Interesting. So I should just give it a go and see what happens I guess.
I’m assuming the need for acidifying of sparge water is directly proportional to alkalinity (i.e., lower alkalinity means less need to acidify sparge, as there is less buffer to acidity). Yes?
And, I don’t really wanna drop funds on a pH meter until I know I’m into all grain for real. Are standard high school chemistry strips good enough to get a feel for all this?
Ah, right, my bad, somehow I got it in my head that hardness has implications for darkness. I reread Palmer’s Mash pH page and it sounds like calcium is pretty critical to enzymes breaking sugars out of their little prisons . Does low calcium potentially mean low OG?
Nate welcome to the board.
You are discussing far and wide variables of water composition that are too complicated as you state for a beginner to understand the basics of using and adjusting their water for brewing which in an actuality is super simple not as blinding as you are trying to make it seem. You are actually complicating the learning curve greatly by assuming everyone here is a chemist or wants to be one and/ or needs to learn water down to the micron or grain. You really only need to understand the principles and effects. Yes we all understand you check PH at mash time but that is not the topic of today’s questions we are working with probables which are not exact science. The exact science lies with Martin B, Kai, DeClerk, John B etc… that have all written books about what your rehashing.
And as an aside I along with others that have been members of the board for long periods of time have found that Bru N water can be used far and away from the old methods of trial and adjust at the mash tun as I always come within 0.1 -/+ of Martins suite and I think without a doubt new brewers can use it as a primary tool without a PH meter or leanings of a water scientist.
Look at it this way if Bru N water assumes you will Hit 5.4 will you ruin your batch if you hit 5.3 or 5.5 absolutely not and its a lot better than disregarding mash PH because its super complicated and you need to tinker around with amounts and a PH meter so they avoid the topic and continue to mash at 5.8-6.5?
[quote=“ickyfoot”] I’m assuming the need for acidifying of sparge water is directly proportional to alkalinity (i.e., lower alkalinity means less need to acidify sparge, as there is less buffer to acidity). Yes?
[/quote]
Standard strips are pretty imprecise. Even a guess like Bru’n Water’s sparge acidification worksheet might give better results than a standard range test strip.
Before I learned about water chemistry, I made beer I was happy with. My beer now is much better now. Great beer requires a lot of science, but it’s not hard to make decent beer without being too precise.
Cool, I was thinking of a digital meter, which I’ve seen for $80+. $30 is a worthwhile outlay in pursuit of better beer . If I test distilled water immediately upon opening it, will that be a decent gauge of how far off they measure?
At any rate, I think what I’ll do is get those, brew some all grain slobber (because I love the extract version and have it as a comparison), record mash pH, boil it, ferment it, drink it, and take notes. The next time, I’ll try making some modest adjustments to pH if necessary and repeat.
The main take away for me is that my unaltered water chemistry is sufficient to take the plunge.
When I started out brewing, I found, from my personal experience, that oversimplification of the science made it more confusing, for me, because I had to “unlearn” the rules-of-thumb and simplifications. Your experience is different from mine, and I respect that.
I find the science to be more accessible if I can think about the nature of what’s happening, instead of just plugging numbers into an equation without knowing the “why” of it. Other people are happier doing it that way. I’m not sure what Ickyfoot prefers, but I thought they seemed interested in the “why.” I could be wrong.
I’m definitely interested in the nitty gritty, and love reading about how the various factors in the water, the malt, etc., interact. So, nothing here has been more complex than what I was looking for. Basically, I’m trying to learn.
When it comes to practical application, initially I’d prefer to alter as close to nothing as possible, with no alterations being ideal. This will be my baseline. Then, I can incrementally apply any knowledge I’ve gained about the chemistry to slowly improve my beer and more clearly gauge how each change affects the final result.
No a lot of times due to offgassing the PH of bottled distilled can be much different than when it came off the reduction pipe.
And further on your thought of accuracy. I am not going to check what Nate said as I cant remember what number he gave, so I am assuming hes quoting the studies correctly but these strips he mentioned are truly the way to go as they have a known already trial-ed by brewers defect of those couple of points. So you can use them in confidence if looking for a lower cost entry to testing. And I believe Denny was the one that mentioned this years ago but cut the strips in half therefore giving you double the strips. Now not a dig on NB as they provide some good things such as the forum but you can find these strips lower than $40.
Edit* Kai has some real useful info as mentioned before but as I reread Nates post about the strips I needed to check and it is closer to 0.3 Kai’s site will help you see the deviation.
There was also someone before Kai that found this out also I cant remember who it was at this point.
I also noted you went back to the calcium question.
No, you will not drop tons of OG is the simple answer. Calcium has many varied benefits in both the mash and the ferment. You will gain some better efficiency and protein break with calcium at proper levels but if it is not “optimal” and your mash PH is on time efficiency will be great to excellent. An out of whack PH is what is going to be the OG killer not Ca in basic terms.
Gopher, I looked to your water utility and you are being given only Na and SO-4 there is no way to properly analyze the water for brewing unless you have a few more components of the mineral composition as a whole including ALk or HCO3.
You along with select others throughout the US have municipals that need to be called personally just like John Palmer’s quote is suggesting as they only mass market media reporting the contaminants per EPA guidelines and do not include the mineral composition as a whole. They typically have the values you just call and speak to a water lab agent to get the following details you will need. If your muni does not test for these aspects you will need a ward labs test to move forward in water manipulation as a whole.
Here is the number to your water peeps:(414)425-7510
Needed mineral values:
Ca/ Calcium
Na/ Sodium
Mg/ Magnesium
SO-4/ Sulfate
Cl/ Chloride
As you already know one of the following three:
HCO3/ Bicarbonate
CO3/ Carbonate
Alk as CaCo3 (mg/l or ppm)
There is a way to compute the value HCO3 using Ca and Mg, I believe it was Kai if not AJ Lange or Martin B covered it in the past on HBD.
Good know re: Ca, ItsPossible, and thanks for the link to the ColorpHast offsets. I’m starting to feel like I can take the plunge with relative confidence!
I played a gig at a brewery last night and ran into the assistant brewer. He suggested that I go with a single 2-row pale malt and single hop for my first all grain. He says that’s how they set a baseline when they started brewing at that location, and I think it makes sense. Maybe I’ll go with a bitter or another well balanced pale ale.
. Does low calcium potentially mean low OG?