I have been looking at what is available out there and decided to do a little work in Excel and create my own, borrowing some ideas from Palmer's tool and the Water Witch. What I wanted to do is have a place to enter your water chemistry and the chemistry of the water you would like to copy. Based on those two sets of entries, it would then calculate what mash water additions are needed to get as close as possible to the target mash water. In addition, it also figures out how much you need to dilute your water with distilled/RO water if you are too high in some minerals. You can lock additions at a certain level if you wish (zero if you prefer not to use a certain type of additive or a nice round number if you so choose). Another output is a graph that shows the best SRM of beer for your water, the target water, and the water as adjusted.
It runs using Solver to minimize an error function (target minus adjusted water, by ppm of each critical ion) and an Excel macro, so if you download this tool, you will need to enable the macros when asked (no malicious code in there - I can provide the code to anyone who wants to see it and verify). If some of you that use Excel and also have experience in modifying your mash water chemistry can check this out and give me some feedback on how to improve it, I would really appreciate it. If you would like to know more details on how it works behind the scenes or why I chose to do it this way, just let me know.
Download Mash Water Chemistry Calculator
It runs using Solver to minimize an error function (target minus adjusted water, by ppm of each critical ion) and an Excel macro, so if you download this tool, you will need to enable the macros when asked (no malicious code in there - I can provide the code to anyone who wants to see it and verify). If some of you that use Excel and also have experience in modifying your mash water chemistry can check this out and give me some feedback on how to improve it, I would really appreciate it. If you would like to know more details on how it works behind the scenes or why I chose to do it this way, just let me know.
Download Mash Water Chemistry Calculator