Pale Ale Experiment

Mashing
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[quote=“14thStreet”]hoppyguy, I might have missed it but where are your bicarbonates coming from?

rebuiltcellars, how long is a “long time” for your BoPils? I would think that you needed all the rests, decoctions and aging with your water to get that great beer. It’s tradition for a reason but I wonder if it all is necessary simply using different water? I’m trying to nail down my own water as well.[/quote]
I brewed it in April, and after fermenting kept it at room temp through the summer (don’t have a good means of lagering during the warm months). Put it on tap in September, and it was only after it was kept cold for several weeks in the fridge that the beer came into it’s own.

As for the process, yes, it had all the rests and every temp change was accomplished with decoctions. 3.5 hour acid rest, 1 hour protein rest, 30 minute low conversion (144F), 30 minute high conversion (158) and a 10 minute mashout. Followed by a 4 hour boil.

To answer your question though, I am certain you can get very good results using different water and fully modified malts. I just wanted to try out the process firsthand, and I’m not sure I will do so again. Last month I brewed a German style pils with fully modified malt, salts added to the water, and a single infusion mash. I’ll compare when it is ready and see if I can tell the difference.

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A four hour boil, did you leave the country? :slight_smile: Thank you for the feedback, let us know how they compare when your latest is ready!

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I use distilled water for my brewing all the time, and add whatever minerals I need to achieve the proper water chemistry for the style. I don’t know of any other way to hit a target water profile more accurately. Do you? Adding tap water to distilled water may give your mash some necessary minerals, but who knows what else you’ll be getting in there, too? Today’s municipal water can have some pretty godawful scary stuff in it, like arsenic, for one. Unless you have obtained an accurate chemical analysis of your home’s water and you know exactly what’s in it, you’re really just shooting in the dark, don’t you think?[/quote]

I ment don’t use 100% distilled with no mineral additions. of coarse you can build up a water profile with R.O. and distilled water.[/quote]
I see.

24

The only time soft water is really good is for a Pilsner. When making a pale ale, I will use chlorides and sulfates of magnesium and calcium, but avoid using carbonates. The mash for a pale ale needs to be more acidic than for a porter or stout. When brewing a stout, I will add potassium bicarbonate to the mash for alkalinity.

While I am talking about chemistry and pale ales, I tried making pale oat ales. They were good, I’d drink them and give them to others, but there wasn’t anything outstanding. I didn’t notice a difference between pale oat ale and pale ale that was all-barley, except that the oat beer was very cloudy and hazy. There must be some chemistry between the proteins and oils of oats, and melanoidins or “toast molecules”, whatever you want to call it. A stout made with oats is black satin, black cream!

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The 2011 winner of the bo-pilsner category used 100% distilled water.

I live down the street from Oskar Blues brewing and on the brewing network they’ve said that they don’t do too much in the way of salt additions and we have absolutely 0 ppm hardness in our water (read: no calcium)

I think that the experiment is definitely worth doing. Near as I can tell, no one participating in this thread has done the experiment. Doesn’t that mean it’s worth while?

When I read the original post I was all geared up to see the results. When I kept reading I was disappointed to find that this thread devolved into regurgitating useless dogma that anyone can read in a basic brewing text. Does no one actually want to know what this beer tastes like?

There was a time when everyone said that you had to secondary a beer or it wouldn’t drop clear. More recently, the “wisdom” about water chemistry was that you should try to match useless historic water profiles that can’t even exist in nature due to the imbalance of ions. It was also recently preached as law that adding phosphoric acid to mash water precipitates calcium, so you would definitely have mashing/clarity/fermentation problems…until Gordon Strong did that and won three ninkasi’s in a row.

The most important thing is to just try it and then trust that you have a decent palette, right?

End rant.

Comments on the actual experiment: Do you have a pH meter, colorpHast strips or anything? It would be good, I think, to maintain integrity of the experiment, to keep the pH between the two batches equal via something like lactic acid additions. Pitching rate, date of sampling, fermentation temperature should all be held constant, volume, ingredients, aeration method, etc etc etc.

It may be the case that you have some trouble converting the distilled batch. Make sure you do an iodine test for conversion and if it’s not converted in 60 minutes (which I doubt) try mashing longer. Also, on the “control”-ish batch that uses salts: most breweries add salts to the mash and the kettle and skip any sparge-water additions, but it’s your experiment…

Looks like the hopville page has “croaked” so no comment on the recipe. May be better to try this with a lighter style like cream ale so differences between the two batches won’t be masked by firm hop flavors; however, it does depend on your hypothesis. What do you think will be the effects of such a water difference?

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Tyler I bet the winner did the same as others, distilled PLUS salts.

Try drinking some distilled water. It tastes sour because it extracts salts from your mouth. It’ll extract what salts are present in the malt, but if there were reliably enough salts in malt then no one would be building water. Even those building bopils water are adding salts. If nothing else, try eating food that has no salt. Not good.

My own rant concerns the use of palette or pallet instead of palate.

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[quote=“mf tyler”]I think that the experiment is definitely worth doing. Near as I can tell, no one participating in this thread has done the experiment. Doesn’t that mean it’s worth while?

When I read the original post I was all geared up to see the results. When I kept reading I was disappointed to find that this thread devolved into regurgitating useless dogma that anyone can read in a basic brewing text. Does no one actually want to know what this beer tastes like?[/quote]

I couldn’t agree more, mf. If I knew you a little better I might even say you’re my hero.

:cheers:

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Well, then do it and tell us how great it is. I got the impression that the OP wasn’t an experienced brewer and wasn’t considering that the control might not turn out well at all. You experienced guys go for it and let us know how great it is so we can chuck our useless salts. You all haven’t done it, so why not? Go for it, brew a nice brown ale or a stout with ONLY distilled water and let us know how wonderful it is. Sheesh, I wasnt trying to stifle creativity, I was just trying to keep the guy from asking 5gal of lousy beer. With all the variations one can explore, why do something with a good chance of being actually bad? And as far as dogma goes, not everything that’s written down is useless boys.

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Here’s a plan for you. Brew a bopils, it wants soft water to begin with. Use a mash around 1qt/lb to keep the salts inherent to the malt at as high a concentration as possible. Don’t add acid since this is cheating, you add anything but distilled and you have modified the water. I would mash two hours since the conversion may go a little slow. With this experiment you have a decent chance of things turning out well.

Salts are there for a variety of reasons. Enzymes need cofactors and an aqueous environment that supports them staying active and not denaturing prematurely. Salts affect pH and buffer the solution, again to support optimal enzyme activity. Salts also have a significant flavor contribution in a variety of ways, affecting hop and malt character as well as probably having effects themselves. Not everything written down is dogma, some of it is fact.

PS I will believe there is 0ppm calcium in a water when I see the test results. Low, sure. 0, doubt it.

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There might actually be a better chance of an amber colored beer turning out with 100% distilled and no salts or acid than a pilsner, due to mash pH. Specialty malts would reduce pH towards the magical 5.3, and a pilsner contains very little if any specialty malts so the pH tends to be closer to 5.8. Again, experiments might prove (to myself anyway) whether pH control is even important at all. Maybe to my taste buds, it isn’t. I won’t know until/unless I try.

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Good point, I was thinking more of a recipe that would have been produced from soft water. I may try this myself in a small batch.

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Rather than jump into a 5 gallon experiment I decided it might be better to try a little test to see if a 5 gallon experiment was even necessary.

There are potentially many reasons a distilled water beer wouldn’t work:

  • Mash won’t convert
  • Beer won’t ferment
  • Fermented beer won’t clear

I figured if I could convert a small mash, then it may be worth trying a 1 gallon batch. So I gave it a shot today. I knew I wanted enough wort to take a gravity reading, and that my hydrometer testing tube holds just over 200mL so I went with a 300mL mash.

To keep it at ~1 qt/lb I used 150g grain and mashed for 1 hour doing an iodine tests every 15 minutes and making observations.

I did a write up here: http://www.tylercipriani.com/brewing/di … onversion/

tl;dr: the mash did convert!

I think that an experiment designed to determine if there is a large effect across a range of calcium concentrations is in order. I think I’ll order than 1 gallon kit from NB. Watch this space :slight_smile:

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Thank you so much, Tyler, for going forth with your experiment.

All – At Tyler’s prompting, Martin Brungard just uploaded some really excellent information on distilled water brewing at:

https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/ ... ;topicseen

Awesome sauce.

:cheers:

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Interesting stuff. Who’d have thought we stumbled on a current research project?

I wouldn’t hesitate to think that a malt would convert in distilled water mash, whether it would be enhanced by salts is another matter. Iodine test isn’t the most reliable way to demonstrate conversion. The OG of a carfefully prepared wort is though.

If malt has enough calcium to bring the mash to 100ppm Ca then I would suppose thats enough to do the trick. On the other hand, malt may just have a somewhat variable Ca content depending on soil conditions, variety etc. Then too, the concentration is going to depend on the mash ratio, twice the concentration at 1qt/lb vs 2. Since calcium salts aren’t necessarily very soluble, this adds another variable. I think its safe to add a little bit of calcium salt, espeically if your anion is going to enhance flavor.