I added acid to my water and my pH cratered!

A common concern for brewers with a new pH meter is that they find out that the pH of their mashing water drops through the floor when they add the Bru’n Water-recommended acid amount to their mashing water BEFORE the grain is added. The pH of mashing water does drop below typical mashing pH and this result is OK. Read on!

This problem is most pronounced when brewing pale styles. A pale grist needs some form of acid addition in order for its mashing pH to drop into the proper range. In many cases, that means that the acid dose is large enough to completely neutralize the water’s alkalinity. When there is no alkalinity in the water, its pH easily drops. In fact, the laboratory definition of alkalinity states that zero alkalinity occurs when the water pH is between 4.3 and 4.5. To bring a water with alkalinity (even RO water has a little bit of alkalinity) to zero alkalinity, its pH has to be driven down to that range with acid. For really pale grists, the alkalinity may actually need to be less than zero. In those cases, the pH of your mashing water could easily be under 4.

But have no fear, when you add your grain to that low pH mashing water, the pH of the mash will rise into the proper range (assuming you used Bru’n Water properly). Malt and grain have very strong buffers that help move the low water pH up to its desirable mashing pH.

So next time you check your mashing water pH and its really low, don’t freak out! It’s supposed to be that low.

PS: Always add and thoroughly mix your acid and minerals to the water before adding the grains. That is the best way to assure they are properly distributed in your mash. Testing has proven that its almost impossible to get them evenly distributed in the mash when you add them AFTER doughing in.

Enjoy!

Batch size and measurement precision

Commercial brewers creating barrels or hundreds of barrels of beer in each batch, can get by with coarse measurements of malt, water, hops, acids, and minerals. But homebrewers with their smaller batch sizes, need to pay more attention to measuring those items. This is particularly true as the batch size gets really small.

The growing popularity of brewing very small batches in the 1 to 2 gallon (4 to 8 liter) range, makes it more critical to make sure your measurements are more precise. That means that measuring those items down to the milliliter or milligram needs to be a consideration. using measures like fractions of teaspoons, ounces, pounds, or kilograms might be too imprecise for getting elements like your water/grist ratio, mineral content, bittering, and mashing pH correct.

That may mean that its time to get a precision scale and graduated cylinder for brewing those small batches. While those tools are still important to commercial and home brewers, they are critical for small batch brewers.

Enjoy!

Brewing Water and Yeast

There is a misconception that our brewing water has to have calcium in it in order for the yeast to grow. Fortunately, your brewing water does not need calcium in it for the yeast to prosper. Read on to learn why.

Like most organisms, yeast evolve to survive in the environment they are given. In the case of brewing yeast, they are evolved to thrive on the conditions that malt wort provides. Fortunately, malt provides the big 3 nutrients that are the building blocks of life: carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. In addition, malt provides calcium and magnesium that are critical for yeast metabolism. In fact, there is more than enough calcium and magnesium supplied by the malt to adequately nourish the yeast. Therefore, our brewing water doesn’t have to include calcium or magnesium ions in it to keep our yeast happy.

However, there are reasons that you might want calcium in your brewing water. The most important reason is to help remove oxalate from your wort. Oxalate is a component in beerstone and in kidney stones. So, removing oxalate from your wort can help keep both your brewery and your ‘plumbing’ clean. 40 ppm calcium in the mashing water is typically sufficient for oxalate removal.

Another reason to include calcium in your brewing water is to aid yeast flocculation. While aiding yeast flocculation is of less concern when brewing lagers, it is an important factor in getting ales to clear in a reasonable amount of time. 50 ppm calcium is recommended in the overall brewing water to help ales clear better, but less calcium is OK for lager brewing.

The final reason that you may want calcium in your brewing water is to add flavor ions such as sulfate and chloride. In the case of delicate pale lager styles, including somewhere around 20 ppm calcium in your water can be useful in delivering enough sulfate or chloride to add enough flavor to avoid the beer from tasting bland.

While there are reasons to include calcium in your brewing water, you don’t have to worry about your yeast having enough to perform well. So, it’s OK to skip calcium salts in your water…your yeast will still perform.

Mashing Out… Is It Worth It?

Mashing out is the term given to the act of boosting your mash temperature prior to running off your wort. For many brewers, a single infusion mash is what they use. This post will discuss if performing a mash out step is worth it.

In some mashing setups, adding heat to either the wort or mash is easy. When you mash in an insulated vessel with no external heat source, mashing out may not be so easy.

Common wisdom is that the mash out step stops enzyme action and helps fix the potential wort fermentability, but that is not totally true. Even at the typical 168F to 170F (75C to 77C) mash out temperature, the enzymes continue to work. They just become denatured more rapidly.

Significant benefits of mashing out is that it helps pull a bit more extract out of the grist and it elevates your wort temperature. Hotter wort just means that you will reach boiling a bit quicker, but its not that much of a benefit. However, getting a bit more extract out of your grist can be a worthwhile benefit.

In practice, mashing out can increase your wort gravity by about 1 to 2 Brix (0.004 to 0.008 specific gravity units). Your final saccharification rest temperature generally defines how big a boost you're wort will produce. Lower sacc rest temps will produce a bigger boost, while high sacc rest temps will produce less. So, if your final sacc rest was only in the mid to upper 140F (60C) range, you could see a nice efficiency boost from a mash out step.

BUT, IS IT WORTH IT? For those brewers that have a mashing system that can easily and effectively step up their mashing temperature, YES, it is worth it. For those of you that would have to add the proper volume of boiling water and stir, it may not be. Its even more questionable if you don't have much room in your tun to accept that mash out infusion.

The bottom line on Mashing Out...if you can accomplish it easily...do it. If its less feasible or troublesome for your system, its OK to skip.

Working With Calcium Chloride

Calcium chloride can be a confounding salt to work with in the brewery since it readily absorbs water from the atmosphere and effectively dilutes your assumed ionic addition. Fortunately, there are two ways to resolve this.

The most consistent option is to create a liquid calcium chloride solution. That option is discussed more thoroughly in older posts on this page. Another option is to occasionally dehydrate your calcium chloride supply by baking it in an oven.

Since your solid calcium chloride will slowly pick up moisture, even when stored in tightly sealed vessels, baking the solid can dehydrate it to near anhydrous condition. This is an easy process.

Place the calcium chloride solids in a heat-proof open container such as a bowl or tray and heat the solids to about 200C (392F) for at least an hour. Those solids will melt and in the process, they should revert to an anhydrous state (no water of hydration). Once dehydrated, you can have a better estimate of the solid and how much calcium and chloride you are adding via the salt. In Bru'n Water, you can set the calcium chloride form to Anhydrous and be more accurate in your additions.

If you don't think you've been getting what you expect out of your calcium chloride additions or if your solids are getting watery or runny, then this baking technique should help you.

Enjoy!

Mashing or Finished Water Profile?

The Supporter's version of Bru'n Water includes an interesting dual reporting of both the water profile in the mashing water and in the overall finished water. Why are there two? Which should I target?

The program reports these two results because sometimes their concentrations can differ.

Usually, we are trying to match the overall finished water profile to your targeted water. We do that generally for beer flavor reasons. However, there are cases where it is helpful to add ALL the calcium salts (that were calculated for the entire batch) to the mash. This drives the calcium content higher in the mashing water which helps to reduce oxalate content in the wort. Oxalate is not desirable in wort since it leads to beerstone in your brewery or kidney stones in you!

It is this case where you should monitor the mashing water profile and its calcium content. It appears that about 40 ppm Ca in the mashing water is sufficient to remove a significant amount of the oxalate from the wort.

Since all the calcium salts for the batch were added to the mash with this technique, the overall calcium content is reduced when the low calcium sparging water is added to the mash. So, there is a need to know both the mashing and overall finished water profile information.

Even if you can't get your mashing water Ca content to 40 ppm, driving it higher with this "add all the calcium salts to the mash" technique does still help reduce some of the oxalate. In addition, this technique also helps drive down mashing pH, which can help reduce the amount of acid you add to the mash. This is a win-win.

Having this dual water profile report and Bru'n Water's capability to manage this "add all calcium salts to the mash" technique is another reason to become a Bru'n Water supporter.

Brewing Vienna Lagers

Vienna lagers are relatively malty beers with a dry finish. Let's look at how the water character in Vienna makes that possible.

The surprising thing about the water supply in Vienna, is its seemingly high sulfate level. With about 60 ppm sulfate and 15 ppm chloride, it seems counter-intuitive that the brewers there could make a seemingly malty beer there. But that is the anachronism that is sulfate. It does not prevent you from making a malty beer. In some ways, having an adequate sulfate level helps a brewer create a malty beer that is still drinkable since that beer is more likely to have a more drying finish. In fact, Burton on Trent brewers were known for their Burton Ales, which were very malty, high gravity beers. Not the hop-focused beers that most correlate with Burton. They did use the sulfate-rich Burton waters and they did produce malty beers that were treasured...probably because they finished cleanly due to the sulfate content.

When you review the description of what a Vienna lager should taste like, an important thing should jump out. "Fairly dry finish" is right there in the flavor description and essentially parroted in the mouthfeel description. For that reason, you are likely to find that employing that elevated sulfate content that comes straight out of the Danube River, is an appropriate consideration. I suggest that the boiled Vienna profile is an appropriate guide for your water additions. Do recognize that the Danube water is fairly alkaline that far down river and even after boiling or lime softening, it would still have that modest alkalinity that will require some form of lactic acid addition to neutralize. Many breweries in Germany faced with alkaline water, employ a continuously-operating sauergut fermenter to supply them with Reinheitsgebot compliant soured wort that is added to the water.

As with any fine lager, keeping the calcium content low, is an important factor for improving yeast performance. The roughly 30 ppm Ca content of the boiled Vienna profile is appropriate, although it can be good to have 40+ ppm in the mash to help with oxalate removal.

Why is brewing water chemistry difficult?

Some brewers look at brewing water chemistry and walk away. It seems too hard to comprehend!

Well, they could be right; it is a hard subject to master. This article will help illustrate why brewing water chemistry may seem difficult and why you might not be so dense after all.

The problem with understanding brewing water chemistry is that there are so many aspects to it. The figure below shows the major components of wort: the water supply, the mash grist, and any added minerals. Each of those components has contributors that affect our ultimate brewing targets…the flavor and pH of our wort.

As you can see in the figure, there are at least a half dozen contributors that affect wort flavor and pH. It is this large number of contributors that make the average person pull out their hair and give up on this subject. But understanding a problem is the first step in solving it. So take a moment with the figure to begin your trek toward understanding the aspects to how each of these components: Water, Grist, and Chemicals affect your wort. Each will be discussed in upcoming articles and we will work at helping you understand how those contributors affect your wort and beer.

Low-Cost Way to Have Your Beer Evaluated

One thing that novice and developing brewers can have a problem with is understanding, detecting, and correcting faults in our beers. Some of us just don't know that some of the flavor in our beer is actually a fault and we don't do anything about it. Getting an objective assessment from a trained and experienced beer judge can help bridge that gap from being unaware to working on a solution.

The cheapest way to get help is to be a member of a local homebrew club and enlist the palate of the most skilled and knowledgeable club members to give you their assessment of your latest masterpiece. Bring your beer to meetings and let others taste it. Ask for honest assessments, not platitudes. Hopefully, they are experienced BJCP judges. Sitting with them and having them point out to you what they taste (good and bad) and what it might have been a product of, is a great way to tune your palate to recognize those features and faults and move your brewing to enhancing or fixing them. Hopefully, you have a good club around you with skilled beer judges.

A second way is to enter your beer into competition. Good competitions have experienced BJCP judges at every judging station to help assure that a decent assessment of your beer is conducted. Unfortunately, experienced judges are a rare commodity and sometimes you get "Joe" off the street corner who knows little about beer, but was pressed into service by the competition organizer. Its a shame, but its a fact of life. So competitions may not always provide you with good feedback. In addition, you don't have the chance to sit with a judge to taste the beer with them to get direct feedback and guidance on what is being tasted.

A third way is to learn to judge beer yourself. The Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) provides anyone with the nomenclature of beer, its flavors, and its faults. Unfortunately, you can't get everything you need from the written word. You have to be instructed by hands on (tongue on?) experience with experienced tasters to illustrate what is good and bad. Find a BJCP training class in your area.

A forth way is to volunteer to be a Steward at a BJCP beer competition and ask to taste the beer samples as the judges discuss their findings. That is how you can start to understand the good and bad aspects of beer. Listening, tasting, and correlating those flavors and faults can help you understand the flavor of your own beer and how to make it better.

Enjoy!

Sodium… It’s OK in Beer

A recent post by a brewer with somewhat elevated sodium content in his tap water pointed out a potential misconception that many brewers have about sodium. Many think that sodium is never desirable in beer, but it's OK to have a modest sodium content in beer. This is one of the many points that John Palmer and I tried to point out in the Water book. Great beer can be made with sodium in the brewing water.

One of the trials that John conducted while working on the book was to spike a few of his beers with various sodium salts to assess the effect on beer flavor. In every case, beer flavor improved with minor sodium content. Fifty to 100 ppm sodium is not a red flag for all brewing. In the case of darker styles, sodium is very often beneficial to beer flavor.

The illustrative finding from the brewer mentioned above with the elevated sodium content in his water, is that he has advanced multiple beers brewed with his tap water to the final round of the National Homebrew Championship and the MCAB. Having tasted at least one of his beers myself, I can attest that sodium in the 80 to 100 ppm range can taste great. By the way, sodium doesn't taste salty until its concentration is around 250 ppm. That is well above the desirable level in beer.

Don't be afraid of sodium in your brewing water. The only caution is that high sodium with high sulfate can be rough tasting. Otherwise, do consider boosting sodium in some of your beers.

Enjoy!