First water treatment sense check

[MR]

Hi all,

I did my first all grain brew on my new (to me) Brewzilla 3.1.1 a few weeks ago.
I'm now preparing to dip my toe into the murky world of water treatment and have read the excellent Beginner's Guide to Water Treatment thread.

I have tested both my tap water and some Ashbeck water I have. For the purpose of this calculation and the next brew I am going to use 100% Ashbeck.

My Ashbeck has an alkalinity of 14ppm. I'm making the Deya Hokum Stomp Oatmeal Porter clone from Malt Miller, so given the style want it to be closer to 120ppm, which means an addition of 3.12g sodium bicarbonate for my 20L batch (0.17g/L x 18.38L mash volume).

The calcium I calculated at 25ppm (even though the label says 17). If I split the difference and say 20ppm, and aim for 100ppm, then I need to add around 80ppm. The beer is malty so I want a ratio of around 0.8. If I add 9.17g calcium chloride (0.2g/L x 41.68L total volume) and 8.33g gypsum (0.15g/L x 41.68L total volume). This is a total calcium of 143ppm and ratio of 0.8.

In Brewfather I selected a target profile of Robust Porter and split the mash and sparge automatically (excluding the sodium bicarbonate) it says the mash ph will be 5.58.
It's warning that the calcium is a little high for the style at 143 and chloride at 157, but if I try to bring the calcium levels down by reducing the gypsum and calcium chloride then the mash ph goes too high at 5.62.

Does this all sound ok?

 

[Caramel Ox]

Simple answer is that your final numbers look like they will be okay.

To open the worm can - alkalinity isn’t a number you need to target, it’s just something to deal with if you can’t get the mash ph into the target zone. You want to keep things as simple as possible.

Since you have Brewfather make a profile for your tap water and ashbeck and play around with partial dilutions - if there are minerals in your water already that you need then use some of them.