Adjusting Your Brewing Water

Another great update from Jorge at http://brewbeeranddrinkit.com/go/more-beer.html

Adjusting Your Brewing Water

90 to 95% of your beer is made up of water... and if your water tastes like pond water, then your beer is likely to taste like pond water...

So assuming your water tastes good, then let's look at how you can adjust your water to brew better beers...

There are many things you can do with water, but the most important reason why you want to adjust your water (if at all) is to keep your mash pH between 5.1 and 5.4...

Extract brewers don't have to worry about adjusting their water, since no mashing is taking place and dry or liquid malt extract has all the minerals and nutrients yeast need for fermentation...

... but for all grain brewers, playing with water is half the fun...

So, the question 'how do I adjust my water?' is different for every brewer depending on a)the water source and b) the beer being brewed...

To make this easy to understand I'll start with distilled water as an example and then give you harder examples using other sources of water...

Distilled water has essentially zero minerals and it's about as pure H₂O as you can get... and it should have a neutral pH of 7...

T

he pH of water itself doesn't matter as much as the pH of the mash... that's what we are worried about... when you add water to your grains, the natural acidity of the grains brings the pH down below 7...

Here's where we need to start paying attention... pale malts, lager malts or light colored malts don't have much acidity... toasted malts or roasted malts on the other hand tend to have too much acidity...

What that means is that if you tried to brew a light beer using nothing but distilled water and a pale or lager malt, then your mash pH will probably be around the high 5's... if you were to brew a dark colored beer using distilled water and dark malts then your mash pH will probably end up in the high 4's... either way you'd be above or below the range you want to be, which is in the 5.1 to 5.4...

That's where adjusting your water comes into play...

For light colored beers you want to adjust your pH down and for dark beers you want to adjust your pH up...

To adjust your pH down, the easiest way is to add Calcium or Magnesium to your mash... these minerals bring the pH down... and they are usually found in the form of Gypsum salt (Calcium Sulfate), Calcium Chloride or Epsom Salt (Magnesium Sulfate)... alternatively lactic acid can be used, but I prefer to stick to salts...

To adjust you pH up what you want to use is carbonates... carbonates make your water alkaline, which means they raise the pH of your mash... and you can add carbonates to your mash in the form of baking soda (Sodium Bicarbonate) or chalk (Calcium Carbonate)...

Easy enough?

So you'd think that if you brewed using medium malts like caramel 60 - 120 L or similar colored malts, then you don't have to adjust your water to hit your pH... and you'd be right, but you still have to adjust your water because you need to have at least 50 ppm of calcium...

Not only does calcium help during the mash, but it's critical to have good fermentation...

Again, extract brewers don't have to worry about that, because extract has the minerals needed...

Now, this was if you were to use distilled or reverse osmosis water... which has no minerals or carbonates... but what if your water does have minerals or carbonates?

Well, now you know what minerals to look for and why you are adjusting your water to begin with... so let's look at a couple examples... check out this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jJYrx5JCP4

Hope that helps you brew better beer...

Brewing Efficiency 101

I try to make a habit of not posting someone else's work but Jorge at Brew Beer and Drink it did such an awesome job of explaining Brewing Efficiency that I had to do the ole cut-&-paste so I could come back and review this when I needed to and so anyone else checking out this site could benefit as well.  Hopefully you will find this as helpful as I did.

Jorge posts some excellent stuff and I hope you will help support his efforts at http://brewbeeranddrinkit.com/go/more-beer.html

From Jorge:

First off, if you are brewing extract, it is almost impossible to miss your OG (Original Gravity)... If you add six pounds of sugar to five gallons of water, you have exactly six pounds of sugar mixed in with your water!....

The only way your hydrometer can be wrong is if you spill wort or you have anything other than five gallons of water... or if you scooped up a sample of your wort when your sugar (DME/LME) is not mixed in well...
But you still have 6 pounds of sugar (malt extract) in water! I don't care what the hydrometer says... that's with extract....

Now efficiency is a bit harder... deals more when brewing with grains, but this should help explain malt extract above...

So starting from the top... we are adding sugar to water to make our wort... pure sugar (sucrose) will give you 46 points of sugar if you add one pound to one gallon of water... that reads 1.046 in the hydrometer...
When you look at a grain's typical analysis sheet, you will see a percentage number under "Extract CG/Dry Basis" (CG = Coarse Grind)... for 2-row it's about 80%... That means that if you were to extract every single possible grain of sugar out of it... and I mean to the last drop, you would get 80% of 46 points per pound... 80% times 46 equals 36.8...

That means you would get a reading of 1.037 (rounded up)... again, that's if you get EVERYTHING out of it... if you have 100% efficiency...

Most brewers will get around 75% efficiency... that means they will get 75% of the 36.8 possible points they can get if they were to be 100% efficient at extracting all sugar from one pound of grains...
At 75% efficiency you get: 75% times 36.8 equals 27.6 points... 27.6 points using one pound of grains in one gallon...

That's all that efficiency is...

Say you brew using 10 pounds of grain... at 75% efficency you will extract a total of 276 points of sugar (27.6 as described above times 10 pounds of grain)... in five gallons that would read: 276 divided by 5 gallons equals to 55.2 which the hydrometer reads as 1.055...

So the point is, you gotta think of how many points of sugar TOTAL you have in your water... when you use DME you get about 42 points per pound, which is why I said at the beginning that you can't screw it up... if you add 6 pounds of DME you will have 42 points of sugar times 6 pounds equals 252 points of sugar total... if you divided that in five gallons you will get 50.4 per gallon or a gravity reading of 1.050...

Efficiency is good for planning... I base my recipes on 75% efficiency... but you gotta know how many points of sugar total you need in case something goes wrong...

And let me tell you about my brew gone wrong...

I wanted to brew a beer with OG of ~1.052... that's 52 points of sugar per gallon of water... so if I do the math backwards... Since it's a 5 gallon batch, I know I need 5 gallons times 52 points of sugar equals to 260 points of sugar total... that's 260 points of sugar total not divided into anything... now I collected about 6.5 gallons of wort which means I should have a gravity reading of 1.040... to get that I do divide the total points of sugar by the gallons they are mixed in (260/6.5 = 40)...

Now when I took a sample (after mixing everything well) I got a reading of 1.033 or 33 points per gallon... so I did the math again and realized that 33 times 6.5 gallons equals to 218 points of sugar total... meaning I was about 42 points of sugar below my target of 260 points I needed...
So what did I do...

Well I could have mashed more grains, but that would take too long and since I'm human, lazy and like the path of least resistance, I figured that one pound of DME would give me exactly those 42 points I needed to hit my OG and go on with my brew day... so that's what I did... I added one pound of DME to the boil, brought my OG to where it needed to be and moved on...

That is a real life example of how you go about using math and this whole efficiency topic... and the moral of the story is, keep malt extract handy when you brew all grain in just in case!
Cheers!