Varnish said:
I put these figures into Grahams(?) calculator, and after boiling it said I needed:
0.515g of Calcium sulphate per Litre
0.148g of Magnesium Sulphate per litre
0.058g of Sodium Chloride per litre
Which all seems simple enough.
But now I'm wondering if my water is too chalky to actually achieve this.
Looks like I'll have to buy a pH meter.
Unless you are an :ugeek: there is no need to buy a pH meter. Water treatment really is very simple, but it has been made very complicated by authors that do not know what they are talking about and Murphys threw a curve ball into the mix by recommending a set of profiles for the various beer styles. These Profiles have now been incorporated into many 'programs' and 'calculators' with very little thought about what they are intending to achieve.
First off and the most critical factor in producing a water suitable for a pale ale is to reduce your alkalinity to below 50mg/l and ideally below 30mg/l. While a moderate drop in alkalinity can be achieved through boiling, especially with added gypsum, but a much more effective method is to use CRS. The snag here is that adding a random quantity of acid to your liquor is as much a bad thing as just boiling it. What you need to do is to firstly measure your alkalinity and this can be done using the
Salifert Carbonate Hardness/Alkalinity Test Kitwhich is quick, cheap and sufficiently accurate.
The kit is surprisingly simple, you add 4ml of of water to a test tube, and then add 2 drops of indicator solution which turns the water blue/green. You then add drop by drop from a syringe with a fine tip the KH Reagent (Acid of a known concentration) to the test tube, swirling to mix the contents. Eventually the solution turns orange-red/pink. You then compare the amount of acid used with a table to determine the alkalinity in meq/L . . . multiply that by 50 to give the alkalinity in mg/L (ppm) as CaCO3 . . . once you know the amount of alkalinity you multiply it by the total amount of liquor you are going to use, and then work out how much CRS you need. (Say you ended up with a measured amount of 235mg/l and you use 30L of liquor, you need to eliminate 235-30 = 205mg/l so 205*30 = 6150mg of alkalinity. Each ml of CRS neutralises 1803mg so 6150/183 = 33.6 ml of CRS is needed) . . . The recent Brew Day I assisted at we used a Litre of CRS!!!
Ok so that is all the liquor treated to reduce the alkalinity to a sensible desired level . . . Using Acid means that we have boosted the sulphate and chloride (but not by a lot overall), but left the calcium levels unchanged . . . Calcium is a good ion and we need to ensure that we have enough of it in the mash / boil / FV. What I do is to use a custom profile in Grahams calculator then enter my current water profile as the desired set a 4 to 1 sulphate to chloride ratio and then set the sulphate level to around 250-300 . . . and everything magically works out. Remember that my only interest here is to increase the calcium levels, I have no interest in adding sodium . . . it has no real benefit to the brewing process . . . . . there might be some benefit to using magnesium sulphate but it is not all that significant.
So really all water treatment boils down to
1) Reduce your alkalinity to a suitable level for the style you are brewing
2) Increase your calcium levels to above 100-150 using either calcium sulphate or calcium chloride (or a mixture) depending on whether you want to accentuate hops or malt in the final beer.
Sorry if I've been a bit of an :ugeek: and this post is a bit longer than I intended