Adjusting your water chemistry
Water chemistry can make a big difference in the final taste of your beer, let the mash enzymes work more efficiently and help your bugs grow and flocculate well. This is by no means a bible to follow but gives some general guidelines to start with. There's lots of material on this out there. The best tool I've found to use is bru'n water https://sites.google.com/site/brunwater/.
Luckily North Bay water is perfect for brewing, very soft and easy to manipulate. I typically use 3 salts for mineral adjustments (gypsum or CaSO4, Epsom MgSO4, and Calcium Chloride CaCl), campden or sodium metabisulphite to knock out the little bit of chlorine in the tap water and acidulated malt for pH adjustment.
Here is a typical NB water report (as of summer 2016) with ion concentrations in PPM:
Ca 7
Mg 2
Na 11
SO4 6
Cl 19
CO3 13
Total hardness as CaCO3 26
The important ones for taste are the sulfate (SO4) and Chloride (Cl). If you jack up the sulfate to several times the chloride you can enhance the perception of bitterness, likewise if you have 2-3 times more chloride than sulfate you can enhance the sweet maltiness of a beer. It's safe to ignore the sodium and bicarbonate numbers. Here is an example of an exaggerated sulfate based on Randy Mosher's ideal Burton water profile:
Luckily North Bay water is perfect for brewing, very soft and easy to manipulate. I typically use 3 salts for mineral adjustments (gypsum or CaSO4, Epsom MgSO4, and Calcium Chloride CaCl), campden or sodium metabisulphite to knock out the little bit of chlorine in the tap water and acidulated malt for pH adjustment.
Here is a typical NB water report (as of summer 2016) with ion concentrations in PPM:
Ca 7
Mg 2
Na 11
SO4 6
Cl 19
CO3 13
Total hardness as CaCO3 26
The important ones for taste are the sulfate (SO4) and Chloride (Cl). If you jack up the sulfate to several times the chloride you can enhance the perception of bitterness, likewise if you have 2-3 times more chloride than sulfate you can enhance the sweet maltiness of a beer. It's safe to ignore the sodium and bicarbonate numbers. Here is an example of an exaggerated sulfate based on Randy Mosher's ideal Burton water profile:
brun_water_hobgoblin_2.xls | |
File Size: | 862 kb |
File Type: | xls |
You can see the sulfate is around 300 while the chloride is around 40, which added a nice sharpness to an otherwise sweet malty beer.
To adjust, just pick a profile from the top like 'yellow balanced' depending what you're going for and it will populate your target at the top. Then add your volume, when I brew a 5 gallon batch I usually use 8 gallons of water total, so that's already in the total water additions section. The default water report for North Bay is already populated on the first tab of the excel workbook so you don't have to worry about it unless you use other water sources. Now all you have to do is change the addition (g/gallon) numbers next to the salts of interest and see what they do to the finished water profile. It's kind of weird, but it'll pump out amounts to add in grams in the bright yellow column under the total water additions. You can see I had to add a massive 12.8g of gypsum, 4.8g of epsom and 1.2g of calcium chloride. I use 4 gallons mash and 4 gallons sparge so I split the salts up between the two to even things out. Keep tweaking until your finished water profile equals the target profile give or take, it doesn't have to be exact. Also hover over the other numbers under each ion in the finished water profile to see recommended concentrations and their effect on the beer.
As for the chlorine (not chloride), there's next to none in our water so you can get away with ignoring it, but I like to add a pinch of metabisulphite to each 4 gallons when I'm making the water up just to make sure. That's about 1/8 to 1/4 of a campden tablet.
The little bit of bicarbonate in our water seems to keep the mash pH around 5.6 if you do nothing, which is perfectly fine but again a little bit of acid makes things work more efficiently and helps with keeping the color of the finished beer from darkening (especially with really pale stuff like wheats and blondes). 1-3 oz of acidulated malt does the trick nicely in a 5 gallon batch. Nothing in a stout or really dark beer (since dark grain naturally acidifies the mash), all the way to 3-4 oz in the light stuff. Put it through the mill with the rest of your grain for the mash. Seems to get the pH down to around 5.3-5.4 which really makes a difference, you'll get a couple more points of efficiency too.
There's tons of profiles out there to play with, I like some from Randy Mosher's list which can be found here: http://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=180667
If you find a cool one you want to add to the drop down list in the excel sheet, just keep scrolling down on the adjustments page and you'll see a big blue list of all the profiles. Just type in the numbers in one of the user custom rows near the bottom. Most of the time I just use the yellow, amber, brown, black profiles and pick whether I want it balanced bitter or malty based on the beer I'm going for.
I tend to leave out the epsom when doing sweet beers and just make up what I need with gypsum and calcium chloride. Don't bother with Chalk (it won't dissolve properly) or any of those other salts, you can do the basics with just the three I mentioned. Also all of these tiny salt additions are impossible to add without a good scale, a nice 0.01g resolution 200g jeweler's scale is one of the best tools to have for measuring salts and hops. Ebay has tons for under $10 from China.
Hope you got something out of my ramblings from this batch of nerdery, enjoy and go make some beer.
To adjust, just pick a profile from the top like 'yellow balanced' depending what you're going for and it will populate your target at the top. Then add your volume, when I brew a 5 gallon batch I usually use 8 gallons of water total, so that's already in the total water additions section. The default water report for North Bay is already populated on the first tab of the excel workbook so you don't have to worry about it unless you use other water sources. Now all you have to do is change the addition (g/gallon) numbers next to the salts of interest and see what they do to the finished water profile. It's kind of weird, but it'll pump out amounts to add in grams in the bright yellow column under the total water additions. You can see I had to add a massive 12.8g of gypsum, 4.8g of epsom and 1.2g of calcium chloride. I use 4 gallons mash and 4 gallons sparge so I split the salts up between the two to even things out. Keep tweaking until your finished water profile equals the target profile give or take, it doesn't have to be exact. Also hover over the other numbers under each ion in the finished water profile to see recommended concentrations and their effect on the beer.
As for the chlorine (not chloride), there's next to none in our water so you can get away with ignoring it, but I like to add a pinch of metabisulphite to each 4 gallons when I'm making the water up just to make sure. That's about 1/8 to 1/4 of a campden tablet.
The little bit of bicarbonate in our water seems to keep the mash pH around 5.6 if you do nothing, which is perfectly fine but again a little bit of acid makes things work more efficiently and helps with keeping the color of the finished beer from darkening (especially with really pale stuff like wheats and blondes). 1-3 oz of acidulated malt does the trick nicely in a 5 gallon batch. Nothing in a stout or really dark beer (since dark grain naturally acidifies the mash), all the way to 3-4 oz in the light stuff. Put it through the mill with the rest of your grain for the mash. Seems to get the pH down to around 5.3-5.4 which really makes a difference, you'll get a couple more points of efficiency too.
There's tons of profiles out there to play with, I like some from Randy Mosher's list which can be found here: http://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=180667
If you find a cool one you want to add to the drop down list in the excel sheet, just keep scrolling down on the adjustments page and you'll see a big blue list of all the profiles. Just type in the numbers in one of the user custom rows near the bottom. Most of the time I just use the yellow, amber, brown, black profiles and pick whether I want it balanced bitter or malty based on the beer I'm going for.
I tend to leave out the epsom when doing sweet beers and just make up what I need with gypsum and calcium chloride. Don't bother with Chalk (it won't dissolve properly) or any of those other salts, you can do the basics with just the three I mentioned. Also all of these tiny salt additions are impossible to add without a good scale, a nice 0.01g resolution 200g jeweler's scale is one of the best tools to have for measuring salts and hops. Ebay has tons for under $10 from China.
Hope you got something out of my ramblings from this batch of nerdery, enjoy and go make some beer.