Water Profile Calculation- Beer Smith

[jroe7313]

Hello everyone,

Just a quick question regarding calculating my water profile and additions. Im currently using Beer Smith, but this question can be applied to any program. Under the water profile tool I have my cities water profile entered and I add whatever elements necessary for the profile of the beer. My question is, what value do I use for the number of gallons? Is it my mash in volume? or is it the total batch size I intend for? Changing the gallon value dramatically changes the ppm totals... Just wanted to get this right so I can have some consistency and meet the profile for a specific beer.

Thanks! Happy Brewing!

 

[Yooper]

Hello everyone,

Just a quick question regarding calculating my water profile and additions. Im currently using Beer Smith, but this question can be applied to any program. Under the water profile tool I have my cities water profile entered and I add whatever elements necessary for the profile of the beer. My question is, what value do I use for the number of gallons? Is it my mash in volume? or is it the total batch size I intend for? Changing the gallon value dramatically changes the ppm totals... Just wanted to get this right so I can have some consistency and meet the profile for a specific beer.

Thanks! Happy Brewing!

Well, I'll save the discourse on meeting a profile, as well as the uselessness of Beersmith's water profile feature, but I'd suggest reading up on this in the forum, and that can save of trouble in the future.

As far as the amount of water, it's the amount of water you are using in the beer. Often, for a 10.5 gallon batch, I use around 15 gallons of water.

Remember to sparge with low alkalinity water, preferably RO water or acidified water.

 

[ajdelange]

It's the volume of water you wish to treat. If you want water with calcium hardness of 100 ppm as CaCO3 and alkalinity of 50 you would need to add 100 mg of chalk to each liter followed by 1 mEq of the acid of your choice. Thus if you want to treat 10 gal of water (37.85 L) you would enter that number into the calculator and it would instruct you to use 3.785 g chalk etc. If you want to treat half that much for mashing and treat the rest some other way (or not at all) then enter 5 gal and it will instruct you to use 3.785/2 grams of chalk.

If the program attempts to estimate mash pH then you must enter the amount of water you intend to mash with. Calculated concentrations will then be for that volume and the pH estimate for that volume as applied to the grist weight.

Note: I've probably chosen bad numerical examples here as some spreadsheets/calculators don't do calculations involving carbonate alkalinity accurately. It is also necessary that the sythesized pH be 8.38 and the resulting alkalinity isn't exactly 50 but the hardness is in any case and most calculators should get that right.

 

[And1129]

I usually treat only the water I use for mashing with brewing salts appropriate to whatever style i'm brewing to get the benefits of better mash-efficiency and pH drop. I don't add salts to my mash-out or sparge additions because I don't see the point and would rather use less salts than more. I do, however, treat my sparge water with just a little bit of acid, but again no salts, to help mitigate pH rise and off flavor take-up during sparge.

 

[Spartan1979]

Well, I'll save the discourse on meeting a profile, as well as the uselessness of Beersmith's water profile feature, but I'd suggest reading up on this in the forum, and that can save of trouble in the future.

As far as the amount of water, it's the amount of water you are using in the beer. Often, for a 10.5 gallon batch, I use around 15 gallons of water.

Remember to sparge with low alkalinity water, preferably RO water or acidified water.

I just ordered an RO system. Can you shed a little light on why Beersmith's water profile feature is not useful. I do understand why one might not want to match a particular profile.

 

[ajdelange]

In order to brew a beer of a particular style it is only necessary to have water that broadly matches the profile of the city in which it originated and even that statement is not to be taken as gospel because many of the originating breweries would have treated the water prior to its use in brewing. The simplest example might be the water used to brew Bohemian Pilsner. It is sufficient that water used for this style be low in mineral content - not that it match the water of Plzen or Ceske Budejovice. In the case of Burton ales it is sufficient that the water contain a goodly amount of sulfate, be pretty hard and low in alkalinity IOW that most of its hardness be permanent. It is not necessary to match the alkalinity of Burton water because just by heating the water preparatory to mashing the Burton brewers would have dropped much of that bicarbonate.

The bicarbonate dimension is pretty meaningless in a water profile for this reason. It is difficult for a home brewer to add calcium bicarbonate to low mineral water in order to mimic the profile of a particular city and foolish to go to the effort only to have that bicarbonate drop out in the HLT (just as it would do with an authentic sample of the cities water). Add to this that many of the profiles you see are bogus in the sense that they are not physically possible. If nature can't produce them you can't either.

I advise people interested in this aspect of brewing to take up the BA monograph on that particular style of beer and see what the author has to say about the water. Then try to get the water you brew with generally like what is described.

There is a perfect profile for you for any particular beer and that is the profile that gives you the beer you like best. That can only be found by repetitively brewing the beer while varying mineral content until the sweet spot is found. This takes a lot of time and effort but is worth it.