Brewing Water

Although I know there’s an ideal water chemistry for each style I’ve just never bothered building the profile from scratch. Call it laziness, lack of compelling evidence, or just not wanting to fuss with an existing process that already yields consistent results, but I just can’t persuade myself to dig into this part of the process.

Those of you that do build custom water profiles, do you adjust across the board or only for certain styles? Is there a marked difference on the batches where you do amend the water or is it simply factor in trying.to get your beer as close to perfect as possible?

Cbeers

Quick answer… for me, yes, I’ve seen a big difference in the beers I amend the water from the ones I don’t.

I almost always build my water from straight RO because the water from my municipal supplier sucks. I do mostly six gallon batches and add a teaspoon of gypsum and a teaspoon of calcium chloride to both the mash and to the kettle and that seems to do the trick. I’ll cut the calcium chloride in half and double the gypsum if I’m doing a hoppy style, and vice versa if I’m doing a stout or something similar. I tend to get a little more picky if I’m doing a lager. BoPils needs very soft water, so I don’t add much.. maybe just a little calcium chloride. You can download Bru’n Water or EZ water calculator that does the calculations for you.

The biggest thing you need to do is make sure the pH of the mash is around 5.4. The residual alkalinity of your water is what will throw this off the most, but with RO or distilled water, you don’t have to worry about this. My process is basically to add enough calcium (at least 50 ppm) to get a healthy fermentation and then maybe a touch heavier on the sulfates for hoppy beers and more on the chlorides for malty beers. You can add lactic acid to lower the pH and a little baking soda to raise it in the mash if needed.

Water chemistry can get pretty complicated, so I try to dumb it down for myself as much as possible.

If you do one thing, adjust your mash pH.

Shawn Hill of Hill Farmstead says that he changes the profile of the water for the style.

The first thing to do with your water if you want to tweak it is to send a sample out for analysis. This will tell you what you need to do to your water per style and might tell you what you can do to improve your beer quality by making additions to achieve desired levels of all the minerals present in your water. Do you charcoal filter your water before you use it?cheerstevo

Tap/munni water in Bucks County, Pa is great in all grain ale brews. The water in SE Pennsylvania is destructively hard except for making beer. Lagers with local water from this area need lots of chemical manipulation.
I brew outside and preheat my mashtun with my strike water so most if not all of the local munni chems are gone. Same with any water additions.
Try your tap water. You might save some coin!