff goes up quickly and you have to terminate collection before all the sugar has been collected in order to prevent tannin extraction. If you think about it for a minute you will see the folly of this POV. Say you do extract some phenols. It will be at the end of the run and only a small fraction of the collected wort will contain these phenols. More to the point, you wouldn't treat water to be alkaline as alkalinity is your worst enemy in most cases. If you are using a lot of dark malt in your beer such that alkalinity is required in the water you are probably using too much dark malt but if you really want that much dark malt (home brewers are inveterate experimenters) then withhold the alkaline addition from the sparge water portion in those cases. Even with quite a bit of alkalinity it is quite possible to get down to a few °P before pH pushed over 6. You should measure runoff gravity and pH during a few sparges to see how your equipment behaves in this regard.

 

[mabrungard]

what am I missing here? is the mineral levels only important for the mash and not the finished beer?

Depending upon the beer, the ion content of the mashing and sparging water may or may not be important. An important fact is that there are differing ways to achieve similar results.

When brewing a pale beer, it is possible to treat all brewing water the same. Conversely, a brewer might want to add all the minerals to the mash to help further reduce mash pH. On the other hand, another technique might be to hold all minerals and add them to the kettle. Either technique can be adjusted to produce a similar ion content in the kettle wort, but they might have other results that can be good or bad.

As you imply above, the ion content in the kettle wort and subsequent beer can affect beer flavor. While I prefer to treat my mashing and sparging water separately in order to produce a specific alkalinity in the mash, I do generally like creating similar levels of flavor ions in my mashing and sparging water to produce a targeted level of those ions in the kettle wort. Just recognize that there are differing ways to achieve that end result. There may not truly be a 'right' way to add minerals to brewing water, but it can be important to understand the results of executing those additions in one way or another.

Enjoy!

 

[Fat_Bastard]

thank you aj and martin for answering my question.I would also like to thank you both for all the hard work and knowledge you give to this community.