Beer Adjustments in Your Glass
Water chemistry can influence how your beer tastes and is perceived. However, your opportunity to adjust your beer’s chemistry doesn’t end with brewing. You can conduct post-fermentation adjustments to your beer to help create the beer you really want. Adding minerals and acids to a glass of beer can help you determine what works and what the batch adjustments should be.
One problem in working with only a glass of beer is that the mineral and acid adjustments need to be very small or you will overdose the glass of beer and not give yourself a chance to assess if it improves the beer. To give you an idea of how small these mineral and acid adjustments are, I’ll give you examples.
For most people, the smallest unit their scale can reliably measure is about 0.1 gram. In a 16 oz glass of beer, 0.1 gram of either gypsum, calcium chloride, or table salt will boost the sulfate or chloride by over 100 ppm. That is a teeny amount, but a big jump in concentrations. So you do need to use care.
In the case of gypsum, calcium chloride, and table salt, my measurements show that all of those 0.1 gram amounts were roughly equal to a pinch (between index finger and thumb) of those minerals. While you should weigh your mineral additions, that example helps illustrate how small they are.
To decrease the dose size, I recommend that you measure out a full 0.1 gram on your precision scale and then visually divide the resulting dry salt into 2 or 4 equal piles to allow you to dose at smaller rates. Adding 0.05 gram of any of those salts and bumping the sulfate or chloride concentrations by about 50 ppm is a reasonable start to assess a difference in the glass.
If your beer tastes a little dull or lifeless, then dosing acid to your glass of beer can make a big difference. Again, you’ll need to be precise with your dosing. I recommend using drops of acid as your unit of measure. The first thing you need to determine is; how many drops are in 1 ml of your acid. You will need to use the actual acid and not water for that calibration since the viscosity and specific gravity of the acid influence how large the drops are (and the number of drops per ml). With the drops per ml knowledge, you’ll be able to scale your result into your batch of beer. Be aware that different droppers will produce a different number of drops per ml.
Through testing, I’ve determined that it takes over 3 times the acid to move beer pH as compared to that required to move wort pH the same degree. But, that shouldn’t matter to you since you’re using your tastebuds to determine what beer pH tastes best to you. To give you an idea of how much it takes to drop pH by 0.1 units in a 16 oz glass of beer, it may take about 0.08 ml of 88% lactic acid or 0.8 ml of 10% phosphoric acid.
You don’t need to settle for what comes out of your fermenter! Take this guidance and test if mineral or acid additions can make your beer better.
Enjoy!
