Final beer PH too low

[Charlie]

I would take a hard look at your water. A lot of people use RO or "Spring Water" out of the grocery store without ever considering what minerals it might or might not contain.

I am using an RO system because my local tap water is shit for brewing, but I add minerals to reproduce an "ideal" profile for the style that I am brewing. I don't add minerals to just the mash, I treat the whole volume of water, both mash and sparge. That's not always easy because CaSO4, CaOH(2) and CaCl2 don't like to dissolve in RO water. So I dissolve them in carbonated water I make in a spare corny in my kegerator and add them to the mixing tank.

One poster said that his RO water was pH 8. That should never be the case. Pure water (zero ions) should be exactly pH 7.0, but will be slightly more acidic (about pH 6.8 ) due to absorption of CO2 which creates carbonic acid (H2CO3).

A lot of people think that their water is bad for brewing when it really isn't. If you think it is I would encourage you to send a sample to Ward Labs (or similar) to get an actual analysis, and then compare it to known good brewing water profiles.

Note: I am not an employee of Ward Labs or any other water analysis laboratory.

Charlie

[brewinhard]

One poster said that his RO water was pH 8. That should never be the case. Pure water (zero ions) should be exactly pH 7.0, but will be slightly more acidic (about pH 6.8 ) due to absorption of CO2 which creates carbonic acid (H2CO3).

Charlie

RO water is not as pure as distilled. Distilled water should have a pH of 7, not always the case with straight RO which can have some dissolved solids in it, many times sodium, Na.

[Charlie]

RO water is not as pure as distilled. Distilled water should have a pH of 7, not always the case with straight RO which can have some dissolved solids in it, many times sodium, Na.

Well, yes and no.

Distilled water theoretically gets rid of all the minerals, but any volatiles (both organic and inorganic) and steam distillable organics will come over. When I was doing glucose 6-phosphate assays we distilled the house distilled water (stills, like RO units, are not all created equal). But there's a lot of dynamics that go into distilled water, like how often you charge and change the pot. I hasten to add that lab scale RO units were not then available.

In 2005 we got a Millipore Milli-Q water system. We fed it with house distilled (output quality unknown) that had been run through Culligan corny size fiberglass tanks of some kind (output about 12 mΩ / cm), and it routinely produced 18.2 mΩ / cm (ultrapure) water! It produced 4L in about 2 minutes and the cartridges never seemed to go bad.

I'm pretty sure that 18.2 mΩ / cm is better than anything you're going to do with a still, but we haven't considered haloacetic acids or endotoxins, so none of this should be taken as an endorsement of either method.

Charlie