American Pilsner

[gopher_brewmeister]

I’m looking to do an American Pilsner this weekend and i’m thinking about treating/diluting my mash/sparge water to bring out the hop flavor in the beer. I haven’t treated my water in the past but my understanding is that it should improve my pilsner to do so. I ran the numbers on Bru’n Water and using the “yellow balanced” profile but it looks like I should dlute my water with RO water in order to bring my HCO3 down. Not sure if I’m reading that correctly and I was looking for some help. My water profile is as follows:

Ca 37
Mg 12
Na 9
SO4 29
Cl 14
HCO3 123

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

[troutguy]

Yes you will want to bring your bicarbonate (HCO3) down. You can dilute with RO but your water looks well suited to yellow beers with the exception of that. You could successfully add some lactic acid to the water to buffer the HCO3 and get a mash pH of 5.2 - 5.4. Otherwise you will be playing with salts to build the water back up a bit. As is your Ca, Cl and SO4 are all in good ranges for matching Pilsen type water. Adding the lactic acid simply mimics the acid rest performed by Pilsen Brewers to buffer RA and lower mash pH.

So, yes you can dilute to reduce…then add some other stuff - or - buffer with lactic acid and roll on with it.

hope that helps.

[tom_sawyer]

+1 to just using your water and a little lactic or phosphoric to bring the pH down and drive off some of the bicarb. You might even want to add a little gypsum just to bring the Ca up to 50ppm and the sulfate to over 50ppm.