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Water is a particular passion of mine. Uh trying to demystify it for people.
I really consider water to be um that final frontier, the one that can take your beers from being good to being
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great. Once you understand how water works, how water chemistry works, and you can start taking into account.
Um and it's it really there's there's some chemistry, but it really is a big picture kind of thing. Once you understand the ballpark, you can start
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thinking, considering it, taking into account in your brewing, and your beers will really improve. Um, beer pH, it's like tuning the radio dial.
You know, you you're trying to get that station to come in nice and clear. Same thing with your beer.
When you get the pH of the beer right, you better express
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the flavors of the beer to your pallet. The one the the example I always use is spaghetti sauce.
You know, you can buy spaghetti sauce in the jar and it's very bland. You know, you make bland spaghetti.
You go to a restaurant or,
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you know, somebody that says, "Oh, this is very fresh, homemade from scratch." And it's the most acidic spaghetti sauce you've ever had. You know, it's etching your teeth.
Of course, it's very bright and tomatoy, but that's about all you can taste. So in between there is that that sweet spot is the right pH that
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where you you get some acidity, you get a rich tomato flavor and you get all the herbs and spices that are in that sauce being expressed. It's not bland, it's not too sharp, it's just right.
And the same thing with beer. When you get the beer pH right, that's when the beer
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tastes the best. And the beer pH is directly affected by your mash pH.
And your mash pH is directly affected by your water and your grain bill. The the beer pH, which best expresses the beer's
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flavors, is driven by the mash pH, and that's driven by the water chemistry and the grain bill. Um, and whenever you're talking about brewing and brewing chemistry and water chemistry, it's very easy to get wrapped up in what you think
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the rules are and or calculations say. And you know, this is not a it's not a perfect science.
I mean, it's there's a lot of art in brewing. And one thing that I want to emphasize is whenever I'm talking about you know
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these relationships um you know there there there are rules which are meant to enforce the guidelines which are derived from the principles that suffice until you really understand what you're doing. And so uh we're going to lay out some rules.
We're going to lay out some guidelines. But within that, you've got
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to you've just got to brew and experience it and play with it until you develop that understanding and that feel for the results. And that would be your best guide.
So, um, a lot of good brewing software out there. Um, Beer Smmith, uh, Pro Mash, um, Beer Tools,
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there's there's a lot of good software that'll help you. Um, I have a very nice I have a spreadsheet that I have on my website how tob brew.com in the section 3 chapter 15 that will help you with water.
But again, it's just a tool and
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there you can be led astray by the calculations in that spreadsheet. You know, they may tell you you need an alkalinity of 400 to brew this Russian Imperial Stout.
You don't you don't need to go that high, but that's because it is a a literal calculation. It's a very,
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you know, linear calculation and and brewing being a natural science is not strictly linear. So that's one of my final caveats is uh don't always pay strict attention to the rules.
Get the big picture, you know, and use your experience and judgment to produce the
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best beer. Why water matters?
Well, like I said, it's the final frontier. It's the it's the 10% that'll take your beer from being good to being great.
Um, and the players in water chemistry are your
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brewing salts. Um, calcium, magnesium, and alkalinity affect the pH.
That's that's how you express your flavors. Sulfate, chloride, and sodium to some extent are your flavor enzyme or flavor ions.
The sulfate accentuates hot
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bitterness. Chloride accentuates the malt character.
And your sulfate to chloride ratio kind of determines is that beer going to be malt forward or is it going to be hop forward. So if the sulfite chloride ratio is 1:2 um that
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means the malt character is dominant and you're going to get a nice round soft rich malt character out of that beer. Um and notice we're talking ratios, you know, not not 50 parts per million to 100 parts per million necessarily.
It can be 10 to 20 or 40 to 80, but you
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know, it's a ratio. Um, and likewise, if the sulfate to chloride is 2:1, hot bitterness is dominant, and that's, you know, good for IPAs.
In fact, for IPAs, um, Colin Kaminsky of uh, Downtown Joe's in Napa, he's done a
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lot of work with the sulfate to chloride ratio. and he's found that on a really, you know, clean IPA, he can go up to 9 to one without that beer tasting mineraly.
And that's one thing you've got to watch when you're adjusting your water with brewing salts is that you
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don't produce mineral water and mineral beer. I've had some like that.
They're just, you know, they're not as good as they could have been. You do, you do get that sensation of drinking mineral water in the background of the beer.
So, you don't want to go overboard. Um, I would
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say in terms of total sulfate on a 9:1 ratio, you don't want to be over 3 to 400 parts per million of sulfate. This is another kind of point that I'm not sure I think I get to it later in the talk, but just because Burton on Trent
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says they've got, you know, hardness at 300 and sulfate at 500 and so on and that's where this bass ale came out of or, you know, this hop the hoppy style came out of. Those brewers didn't like brewing with that water.
They we've been
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as brewers, we've been changing our brewing water for the last 300 years at least, if not longer. Um so you know don't get stuck on trying to emulate a particular brewing city.
You're often going to be doing too much. So um one
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thing and so later in talk one thing I'll talk about is uh you know you can use that as a guide as a as a potential goal or target but you got to understand when you're close enough and just to leave it alone. So anyway, um when adding salts for RA or residual
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alkalinity or pH adjustment, um calcium chloride is good for your molter your styles. Calcium sulfate is good for your hoppier styles.
That's because you're you you're changing that chloride to sulfate to chloride ratio
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with those salts. That brings up a great point.
Whenever you're monkeying with your water, you need to have a water report so you know what you're starting with. Um, you know, here in Minneapolis, the water's the water is pretty soft, what we call soft.
Um, it's surface water. It doesn't have a whole lot of
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dissolved mineral in it. If you go further north or further west, you get into um, groundwater sources, you know, limestone aquifers, then you can have very alkaline, very hard waters.
Hard water by definition contains high
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amounts of calcium and magnesium and also iron and manganese and other you know metals. Those are your cat ions.
Um hard water can range from five the pH can range from 5 to 10. Um hard water is
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good for brewing. So often you get used to hearing oh you know this this water that we're brewing with it's very hard so I have to change it.
You know it's too and and actually hard water is good for brewing. It's the it's the metal ions that you want.
Um it's the
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alkalinity that you don't want. The bottom line when looking at water for hardness is you're looking for calcium levels in the at least 50 parts per million.
100 parts per million is great. Um 200 is probably a little too high and
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anything over 200 is probably way too high. But you know, at least 50.
And I I today when we brewed the Oak Mild, we we ended up with a uh we did some calcium additions and end up with a calcium concentration of 80 parts per million
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for that beer. Soft water does not contain high amounts of calcium and magnesium or other cat ions.
um Pilson, Portland, um places where you have surface water or melt water sources, um
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you don't have the dissolved minerals and um the pH, you know, the pH of soft water can be 7 to 10. You're not probably not going to get down to the fives.
Lower pH is driven by the water hardness. Um but the r the the pH the
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water can still be low in hardness and high in alkalinity. When it's high in alkalinity, that's when you go above 7 to 10 pH.
And here's a very important take-home. Soft water can be alkaline, but alkaline water is not necessarily soft.
So, if you see a water report says
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the water pH is eight, it tells you really nothing about the levels of hardness and alkalinity in the water. All that eight tells you is that balance.
You can have a pH, you know, a pH8 water that is very soft or it can be
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very hard depending. Um, what does water pH mean?
You look at your water test report and you see pH 8 and 1/2 or 8 or nine. What does it mean?
Not much. And I like I like this picture because you see the little girl and the the big guy on the end of the teeter totter.
Little
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girl's alkalinity. Alkalinity dominates your water chemistry.
You know, you can have water that is just coming out of the tap. You think, you know, you see some scale, you see um on on the pipes or, you know, you taste it and it tastes mineraly and you think, well, this is
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hard water. I need to soften it.
Well, you soften it. You take out what existing hardness there is there, but you leave all the alkalinity behind.
And it's the alkalinity that you're always struggling against when you're brewing, cuz that's what's going to pull your mash pH higher than it needs to be or
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that you want it to be. So, what does water softening do?
Well, salt-based water softeners exchange sodium ions for the calcium and magnesium. So, as I say, you're throwing the baby out with a bath water.
You want the calcium in your brew. Um, and you don't
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want the alkalinity, but typical water softening leaves all that alkalinity there and just takes away the calcium you need. Mash pH.
U, this is one thing that How to Brew may not have been made terribly clear. the you're looking
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you're looking for a consistent mash pH. Whatever style of beer you're brewing, it should be 5.4 to 5.8 when you measure it at room at room temperature.
That is letting that wart sample cool down from the mash temperature to room temperature, testing it with a little pH
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strip or a handheld pH meter. If it's at room temp, you're looking from 5.4 to 5.8.
If you're at mash temp, the difference in temperature creates a difference in uh chemical activity which causes the pH to be higher or a lower
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5.1 to 5.5. I when you when we say higher at chemical activity um the pH scale is actually the anti-log of the hydrogen ion concentration.
So it's a lower number but yet higher activity of
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hydrogen. So that's that's the temperature effect.
A difference of.3 pH units according to temperature. The pH test papers are made to be used at room temperature.
That's where they're calibrated at. They're they're indicator the indicators that are in the test paper are made to work
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at room temp, 70° or so. Um calibration solutions, same way.
When you calibrate your your pH meter, those are made to work at 70. If you get the temperature correction factors from the manufacturers, you can see that like at
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at mash temperatures, you're off by, you know, half of half a pH unit or more. PH meters with with ATC or active temperature compensation, they give the actual pH at the measurement temperature.
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And so if you're if you have a pH meter that has ATC in it, you know, comp temperature compensation, um you can stick that in the mash. It's not terribly good for the probe, but they they're some of them are designed to take that use in the temperature and
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you can So you're measuring at temp, then you're looking for the 5.1 to 5.5 range. Um, if you allow that to cool down to like 100 or 120, then you got to kind of think, well, maybe halfway between room temp and mash temperature.
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And so, I mean, I'm looking at somewhere in between that that.3 difference, whatever that is. Um, I don't I don't have a a good conversion curve for that.
Um, nobody's published data on what the chain what what uh what those numbers
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should be at different temperature. We just know that at room temp 54 to 58, mash temp 51 to 55.
So pick one or the other. What is alkalinity?
If you look in the upper left, you see the CO2. It's coming from the
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atmosphere. As carbon dioxide dissolves into water, um you get what we call aquous CO2 there on the or on the left.
And um as a certain percentage of that will uh convert from uh aquous CO2 that
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is CO2 that is associated with water atoms to being actually hydrated and when it actually hydrated that's when you form carbonic acid H2 CO3 and even there that hydronic uh carbonic
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acid is a very small percentage like 2% or less So when we talk about carbonic acid, we're really talking about this situation of hydrated carbon dioxide and a small percentage of carbonic acid. Um
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just for clarity, I don't know it it not not doesn't make a whole lot of difference to this talk. Anyway, so a car um carbon or carbonate comes from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
It also comes from the ground where you have calcium carbonate or dolamite or
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any of other calcium carbonate bearing uh minerals that dissolve and there you get this the the calcium ion coming off and when you go into the water and you get carbonate CO3
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CO3 two should be three anyway CO3 minus two um and you have Three forms that carbonate exists in water. You have the carbonate, the bicarbonate and the aqueous carbon dioxide carbonic acid
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forms. Three forms that it exists in.
Next slide will show us the relative percentages depending on the pH of the solution uh or the water. Let's say we're at let's say we're here at 8.3,
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you know, which is a fairly typical drinking water kind of pH. What this chart says is that 98% of the carbonate species in equilibrium
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at pH8.3 is the bicarbonate HO3 minus1. If we are at a higher pH like 12 then this becomes a very low percentage and the carbonate is the highest percentage
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of the of the three forms over here when we get into the mash and this gray bar is the mash pH range. Um again bicarbonate it's HCO3 goes away and most of it transforms to
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the aquous carbon dioxide form. The kicker is that these reactions occur very slowly.
So if you add um high alkalinity water to the mash, it's not going to instantly transform from
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carbonate to bicarbonate to carbonic acid. It's going to be a very slow transition over several hours, if not days.
Um, and um that's one reason when you do calcium
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carbonate additions to your mash, chalk additions, that um it's it doesn't go into solution very well. it doesn't dissolve very well and you don't see the mash pH response from calcium carbonate
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additions that you would expect from the spreadsheets and the the brewing softwares because even though that's what happens, it happens slowly. So, I I throw that out there and I'm sure I've confused several people, but
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um just be aware of that background info. The the mash is a weak acid, weak base situation.
So, um the the reactions occur slowly. I
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unfortunately I don't have good good data or information on exactly how slow or what that rate is. Um it's just that you know you look at I've talked to water chemistry professors that say oh yes this should happen you know that
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this is the equilibrium you know uh form this should happen and then I talked to notable brewing scientists like Charlie Bamfor that you know have the experience of of knowing this info and then you know testing and seeing it occur in the
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mash and know and knowing what's going on and say yeah it doesn't happen that fast you know you add it And the the the math says that you should get two equivalents of of hydrogen ions from this addition. And yet when you measure
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the response, the pH response of of an addition, you only see one equivalent worth. So um I think in other words, you add calcium carbonate to the mash, the calcium comes off, you got the carbonate that should be plus two, but you only
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seem to get plus one activity out of it. Um there's Kai Troyster has done some nice experimental work in the last couple years um where he did a bunch of titrations with different additions and different chemistries in the mash in actual mashes test mashes and that was
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what he observed um and it it makes sense from my own brewing experience um and my own uh uh trials and so on experiments I've run but it doesn't really um jive with what the the water
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chemist industry books say they say it should be instantaneous but it seems to be the connect seem to be much slower. Beer and mash and beer pH is the net effect of the hardness the alkalinity and the grain bill.
The grain bill having some natural acidity that you
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know helps is is a player in this in this game. Here's where we talk about residual alkalinity.
This is alkal alkalinity that is uh remains after you've started the mash. certain equations have occurred and I'll show
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you those and you're re with the calcium and magnesium in the water and you're left what we call residual alkalinity. The the equation for that is residual alkalinity equals alkalinity that is the total alkalinity is calcium carbonate that you see on your water report minus
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the calcium uh hardness divided by 3 1/2 plus the magnesium hardness divided by 7. The unit for this equation is millie equivalents per liter which is not the same as parts per million.
Parts per
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mill is raw concentration. Millie equivalents per liter is parts per million divided by the activity uh the the equivalence number of equivalents in that atom or molecule as the case may be.
So that's why you have the little
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convert the uh factors underneath there. the u magnesium is half as effective at uh pH change as calcium is.
Higher high residual alkalinity means that you know this water that you're brewing with has
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a high p higher pH more alkalinity than hardness and it's going to pull that mash pH toward six. To counteract that you brew a darker beer one with more intrinsic al uh acidity because of the dark grains.
So high residual alkalinity
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means you brew dark beers. Low residual alkalinity means that you brew light beers.
I talk about this as you know balancing a triangle. You know pick any triangle.
You've got some amount of water alkalinity, some amount of water hardness and you've got some grain bill and where that where those values
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balance is going to be your mash pH. And what you want and that mash pH may be 4.9, it may be 5.8, it may be 5.3.
You want it to be in the 5.3 range and not, you know, higher or lower. This is the
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equation uh generated by my friend AJ Dang. Um but it it it uh diagrams the that equation you see there across the top.
There's at least one form of it where um the calcium and magnesium
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combine with the malt phosphates and uh carbonates to generate calcium phosphate and carbon dioxide and water. and two moles of hydrogen ions.
And that is what
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drives. So you take, you know, you have your water at pH8, you have your grain bill, you put them together and create the mash, and then you're looking at a mash pH of, you know, 55 that it's those two moles of hydrogen atoms over there on the right that is
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causing that pH drop. That's that's where this is coming from is the calcium reacts with the malt phosphates um to generate a precipitate carbon dioxide water and two moles of hydrogen ions.
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Woohoo. The relationship between um tannin extraction from dark grains high pH does it you know when your when your mash pH gets above above 5.8 8 to 6 6.2
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somewhere in there. That's when you start pulling out the the tannins and the silicates from the grain husks.
Um you can count you can counteract that by reducing the temperature. You know if you if instead of being at 150 you drop that down to 100 or 120 you've also
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dropped that that the extraction uh activity of that water. Um, so your pH could still be, you know, six, but by dropping the temperature, you've decreased how much of the tannin you're getting out.
So yes, that's why co when you have very soft water and you want to
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brew a dark beer like this, uh, you can do cold extraction of your dark malts and then just add that wart to your boil and not really go through the higher temperature mash to reduce that impact. All right.
Well, this is the fun stuff.
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Uh back in uh oh geez 2007 I think it was I did a when NHC was in Denver I did a really neat experiment with a couple of guys where I just gave directions by long distance and they
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they did all the work and we we made two waters. We made a higher residual alkalinity water and a low residual alkalinity water.
And um the we then we brewed two recipes with the right water
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and and then brewed the same two recipes with the wrong water and compared the beer. So there you can see the residual alkalinity values.
One was minus 50 which is a very high hardness low alkalinity you know kind of residual alkalinity and that's intended for pale
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beers as I said uh higher than the 200 residual alkalinity that's intended for the dark beers and we brewed the stout both ways um the the end result when we tasted the beers was that the beers brewed with the one the the wrong
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residual alkaline water had a more one-dimensional flavor to them. Um, the ones that were were brewed with the right RA water for that style had a lot more complexity.
You could pick out different flavors. Here's the uh here's the pale ale recipe.
You know, uh
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nothing too fancy. Um you know, two row Vienna, some carropills, caramel 40.
Um couple of hop editions and uh you know, 41 IBUS, 1050, you know, California ale yeast, you know, just a pale ale. Um the
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next slide is the uh stout recipe. I think um this was a foreign extra stout and uh the it had a lot of you know dark dark chocolate, black malt, special roast, crystal 80, you know, roast
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barley, you know, pretty dark beer. Um the color calculates out to 45 SRM using the Mory equation.
Again, about the same OG, 1050, and about the same degree of bitterness as the pale ale. This was
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about 45 versus 41. But really, that's pretty ballpark um terms of bitterness.
Um and I I did it I wanted to keep those numbers near so that you know we could we weren't judging apples and oranges when it came time to tasting the beers and comparing
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them. So the pale ale with the over on the left you see the pale ale had with the residual alkalindia minus 50 um 1046 final gravity 109 apparent attenuation 80% mash pH was 55 right
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where we wanted it beer pH was 4 and a half okay we go over to the pale ale brewed with a high alkalinity water which would be uh an an RA of 200 is is pretty typical for people that are brewing with with groundwater. Um it's
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not that it's not that high in RA. And um you see the mash pH went from 5 1/2 to 6.1.
Beer pH went 4 1/2 to 4.7. Again, the the fermentation has a the yeast have a great deal of
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buffering effect in, you know, driving that pH down to mid fours or low fours in most beers. Um, but the diff so the difference between these two beers is only 02 pH units.
Yet when we were
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tasting the beers in in the in the room, every we tasted the uh the high alkalinity beer first and everybody said, "Oh yeah, this tastes like a you know a good hoppy bitter pale ale." And I said, "Okay, now try the second one."
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And I said, "What do you taste different?" Or and everybody agreed that the second beer you could you could differentiate between the malt flavors and the hop flavors. Uh there was where the first beer was onedimensional, the second beer had complexity.
You could differentiate differentiate the two
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characters in it. So it just a very small pH difference made a a big difference in taste.
Again, mash pH 5.4, beer pH 4.6. You brew it with the wrong water, uh you had a much lower pH 4.9
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and a and a beer pH of 4.2. You know, a little more little more difference there in the final beer pH.
Most water reports are the annual averages for the particular mineral. Um so you look at you know the calcium number for the year that could you know depending on the
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changes of the changes of the water source during the year you know so maybe during the summer they pull from the lakes during the winter they pull from wells or vice versa. Um that can have a significant effect on the the chemistry of that water.
Um, and so when you're
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looking at, you know, say classic brewing studies on the web, you know, you say, "Oh, here's the water analysis for Dortmund, you know, or here's the water analysis for um, uh, what's another Munich or, you know, one of the one of the classic brewing cities." You got to understand that that's probably
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an annual average and it may have occurred from, you know, five different wells in the area or, you know, you know, winter to summer source water variation. Use it as a use it as a guide.
Use it maybe as a you know just a kind of as a
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big picture, but don't try to match it because it really it's a very poor target to base your beer from because you don't know really know um what what the real brewing water was when they developed the style. So, when you're
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when you're trying to when you're trying to design a water for a recipe, you're you're going to brew a uh a brown ale. Let's say um don't get stuck on trying to match a particular brewing city's water.
Instead, say to yourself, I'm
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going to brew a brown ale. That means that, you know, the color is, you know, 20 25 and that has some that has some acidity to that grain bill.
So to balance that acidity in that grain bill, I'm going to want a a brewing water with a little higher residual alkalinity than
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I may have, you know, let's say we're here in Minneapolis. Minneapolis being low RA water, you may want to may want to bump up the alkalinity of the water, you know, for the for the for brown ale that you're brewing here.
Uh you would do that by adding calcium carbonate or
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sodium bicarbonate to get get the alkalinity up a little bit. you know, choose match the residual alkalinity to the color of the beer style.
That's your first guide. And it really is a guide.
You want to ballpark this stuff. Your second consideration is going to be the chloride to sulfate ratio.
You know, do
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you want that beer to be malt forward or do you want it to be hop forward? So when you're adding calcium or uh magnesium sulfate or calcium carbonate or you know whatever salt you're adding um look at the result of that salt
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addition and say am I am I increasing the chloride too much you know am I getting a a 2:1 chloride to sulfate ratio for this IPA well that's not what I want I want I want the sulfate to chloride I want the sulfate to be higher for a hoppy beer in my ongoing passion
31:50
for understanding in water. Um, Brewish Publications wanted they said we need to have a malts book, a hops book, water book, yeast book.
Yeast book is out there. Hops book is coming.
Uh, the water book was supposed to be ready for
32:06
this fall. And I worked hard all last fall and visited Sierra Nevada and New Belgium and a couple other breweries, you know, trying to assemble lots of source material.
and my co-author and I
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realized that we just didn't know enough about what we wanted to talk about. Um it's as soon as you as soon as you start digging at water, it gets really complex.
Um and and half of our struggle is trying to figure out, you know, how
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much chemistry do we present to the average brewer? Um we Brewers Publications of course wants a book that you know can cover any brewer both the advanced home brewer as well as a professional brewer.
Um and you know so
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professional brewers they may have more restrictions when it comes to changing their water to accommodate a particular recipe but they've also got more considerations on water treatment after brewing whereas the home brewer doesn't you know they just dump whatever they
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don't need. I mean, it's and some of the larger breweries, you know, Stone, Sierra Nevada, they've got to treat all of the water that they release.
Um, they can't have uh water with high biological oxygen demand or chemical oxygen oxygen
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demand going to the sewer and to the the city water treatment plant because they get fined for that. Um, it's too much too much treatment load.
Um, so what Colin and I have been doing is re researching, you know, these different water treatment methods, different
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source water treatment methods as well. Um, so we can put together a a comprehensive book.
In fact, the title for it is going to be water a comprehensive guide for brewers. And it's a guide and you know, we real quickly realized that we couldn't be the the last word in water chemistry.
It's
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much too complex. There's way too much stuff to cover.
Um but what we can do is cover a toz you know in in terms of a snapshot or you know over an all over overall picture you know here are your here are your options if you're trying
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to do source water treatment here are your options and and the relationships if you're trying to do recipe water adjustment here are your options for source for wastewater treatment and that that's where the book is going and we're still working on it. Uh thank you all
34:31
for coming. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you'all.
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Thanks. [Applause]