Adding D.W.B. and A.M.S. to water profile

[Hawkbox]

I think what is being asked is how much of each chemical did you actually put in the water when you brewed?

I'm a little overwhelmed by their response though so I might have missed it.

 

[JedTodd]

i have put in exactly what the report advised for the beer, Lager, stout, pilsner etc that i was brewing, lol

 

[Hawkbox]

Ok so you put this much in the brew?

Cause holy hell that's a lot of salts.
I average less than 20g total additions to my water. You might be better off just buying some calcium chloride and Gypsum to make it easier to measure.

Or just do what the manufacturer recommends. It just seems super high for what you're doing.

 

[Hawkbox]

I'm less knowledgeable than Silver about water but a quick poke around the calculator makes me raise an eyebrow. 381ppm of sulphate is ridiculously high as well as 223 of chloride.

Even then it's only about 20g of additions to match up as best I can in 5 minutes of effort.

This is a write up our local brewing knowledge person did up for our water, it's not a good 1:1 but it would help you give a read.
For something like a stout with your water I might not add anything at all and see how it turns out.

http://yegbierfrau.ca/resources/Knowledge_Base/Edmonton Water Chemistry Simplified.pdf

 

[JedTodd]

Many thanks Hawkbox, i confess i know nothing about water chemistry so just followed the advise i paid for to the Laboratory, who also happen tomake these chemicals, i.m all for an easy life, so paying £40.00 for the report was a no brainer, lol. where did you find the tool for the water chemistry? is it on Bf? many thanks, Jed

 

[Hawkbox]

Yeah it's on BF. If you are building a recipe you can go into Edit on the bottom right in water calculator.

You'll need to populate your source water, which could be the raw liquor numbers and just put a guess in for sodium.
Then fill in the numbers for what you want to achieve. I almost always only use Gypsum and Calcium Chloride personally.
Get them close enough for the girls you go with and try it out. If your municipality has a water report see if you can get that too.

Edit: Or just go here to play around https://www.brewersfriend.com/water-chemistry/

 

[JedTodd]

it all looks very confusing, lol i guess it is a subject i need to study a lot more, lol, many thanks

 

[Hawkbox]

It's not as bad as you fear. While it's a really deep rabbit hole you can basically narrow it down to ratios.

Chloride:Sulphate and in what proportion. Malty beers you want more chloride than sulfate, hoppy beers you want more sulfate than chloride.

Or just go 1:1 and see how it goes. Don't stress yourself out about it for now, just kind of think about what might change if you did something different when you brew a batch and you taste it. More hop/dry character? Add some gypsum and so forth.

You'll get it. It took me a long time to get a handle on it to the point where I at least know what the things all do.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

When I say "specifically" I'm saying it in response to this, which I presume to be their advice to you:

AMS - 142 ml per 25 lts of liquor to be used, all liquor to be treated
DWB - 85 g per 25 lts of beer to be made, to be mixed in with the mash

 

[JedTodd]

Thank's Hawkbox, it looks like a long road, but one we must all tread, lol, thank's for simplifying things to an understandable level, and keeping the fun factor in the subject, lol, Jed

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

Ok so you put this much in the brew?
Cause holy hell that's a lot of salts.

And easily enough acid to be mashing at ~pH 4, just as the OP says he actually measured, instead of his arriving at the most commonly desired and targeted ~5.4 pH.

@Hawkbox, I'm heartened by your coming into this and beginning to support and see what I saw from the very onset. I realize at this juncture that in taking what has been a load of my time with the pure intent to help, I have instead somehow apparently highly frustrated the OP, but I have no idea as to why and how I have done so. I have been very careful and methodical in my approach. It appears that his faith lies strictly in trusting the organization that provided him with his water analyticals and with recipe related guidance. And thereby my attempt to right the ship has failed.

 

[Hawkbox]

You are talking about 3 levels above his head right now. Frankly I'm struggling to follow you. You need to dumb it down for him, he's nowhere near confident or comfortable with the level of information you're hitting him with.

It's good stuff, but you need to ELI5 when someone is a new brewer.

@JedTodd Don't lose heart, Silver's information is sound and useful but until you have the fundamentals of everything else down and are able to get a handle on what the various bits do it's not valuable to you.

I'd suggest putting a couple recipes together and sharing them in the recipe channel along with water setting if you want to play with them.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

At this juncture it would be interesting to see what making adjustments that are roughly in the neighborhood of 7-fold over what is more likely to be required has done to impact the flavor of @JedTodd's homebrews. Perhaps Brulosophy is correct in often concluding that massive deviation or alteration from the apparent right course seems to have little perceptible impact.

 

[Hawkbox]

I'm honestly curious too because it's a wildly high amount of minerals to be adding, my understanding of numbers that high is you start to get "gritty". Which I've never tried so I can't say I've experienced.

I think with the base values he has if he tries a brew with no adjustment at all it might come out fine, considering other than his hardness that's almost where I aim for with most beers anyway.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

The methodical approach I was taking was an attempt at stimulating (over time) self thought and self awareness and self esteem. Sort of along the lines of teaching a man to fish vs. simply giving him a fish (while similarly benefiting any audience that may have been munching popcorn behind the scenes). But it seems that the stimulation aspect fell flat when the OP failed to remotely grasp that what he had paid for and trusted was perceived by me (rightly or wrongly on my part) to be at the very root of the problem all along.

I was going to move this deeper into the mathematics behind why adding 21.8 mL of AMS is a better answer than adding 142 mL, but I was never presented with a "why" upon which to build upon the science aspect of it. Then I was going to do similarly with respect to the 85 grams of mineral addition. And lastly I was going to attempt to explain why I perceived his water analyticals to be impossible.

As to the OP's request to have water treatment given to him as if for giving him a fish, I repeatedly attempted to emphasize two reasons as to why this was not possible. 1) If his water analyticals are in question, then this becomes a matter for which: "In order to know where you want to go you must first know where you are.". 2) How does one confirm that his paid for advice as to where to go with his water analyticals for any particular style has any grounds with regard to a validity claim?

 

[BarbarianBrewer]

And easily enough acid to be mashing at ~pH 4, just as the OP says he actually measured, instead of his arriving at the most commonly desired and targeted ~5.4 pH.

@Hawkbox, I'm heartened by your coming into this and beginning to support and see what I saw from the very onset. I realize at this juncture that in taking what has been a load of my time with the pure intent to help, I have instead somehow apparently highly frustrated the OP, but I have no idea as to why and how I have done so. I have been very careful and methodical in my approach. It appears that his faith lies strictly in trusting the organization that provided him with his water analyticals and with recipe related guidance. And thereby my attempt to right the ship has failed.

@Silver_Is_Money, don't get too frustrated, I sense that @JedTodd was simply suffering from information overload. And you did give him a ton of information to process. To be honest, when you hit "cation/anion mEq/L balance", my brain began to hurt and knew I needed to return later when I had time to google, decipher and understand.

 

[Hawkbox]

Barbarian is right, I know you don't mean it but you're starting to come across as pretty condescending. People need to build into the knowledge, you can't just throw it at them and expect them to get it.

When I said I was struggling to follow I was serious and I've been doing it for 3 years.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

To be honest, when you hit "cation/anion mEq/L balance", my brain began to hurt and knew I needed to return later when I had time to google, decipher and understand.

All mineral ions have electrical charges. Some ions are charge positive (cations), and some ions are charge negative (anions). Sticking your hand into water with unbalanced charges would indeed be a shocking experience. But thankfully, water is electrical charge balance neutral. And we can use this fact whereby to sum up the charges that the analyticals dictate for ones water whereby to verify if the analyticals themselves are at least nominally correct (or not).

As an aside, an extension of this would be that if anyone merely dreams up "ideal" water analyticals (also sometimes known as water profiles) they had better exhibit charge balance neutrality, as if they don't, they are not possible to duplicate in the real world, and I believe I used the term "impossible". And we should be glad for the fact that they are impossible. I would guess that nearly 100% of merely dreamed up "ideal" water profiles are factually impossible.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

When you look at the minerals common to brewing, the cation is on the left, and the anion is on the right.

CaCl2 = Ca++ + 2Cl-
CaSO4 = Ca++ + SO4--
NaCl = Na+ + Cl-
etc...

When these minerals dissolve (or more technically correct, 'dissociate') in water, the water becomes a sea of myriads of freely roaming electrically charged ions wherein all + charges and - charges sum to zero.

An aside to this being that water made up from tossing in quantities of any minerals is always factually real, because each mineral tossed in is in charge balance with itself.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

Now that we have the above as background we can move to mEq's and then assess whether it takes 142 mL of CRS to bring 25 Liters of 186 mg/L Alkalinity water to the state of 26 mg/L Alkalinity, or whether it takes only 21.8 mL.

We want to go from 186 ppm Alkalinity to 26 ppm Alkalinity. But to get where you want to go, one must first know where one is. And mEq's assist us here. We will use mEq's whereby to equillibrate (or charge balance) water Alkalinity and AMS, whereby to place both on a level playing field.

To know where we are is to ask how many mEq's of Alkalinity the water has. We know that Alkalinity is measured in units of CaCO3.

The molecular weight of CaCO3 is "nominally" 100. This means that there are a sum total of 100 protons and neutrons present within a "typical" molecule of calcium carbonate. But calcium (Ca++) has 2 positive charges, and Carbonate (CO3--) has 2 negative charges, so the "Equivalent Weight" of CaCO3 (on a charge equivalence basis of '1',whereby to further "level" the playing field") is therefore 100/2 = 50

Now we can determine that 186 mg/L Alkalinity = 186/50 = 3.72 milliequivalents per Liter = 3.72 mEq/L Alkalinity

We have 25 Liters of this water so: 3.72 mEq/L x 25 L = 93 mEq's of Total Alkalinity (as CaCO3).

But our goal is to leave behind 26 mg/L of Alkalinity. Therefore, our goal is to remove 186 - 26 = 160 mg/L of Alkalinity.

160/186 x 93 mEq's total Alkalinity = 80 mEq's of Alkalinity to be removed.

We know (from testing it) that each mL of AMS has 3.66 mEq's of acid.

80 mEq's / 3.66 mEq's/mL = 21.86 mL of AMS required to be added. This is our answer.

OK, so 21.86 is close to 21.8, but it rounds to 21.9. Why?

I mentioned above that typical CaCO3 has a total of 100 combined protons and neutrons. But some CaCO3 is atypical, and has more than 100. The actual molecular weight of CaCO3 is 100.0869, and not the "idealized" 100.

100/100.0869 x 21.86 = 21.84, and this rounds to 21.8 mL

The answer is therefore 21.8 mL and not 142 mL.

This is what I mean by teaching a man to fish as opposed to giving him a fish. The OP indicated a desire to learn about water chemistry, and I have a tendency to desire to teach it.