Water additions for Northern Brown Ale

[jayk34]

I have a brew day planned for the weekend and the first time in going to use the excellent advice in strange Steve's water additions thread.

My alkalinity is 66.7ppm and my calcium levels are 70ppm.

As this is a brown ale, I wasnt going to modify the alkalinity to get it to 75ppm as my water is close enough but will adjust calcium to 100pm for the mash water (12 litres) + 17 litres of sparge water that I drain off into a cooler.

I then boil a few kettles of water to to the cooler to bring up to the required sparge amount and then intend to lower the alkalinity to 30ppm in the cooler.

I was also going to boil 5 litres of water and allow to cool so that I can liquor back in the fermenter to get the correct volume as my boil off rate in the burco is quite high. Was wondering how I should treat this 5 litres of water ? Should it be the same as the mash water of 75ppm alkalinity and 100ppm calcium ??

Does this sound about right ?

Thanks

 

[cushyno]

I wouldn't do anything to your top-up water other than treat with campden tablet. 1/4 of a tablet should do for 5l.
If I understand correctly the calcium is most important in the mash to assist the enzymes in their conversion of sugars.

 

[jayk34]

I wouldn't do anything to your top-up water other than treat with campden tablet. 1/4 of a tablet should do for 5l.
If I understand correctly the calcium is most important in the mash to assist the enzymes in their conversion of sugars.

Thanks. One less thing that could go wrong