Calling water experts: Imperial Stout H2O additions: HELP!

[Chupa LaHomebrew]

OK, it's not really an emergency, but I'm going to be mashing in in about an hour.
I'm sure some of you must have run in to this before: My beer SRM is calculated to 68 in Promash (sounds high, but just a bit higher than Jamil's RIS in Brewing Classic Styles). According ot JP's water spreadsheet I would need an RA of about 700+ to balance that! Well, that seems a bit high seeing as how if I use chalk and baking soda to get to 700, both my calcium and sodium levels are going to be very high (250+ calcium, 100+ sodium)

So..what would you do? My water is fairly baseline, every mineral is in the single digits ppm.
I was going to try this for 7 gallons:
10 gr. chalk
1 gr. calcium chloride
12 gr. baking soda

Should end up with:
total hardness 117
RA 346 (good for SRM 34-38)

I guess that's a better buffer than nothing. The Sodium on that is 124, which I guess will be diluted once I sparge but that already seems VERY high, I don't want to brew a salt beer.

OK, hope to hear from you...if not I'm sure I'll figure it out.

[Chupa LaHomebrew]

Ok, I think I figured this out somewhat. This is actually going to be a parti gyle brew and it probably has to do with how I am calculating it for promash (just for the first beer). So maybe my real color on the first beer is going to be 40 or so, and who knows on the second beer, and since the boil volume will be twice plugged in to what I have in promash now, the total SRM should be half (more like 34). So I don't need the super high RA that I though I would anyway.

I hope that made absolutely no sense.

[BDawg]

Chupa-

You might consider increasing the sulfate content too. RIS should have a hop presence to balance the malt. Without any sulfates (Seattle's water is similar to Portland's) you'll be missing some of the hop bite. I'd just sub about a teaspoon of gypsum instead of the calcium carbonate (chalk).

HTH-

[ajdelange]

My beer SRM is calculated to 68 in Promash (sounds high, but just a bit higher than Jamil's RIS in Brewing Classic Styles).

I don't think so. I do the Irish stout recipe pretty much as it appears in Michael Lewis's monograph and it usually comes out around 80 SRM.

According ot JP's water spreadsheet I would need an RA of about 700+ to balance that! Well, that seems a bit high...

Yes, it is. Dublin (where they have brewed a fair amount of stout) has water that ranges between RA 13 and perhaps 160. I brew ca. 80 SRM stout with water of about 36 RA. 700 is absurdly high. No brewery in the world has water that alkaline. In my collection of water reports the largest RAs are right aroung 160 for Dublin (and Bruge).

So..what would you do?

Nothing unless I had a mash pH problem. With very soft water you will probably hit a pH of around 5.5 with a typical dry stout mash or a little below depending on how heavy handed you are with the roast barley. Check pH after dough in. If the pH is below 5.2 then add a small amount of chalk (certainly not 10 grams), stir in thoroughly, allow to reach and check pH again. See how you like the beer. If you want more hops emphasis then add some gypsum next time. If you want to see if you can get it a bit smoother then add some calcium chloride. Or a bit of each. Ca is good for the yeast, enzyme stability, runoff, clarity...and Dublin water has quite a bit. If mash pH comes in at 5.5 or above you may want to add some calcium chloride and/or gypsum on this brew to get it down a bit. Remember that gypsum will make the hops assertive in a way you may not like so I'd try the calcium chloride first and then add sulfate on a later brew so you can see the difference.

Whatever you decide to do do not add chalk or sodium bicarbonate to the water. Sodium isn't good for much of anything and in brewing (bi)carbonate is usually your enemy (and hardness your friend). Carbonate has its place in brewing but it is generally not a good idea to add it to brewing water unless you do it the way nature does and that's generally more of a PITA than it is worth. Exception: authenticity buffs who want to match the water they brew with to the city the beer came from. They will add carbonate and go to the trouble to imitate nature (bubble CO2 through the water) because that's the only way to get a close match.

I've probably answered this same question half a dozzen times here in the last 9 mos or so so a check of the archives might yield further information of interest.

[thatguy314]

Sean,

I had similar trouble trying to work with Bronx (Croton) water with my oatmeal stout, with a 38 SRM. All my previous stouts tasted kinda funny so I wanted to work hard on the water. As you know, there's no Ca in our water so I had to add both calcium and carbonate, which made it a little complicated. I wanted a balanced sulfate to chloride. I tried 4g chalk 4g baking soda, 2g gypsum, 0.5g CaCl to give me 199RA, estimated SRM 22-26. My mash actually came out at around 5.6, so I had to add a little more calcium to acidify it down to 5.2 That said, I finally got a good stout!

Moral of the story, I wouldn't start with an incredibly high amount of alkalinity. Give yourself 150-200 (tops) RA. You can always add more alkalinity with chalk or baking soda.

[Chupa LaHomebrew]

Well, I didn't get these replies by the time I mashed in so I went with what I outlined in the first message on mineral additions. Maybe next time I will just go with a Dublin water profile.

It would be a lot easier if I had a real pH meter I guess. I don't trust ColorpHast strips for anything after seeing some of the results compared to a pH meter.

Anyway, the wort tastes really good. If what AJ is saying is correct, then either I didn't listen to the water shows well enough, or John Palmer did not really outline how to use the water spreadsheet well enough. Can anyone shed some light on that?

[ajdelange]

In order to try to get a handle on what is going on here I looked back through my brewing records and here is what I found for 7 beers over a range of styles/colors. I can't do a tabbed table so this is going to be a little difficult to read:

Style; Color; Spreadsheet RA; Actual RA; Mash pH; pH Adjustment

ESB; 22; (146 - 205); 36; 5.36; HCl;
Pils; 7.9; (-26 - 33; 16; 5.41; Sauermalz;
Kölsch; 4.3; (-70 - -11); 5; 5.50; Sauermalz;
Vienna; 10.8; ( 9 - 68); -0.7; 5.33; Sauermalz;
Stout; 64.7; (667 - 726); 36; 5.55; None;
Fest; 15.2; ( 63 - 122); 5; 5.42; None;
Stout; 84.5; (909 - 967); 36; 5.54; None

The first item on a line is the style followed by the color (measured on the finished beer), then the RA range recommended by the spreadsheet followed by the actual RA of the water as it went into the mash tun followed by the mash pH and finally anything I did to adjust pH in the mash tun. Where sauermalz is indicated at least part of it went into the grist with more being added in the mash tun if necessary.

Only in one case (the Kölsch) did the actual RA of the water used to brew the beer fall into the range recommended by the spreadsheet. In the case of the two stouts the spreadheet recommendations are absurd. It is unlikely that you would find water with these levels of of RA (the minimum amount of salt you can add to DI water to get an RA of 667 is 1075 mg/L NaHCO3 which clearly excedes the 1000 mg TDS recommendation of the major world water quality certifying agencies and brings sodium to 294 mg/L) and anyone who attempted to brew with such water would have his work cut out for him.

The obvious conclusion is that this part of the spreadsheet needs to be re-examined. I won't argue that there isn't a correlation between beer color and the RA of the water it is brewed from but the correlation is weak indeed (the two batches of stout I've listed came out at 64 and 84 using water with the same RA). I have "designed" lots of beers over the years and done it in lots of different ways but color has never been an input parameter. The nature of the water is dictated by the style not the color.

As I said, I have seen many people on this forum post things like "I want to brew a stout with 50 SRM so I need 488 - 547 RA." You don't! Arthur Guiness never brewed a stout with water with that level of RA (because Dublin water isn't half that carbonaceous) and neither should you.

There is tremendous appeal in being able to start with a single parameter (the color) and work your way through water adjustment and grist composition from that but brewing isn't that simple. A much better approach (IMO) is to learn as much as you can about the beer you want to brew including what a typical grain bill looks like, what kind of water it is brewed with and, especially, what kind of adjustments, if any, were made to water or mash to control mash pH. If your water is at all like what is traditionally used just brew the beer with your existing water and see how it turns out i.e. check mash pH and the quality of the finished beer. This is, effectively, what the brewers who invented the styles did. They, of course, did not have pH meters so their pH measurement was solely in terms of the quality of the finished beer and the yield for a given amount of malt. If the addition of another 1% of sauermalz made a lager better then the brewery would add that extra 1% on successive brews and probably add 1/4% more to see if it got better still. When additional sauermalz stopped improving the beer they would back off. They could do this because they brewed the same beer from the same materials over and over again. You can't (or proably don't want to) do that but you can buy a pH meter for under $100 and it's not a bad little unit as far as I can see.

If there is a pH problem with the beer brewed with your untreated water you will know about it right away when you check mash pH and can take corrective action on the spot. Add lactic acid or calcium salts if it's too high (most likely) or chalk if it's too low. Now you have saved your beer the second part of the problem is to see whether the means you used to control pH detriment the beer. If hops are harsh back off on sulfate etc.

If you, as part of the informing yourself process, read Dr. Lewis's monograph on stout you will find that stouts are brewed with waters with a wide range of mineral content so you ought to be able to come up with a good one without mineral addition. If you want to emulate the water of a stout producing city there are ways to do this. Dublin water (at least per Lewis's description) is pretty much devoid of anything but calcium and magnesium bicarbonate. A very close emulation of this profile (Na 1; Mg 1.9; Ca 80: Cl 1; SO4 5; and assuming that when he says carbonate is 5.45 mval that means the alkalinity is 5.45 mval) can be had by adding 0.07 gram of calcium chloride, 3 mg of sodium chloride, 1.62 gram of magnesium hydroxide, 0.025 gram gypsum, 0.45 gram epsom salt, 7.45gram chalk and 0.133 gram sodium bicarbonate to 10 gallons of DI water but you will have to bubble CO2 through the water to get the magnesium hydroxide and chalk to dissolve and lower the pH to 7.

If you say "OK - that sounds like a lot of trouble. Where do I get magnesium hydroxide? I just want my soft water to resemble Dublin's because I want a Guiness-like stout." then you can see that you are pretty much barred from adding gypsum or calcium chloride because Dublin water (taken Lewis as gospel) is low on chloride and sulfate. You would be limited to adding some chalk which would not dissolve until you went into the mash tun unless you bubble CO2 to dissolve it. Adding chalk and letting the roast malt acids liberate the calcium will get some calcium into your mash for sure but the pH will probably be higher than you want.

OTOH if London stouts are more to your liking you can (again taking Lewis's London water profile as truth) add chloride or sulfate as these are present at apprecuably higher (18 and 58 mg/L respectively) levels.

If all this seems complicated that's because it is. The only way to get a handle on it is experience and that's a good thing because it means you will have to brew and drink a lot of beer.

[Chupa LaHomebrew]

AJ, thanks for the detailed response. I can tell this is a subject that you are passionate about, and I do understand your post. I appreciate your approach to pH adjustment, in that it is not so much about pre-empting the mash pH with salts, but seeing where your pH is and then adjusting. That makes perfect sense.

I think the base of the problem here is that I don't trust my ColorpHast strips to give even an approximate pH reading, which means at some point I will probably want to go to a digital pH meter. I've read some stuff on other forums about ColopHast strips are typically off (low) by as much as .3 pH. So, I took my pH strips in to the brewery that I intern at to check them against their pH meter. This was on the brewday for a stout, so keep in mind that the wort color is dark and that probably influenced the color assessment. On the mash pH, the colorpHast strips read within .1 of the pH meter. However, on the last runnings, , when the wort was much more clear, the ColorpHast strips were a FULL PH off of the pH meter (IIRC, the last runnings were around 5.6 but the ColorPhast strips were showing 6.6!). That was the last time I will ever trust pH strips to give even an approximate pH reading.

I have a question for John Palmer, hopefully he will be able to give a little bit more insight on the issue of RA of water used for dark beers. What do you do when formulating salt additions for a Stout, or any dark beer for that matter? Do you go with the sometimes very high RA that is recommended by the spreadsheet, and if so, how what form of carbonate would you use to achieve that? I feel that this is a very important subject for the BN, since so many people have heard the water episodes of Brew Strong and come to the same conclusions as I have. Thanks in advance! I understand there may be different approaches to water adjustment, but it seems like we should be able to find some common ground here.