Version 2.0 of Palmer's Residual Alkalinity Spreadsheets

[TimmyR]

My limited experience with John's spreadsheet after much reading of AJ's posts, listening the the Water-Ganza 4X and reading several articles re: water and now digesting Noonan's New Brewing Lager, has been to try and make the least amount of changes I can to my water (I have 2 water reports that are pretty close) to get the RA in the ballpark of the predicted SRM or attempt to match a known brewing water profile (e.g. Tasty's mineral profile he builds from scratch for his APA).

So far I have been really happy with the results. I use narrow-band pH strips (is that the right term?) to test my mash pH and have consistently been around 5.2-5.4 from what I can tell. I batch sparge and feedback on my beers has been solid from neighbors (of course), competition and the BN cast (APA comparison 001 vs 007).

Not sure if that helps or not, but that is where I am with the spreadsheet. I actually like the other spin-off of John's spreadsheet that calculates kettle additions for you based on sparge water.

I have a feeling I will get another level of understanding this Fall at Siebel when I attend their Concise Course.

[acepilot]

Remember, this spreadsheet is all about arm waving. You use the Color of the final beer to estimate how much alkalinity is required for the mash pH. Stronger beers of the same color would have more aciidity and therefore coul tolerate a higher RA, than a weaker beer.
I use the Morey calculation for color btw.
Using the weighted average of Lovibond of the malts is not recommended because of the way that SRM is actually measured. Dark beers have to be heavily diluted to allow light to pass thru them for the spectrophotometric test. Again, I use the Morey method. I guess I should have mentioned that in the Instructions...
John

OK, run all this shit by me one more time. If I'm brewing a beer that will have an estimated SRM rating of say 15L, but my mash tun will only contain say Pale Ale Malt at about 3L, with the remaining "SRM" coming from all other grains that have been steeped, should I adjust the mash water to be suitable for an SRM of 3L or the 15L? I would think adjust for 3L....

Baffled in Bloomer

[ajdelange]

Remember, this spreadsheet is all about arm waving.

That is a very key phrase which so many chose to ignore. What it means is that you can use the spreadheet's color calculations to give you a rough idea as to what sort of beers might have traditionally been brewed with a water of given alkalinity/hardness balance.

You use the Color of the final beer to estimate how much alkalinity is required for the mash pH.

"Required" is a very unfortunate choice of words here.

Stronger beers of the same color would have more aciidity and therefore coul tolerate a higher RA, than a weaker beer.

"Tolerate" is a much better way of putting it but the statement is still iffy because the color tends to come from the malts that produce acidity. So a strong beer with a pound of roast barley in it would have about the same color as a weak beer with a pound of roast barley in it and the roast barley would contribute the same amount of acid to both.

I use the Morey calculation for color btw.

This implies that the SRM/RA fit was derived from calculated color and RA values and not from measured data. This makes it even squishier. I have tried some fits to measured color and find a slope 1/7 th of what is in the Palmer model.

Using the weighted average of Lovibond of the malts is not recommended because of the way that SRM is actually measured. Dark beers have to be heavily diluted to allow light to pass thru them for the spectrophotometric test.

It's true that dark beers are diluted in making the SRM measurement but that has little to do with the validity of the model. Beer's law does (in all my experience) hold for beer and thus you can dilute as much as you want and still get a good color reading. Where the method of adding Lovibond ratings fall down is
1) The colors specified for the individual malts are for Congress Wort. In your brewing you are not making Congress wort. You are making it the way you make it. Decoctions, extra long boils, thick mashes, direct fire vs steam, bicarbonate content ... all change the color appreciably.
2) It is not clear what the "official" relationship between SRM and Lovibond is. Taking what is on Weyermann's website as gospel they are about the same at low color levels (the parameters in the SRM definition were chosen to insure a good match between the two scales for light beers) but differ appreciably as color deepens.


[quote = "acepilot"]OK, run all this shit by me one more time. If I'm brewing a beer that will have an estimated SRM rating of say 15L, but my mash tun will only contain say Pale Ale Malt at about 3L, with the remaining "SRM" coming from all other grains that have been steeped, should I adjust the mash water to be suitable for an SRM of 3L or the 15L? I would think adjust for 3L....
[/quote]

The best thing you can do is forget that you ever heard about a tie-in between SRM and RA. If you are brewing something like an ESB (about 15 SRM IIRC) you should think about what Chiswick water might be like and, if you do anything at all to your water, try to get something that is generally like Chiswick's. But then you don't know what they do to Chiswick water to produce Fullers. They very probably add acid to get mash pH into the right range and they may decarbonate the water before brewing with it. So when you adjust to emulate Chiswick water you are actually trying to emulate conditions that might have pertained at the time ESB was originally developed. To make a decent ESB all you have to do is get some RO water and add a tsp of calcium chloride to 5 gallons of it. A tsp of gypsum is optional and should be used if the resulting beer is more to your liking with it included.

[craigevo]

Whilst we don't know what Fullers did in the past, we do know some of the things they are doing recently by looking at their intro to brewing document on their website.

It may be just a general guide for apprentice brewers, but it may well suggest that they probably use acid for ph control and maybe salts for both ph and flavour (?) Some interesting snippets:

"Water Treatment -removal of hardness by heating & acid addition"
"Direct Flavour Effects -Na+sweet (salty in excess) / Mg2+bitter, sour / Fe3+metallic /Cl-fullness / S04 2-astringency / K+ salty" interesting they consider sulfate astringent rather than hop enhancing .
Indirect flavour effects -yeast requirements / pH / enzymes during mashing Keep calcium >150ppm. Four times more calcium than malt oxalate required so we can get a reference to their minimum calcium level here and note that they consider its pH modifying power at least a bit interesting.
Bicarbonate more influential at raising pH than calcium at lowering
High bicarbonate highwortpH due to removal of H+
Calcium reacts with malt protein to reducewortpH / increased run-off rate / increased extract recovery / increased TSN & FAN / precipitation of oxalate

[Hop]

After a year or so of using various water spreadsheets, I've come to a few conclusions and have changed the way I brew a bit. First, most of the time the water spreadsheets are more effort than they are worth if you try to get things perfect. All of them do some hand-waving, and all of them are wrong sometimes. They also don't always agree with each other.

There are now a few things that I do with my water depending on what beer I'm brewing:

- Add specific salts to taste. Rather than care what "authentic" water is for a style, I decide how I want a beer to taste. If I want it to be malty, sweet, and round, I'll add some chloride and sodium. If I want it to be more hoppy and crisp, I add some sulfate.
- I either start with distilled/RO water and build from there, or I start with spring water (50 cents a gallon) and leave it be or adjust as necessary.
- I monitor the mash pH. I either add a little salt to get it back in line or, sometimes, I just mash longer and get good results.

It ended up just being extra work for me to use the spreadsheets to try to predict what was going to happen in the mash tun, and I'd end up adjusting almost every mash anyway. Ultimately, I discovered that it's just more efficient to not plan and adjust during the mash, then record what I did for future batches.

What would be useful, I think, would be a list of beer styles and common additions of common salts to make a good one of that style, assuming distilled/RO water. As ajdelange said, you have no idea what a brewery does to their water, so just reproducing a city's water isn't necessarily going to get you the characteristics you want in your beer.

When all is said and done, I've brewed multiple identical (as far as that is possible) beers using store-bought spring water and spending hours figuring out the perfect water. Ultimately, most people can't even tell the difference. For people who can, there was a slight preference toward the one I spend hours agonizing over the water recipe for. Your mileage may vary, but don't beat yourself up about making perfect water if it's confusing or frustrating.

[TimmyR]

Well summarized AJ. I have found at home the key is taste. My APA improved radically when I changed the brewing salt additions since my water seems to favor somewhat darker beers and a lower chloride-to-sulfate ratio really made the hop bitterness stand out. My American Brown seems a little harsh with the same water profile as my APA and I am going to back off the gypsum to see what happens. It is all such an iterative process dependent on taste and perception.

One of the nuggets I pulled from a recent class was this simplification of the the 3 general steps to water adjustment
1) Add calcium salts to water to meet requirement for brewing
2) Add salts as needed to match beer style
3) Adjust pH to accommodate alkalinity by adding food grade acid (e.g. phosphoric acid)

I also finally spent a few dollars on a pH meter to at least see what is happening in my wort when I mash so I can stop looking at the same color green on all my pH strips.

[alanzo]

1) Add calcium salts to water to meet requirement for brewing
2) Add salts as needed to match beer style
3) Adjust pH to accommodate alkalinity by adding food grade acid (e.g. phosphoric acid)

So, basically, put all your salts for a 6 gallon batch into the mash and then adjust with acid? Is that apposed to, say, putting the appropriate amount of salts into the strike and sparge water?

[TimmyR]

That summary is a simplification of water adjustment from a very broad view. HOW you accomplish your water adjustment will likely vary by your system and process. I still think from a big picture, it is exactly what we do. I do not use food-grade acid to adjust my mash, but have had the good fortune to spend a day in a local brewery with the assistant brewer and that is exactly what he did. Mineral salts and phosphoric acid were added to the mash while he doughed-in and then he check the pH shortly thereafter.