Water adjustments are one of the easiest things you could change in your process and make better beer. It feels like it is an overwhelming subject but I attempt to do a deep dive that is a simple approach to water that is approachable and actionable.
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Show Transcript (AI Driven so it will have errors)
Colter Wilson: Today, we’re going to do a deep dive on water chemistry. This is a place that you could easily jump into today and improve your beer, but when I’ve heard others talk about it, it gets really complicated really fast. And sometimes you don’t really know what people are talking about. So I’m going to attempt to make an approach today that is actionable as well as easy to understand today on homebrewing DIY
Welcome back to homebrewing DIY. The podcast that takes on the do it yourself aspect to homebrewing gadgets, contraptions and parts. This podcast covers it all. Today we’re going to do a deep dive into brewing water and how you can make adjustments today to improve your beer. . Not only that, we’re going to try to do it in a very simple minded approach that isn’t filled with a lot of jargon, so that hopefully you could listen to this show and start making adjustments to your water and make it something you could do today.
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So head over to homebrewing diy.beer. If you head over to our show notes of our show, I tend to like to D embed a Twitter poll into the show notes. Last week, I embedded a Twitter poll for . Asking if you brewed in a house or an apartment. I had 17 responses to that, which is pretty good for a Twitter poll.
But funny, I, I found that 77% of our listeners all brew in their house and only 23% brew from an apartment. So hopefully I’ve recruited a couple of people that are living in apartments thinking about homebrewing and possibly biting the bullet and taking the plunge that it is a hope of mine. We’ll see.
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It’s, it’s really exciting and fun for me. And we’ll talk about the results next week. Also, we have our new discord community, so if you head over to our website, homebrewing diy.beer, click on the menu item called join the discussion and it’ll take you over to our new discord server. It’s pretty fun. I have a lot of different topics that we’re talking about.
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Discussion it really about brewing big beers and barrel aging beers. Those were the two subjects of his show when he was on the podcast, and he’s going to do a live Q and a with any of our listeners, and it’s going to be a pretty fun day. So head over to the website, join the discussion, and hopefully we’ll see you at 7:00 PM on the 30th of April for our brewers Q.
And a. All right, so now I think we’re going to jump into our deep dive where we talk a bit about water chemistry.
well, and welcome back, and let’s just jump into our discussion. On why you would want to adjust your water. I think that’s actually the first question we should ask is why would you want to adjust your water? Well, the reason is, is that as homebrewers, we have to think about how we’re approaching our brewing in all reality.
I was listening, uh, last week to a talk online being given by large Ghoshal about farmhouse brewing, and trust me, I’m going to get back to water chemistry here. But he was having a discussion about the history of farmhouse brewing and really the hiss. It was really a deep dive into the history of brewing itself.
When we talk about the history of farmhouse brewing originally, if you think about brewing in general, it started out that way. It was all farmhouse brewing and then there was a time when they were able to isolate yeast and by isolating that yeast, it took a imagine if there, if brewing was a timeline.
There’s now a fork in that timeline and once. Yeast was able to be replicated and beers were then able to be replicated. You were able to then start to produce it at scale and it became a very industrial product in his story. The point he was trying to say is that as beer became an industrial product, farmhouse brewing kind of stepped, stayed the same, which I totally agree with, but I want to take a branch off of that because modern day homebrewing is actually a branch off of industrial brewing.
Right? So when we talk about American homebrewing, British home brewing, Australian home brewing, even German home brewing, it’s really people trying to replicate what big breweries are doing, or breweries or beers that you could buy at a store and trying to replicate those beers. Don’t get me wrong, there are people out there that harvest their own yeast in their house and have their own farmhouse styles.
Totally get that. That exists out there. But when we’re talking about water chemistry and the reasons why. We have to go back to that. We’re trying to replicate what you, the types of beers and styles that you get in it. In a commercial product. So for example, if I wanted to replicate a German lager, and I’m using very, very hard water, I’m limited to the types and styles of German lagers that are made with hard water.
For example, if I looking for something like a Czech Pilsner, which is made with a very, very soft water profile, has very, very little few or little minerals in it, then you’re trying to. Mimic that water profile to also replicate the style. And so really that is where water chemistry started. And so I wanted to take an approach today where when we’re thinking about water chemistry, I wanted to take an approach that was easy to get your head around.
And so I didn’t want to make it a. Complicated scientific discussion around the different ions that are created in water when you add different salts to them. I really wanted to talk about how if you buy a few different salts and a scale, you’re going to be able to then have all of the tools you need today to make better beer.
And so I’m probably not even gonna get into a deep conversation about parts per million or anything like that. I’m really trying to take a deep dive approach that is really approachable to a beginning homebrewer that may have just finished their first few fermentations. And so in that instance, water chemistry can feel like it’s overwhelming when really the subject is a lot easier and simpler than you think.
So if I were to start today, and this was my first attempt at doing water, where would I start? And I think that is the place we’ll start now. First thing you need to do is you have to get the type of water you’re starting with and what is your base? So there are, at least for me, I see four different approaches to figuring out how you’re going to approach your water if you’re going to make changes.
The first approach is the way that most homebrewers do it is they just take water out of the tap and they brew with it. No adjustment, no nothing. You’re just. Kind of going with the water you have and trying to make a beer style and seeing how it turns out. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that approach.
You’re going to make great beer, but you’re going to be limited into some of the styles that you can get when you’re talking about making amazing beers that are going to win competitions. Now, at that point, you’re going to have to really take a deep look at your water because it makes a huge difference when it comes to mimicking styles and trying to get.
The types of things out of your beer that you’re really looking to enhance. So let’s start with the ways that you could adjust it. So the first way you could do it is by starting with water profile of zero. So what do I mean by that? Distilled water, reverse osmosis water. These are waters that essentially have nothing in them.
They’re going to be pure water. They don’t have any salts in them. There’s no alkalinity in them in any way, and so therefore, they’re essentially starting with a blank slate. This is actually how I do water profiles still today. I use distilled water. I go down to. My local grocery store and I buy about eight gallons of distilled water, and that is my base for starting out.
And then from there I take my brewing software and I added the adjustments into my profile, trying to get the. This particular water profile that I’m looking for that is in line with that style of beer. We’ll get more into that, but that is one approach. The next approach would be to send your tap water off to a lab and have it analyzed and getting a readout of the different.
Parts per million of the salts that are in your tap water. Then you can input that base water profile into your brewing software, and it’s going to give you a Justments based on that. So you’re either going to adjust it up or down based on the Bayswater profile that you get from that lab analysis. That is also an easy way.
And it’s not super expensive. It’s a onetime fee of about 30 to $35 to get your water analyzed, but it does come with some caveats. One caveat is, is that if you have a water source that changes water supply throughout the year, and that is actually the case at my house. I have. A single reservoir that we normally get our water from, but in the summer they actually switched the water source and then my water profile out of my tap completely changes.
I will say that I live in Colorado. My water actually tastes really great. It’s great to brew with. I have brewed with it a couple of times, but for the most part, I still brew with distilled water. Another approach is to not actually get your water analyzed, just take it from the tap, but. Understanding the flavors that are enhanced in your water from tasting your own beer, and then just kind of adjusting your water profile based on maybe some things that you want to enhance.
Think of this, more of like cooking you’re going to season. The water in a way to bring out specific aspects of your beer. The reason water is so important when we think about it that way is that it does make up a majority of the material that your beer is made of. Considering that 99% of your beer is actually a water right, that’s probably.
Less than that, because if you have 6% alcohol, I guess it’s 6% of the entire makeup. But the point is, is that the number one ingredient when we talk about the volume in your beer is going to be water. So let’s talk about these different approaches and the pluses and minuses of each approach. The first approach that I want to talk about is let’s talk about just taking your tap water and making an adjustment.
But the first thing we should talk about even. Before that is the different types of salts that you’re going to use. The main salts that I think I use the most are going to be gypsum. And calcium chloride. The other ones are obviously straight normal salt like you would have as as table salt or canning salt.
The other salts you’re going to use are Epsom salts, which is more towards the magnesium site, and then you’re going to use baking soda. Uh, there’s also some other salts that are used if you look into different brewing softwares, but in all reality, the these, this set that I just mentioned are the ones that are used the most.
So examples would be the gypsum. Let’s start with that. That’s going to be your most. Known when it comes to talking about brewing salts. And the reason is, is that when IPA is first started being the big hit that they are today, Gypson really brings out the bitterness and hops that is, it does other things in beers.
But when we talk about what does it actually bring out in flavor profile that you could notice right off the bat, it’s going to be the bitterness of hops. So if you’re trying to make a more. Bitter beer. A example would be British beers and using things like an IPA bitter or an extra special bitter.
When you look at those tight styles of beer, they are very bitter, but they don’t have a lot of IB use and a lot of that reason has to do with that. Their water content has a lot of Gypson in it, and a lot of the breweries in in England actually add more gypsum to the already hard water that you get from London or other parts of England.
So the point is, is that these are great styles when you’re using gypsum. Another one that’s out there is calcium chloride. I think calcium chlorides getting a lot of buzz right now just because of the new England IPA. Calcium chloride also brings out a specific flavor and beer, and that one tends to be more towards the juiciness of hops, right?
So for example, let’s say I’m trying to make a beer that has a more juicy backbone versus a bitter backbone. I’m going to put more calcium chloride and pull back on the gypsum. That is a great approach to being able to enhance the flavors that you want and looking at water chemistry in a way to season the beer.
And so these are things that you can do when we’re talking about. Adding just your tap water and trying to pull out specific features of your beer in a way to try to bring out characters. So when you take the approach of starting with tap wire and just adjusting from there, and you don’t really know what the salt contents are, you’re kind of just juicing up particular areas of your water chemistry to bring out and enhance.
Particular characters that you want in the beer. So that is one approach. The next approach I would get is talk about is the starting with distilled water, which like I said, is the approach that I personally take. When you start with distilled water, you’re now looking at a process that. You start at zero, there is no salt in your water.
And from there you can build water from scratch. And for me, this was the easiest approach and two reasons why. Hey, it was easy to get my head around learning chemistry in general, when you’re, when you’re trying to learn all of this information, it kind of feels overwhelming. There’s a lot of parts per million in the calculators and there’s a ton of different water profiles.
For example, one of the big brewing calculators that I first started out with and. Highly recommend if you’re looking to start out looking at the Bruin water watering calculator. I’ll put the link to it in our notes for you to go and, and just jump into, it’s just a, uh, an Excel spreadsheet. It’s a really well done Excel spreadsheet.
You have to be able to turn the macros on, cause it’s pretty complex when you look at it. But it has. Certain fields that are the only fields that you can put information into. And in doing so, you’re going to be able to then make those adjustments. So the first thing you’re going to notice when you jump into one of these tools and start making those adjustments is that it’s going to ask you to put in your grain bill.
And this is really important because your grain actually. Contributes to the overall pH of your beer. That is another target you’re shooting for. And as you add these different salts, they’re going to effect the overall pH. And so when you talk about pH of beer, the pH of your mash is super important. It helps with conversion.
You’re going to find that if you nail the right pH, you’re actually gonna have a higher of efficiency of conversion during your mash. And also not just that it really affects the overall flavor. Your mash pH is a target between 5.3 to 5.5 and so when you’re looking at those pH is the base malts. If you’re using 100% baseballs, so let’s say it’s a hundred percent Pilsner type beer, you’re going to miss that pH level if you’re using distilled water.
The reasoning being is that. All of those base malts aren’t acidic enough to bring the pH down. If you look at darker malts, like roasted malts, or even ASIN malts, which is a way to bring it down, you can actually then start to see your pH ticking down just using malts. Another way to adjust your pH is by using things like lactic acid.
Uh, I have a 88% solution of lactic acid that I use when I’m using . A lot of base malts and then adding salts to it, and then I just put a couple of mills in there to get the pH down. I would also recommend if you’re looking for a new gadget to buy or some new tools is getting a good pH meter. A good pH meter is going to help you with your mashes.
It’s also going to help you really see if the readings that you’re putting into from your brewing software into your water. If they’re right, it’s, it’s, it’s a good indicator that the things are working the way they should. I have a Milwaukee. PH meter. It was quite expensive. It costs me about $110 and it’s been worth every penny.
Also, I highly recommend having a pH meter for a couple of other reasons. One is if you’re into sour beers, you have to have a pH meter to know if it’s sour enough. The other one or two sour. The other one is if you’re into making kombucha. You’re going to have a pH meter to be able to see if it’s in the right range and not getting overly sour.
And then third, for me, I make a lot of hot sauces and fermented foods, and the pH meter really lets me know that it’s safe to eat and that I’ve gotten to the right pH and not going to give myself botulism. So all good reasons to have a pH meter back to Bruin water, though. So the Bruin water software is going to have, once you put in all of your malts, you’re going to move over to a second page in that spreadsheet, and it’s going to have different water profiles that you can apply is a dropdown.
And it’s got a lot of them. It’s got them by cities and all this. There’s so many in there, you’re going to be like overwhelmed. But what I have actually personally found with the Bruin water software is ignore the cities. And here’s why, is that a lot of commercial breweries adjust their water anyway. So if you’re trying to mimic the, let’s say you’re making a British ale and you want to mimic the water of London, well, chances are that that brewery is actually probably adding some gypsum to it because it knows that it needs to adjust its water.
So what I would say to do. Is go based upon the style of beer that you’re making. And there’s a whole section in there that’s like Amber dry light. Dry light, full bodied. Those are the types of things that I would apply towards my beer. And the reasoning being is that the numbers that it’s going to spit out as targets for you to hit are going to be more in line with the style you’re trying to recreate because you’re
Trying to get characteristics out of your beer. You’re not just trying to mimic the water. And so I think that that is the best approach when it comes to using Bruin water. People will tell me that I’m right or wrong, but that’s at least by approach, and I’ve had really great success doing it that way.
So let’s say I’m making a full bodied Amber beer. It’s then going to give me some targets for. The parts per million that I need to have in certain types of salts to hit the range. But the thing is, it’s a range and that range can be anywhere within it and still be within the target. And so what I always do then is go through and start adding it based upon a.
Graham or a 10th of a gram, how much I’m going to do into it. So it example would be, let’s say I’m doing an IPA and it’s a standard West coast IPA. It’s going to have three or four grams, and we’re doing a five gallon batch and I’m starting with distilled water. I can. Almost spit out to you. What’s going to go into it?
It’s probably going to be anywhere from two and a half to three and a half or four grams of gypsum. It’s going to probably have two grams of calcium chloride in there. It’s probably going to have about a gram of magnesium and that’s probably going to be the adjustments I make to my water. I’m not going to actually add any baking soda to it.
I’m not gonna add any actual regular table salt to it because they’re going to affect my pH in a negative way because let’s say I’m using a lot of base malls, not a lot of crystal that’s gonna affect that overall pH. If you’ve got a lot of acidic malts in there. And a lot of dark Baltz and you’re too low.
Then you can add some baking soda to bring the pH up to the right level because it’s also going to do that. But then baking soda also is going to affect things like, uh, your different water levels when it comes to like magnesium chloride and sulfates. So those are the type of things that are being adjusted in there and different salts adjust multiple things on that spectrum.
So you, you try to keep it as simple as possible. I would say my three most use salts, even out of the set of five that I have are gypsum, calcium chloride and Epson salt, which is magnesium chloride. So those are really the salts I use the most. The last way that we talk about adjusting water would be to send your tap water off to be tested and use that as your base water profile instead of a whole bunch of zeros.
The best way to do that today, I would say, is to send your water off. There’s a company called ward laboratories. It’s, I’ll put a link to, it’s just word lab.com but I will put a link in the show notes to get there. I’ll put it straight to their test kit. They actually have a test kit that you can buy.
It’s about $42 they’ll send it to you, you give them a water sample, send it back to them, and then they will actually see. Send you results of what is your brewing profile of your beer. You’re then able to take that profile, enter it into your brewing software. So if you had Bruin water, for example, you’d be able to enter it into there, and then that then becomes your base water profile.
And then once you add the different profile you’re shooting for, it’s going to give you the adjustments that you need based on that. So, for example. I lived in salt Lake city for a long time. I had very, very high water with a lot of Gypson in it. If I were to have sent that off toward labs, it would come back that way.
I would have to, in every beer adjust for the pH levels of all that Gypson in my water. I would have to use different salts that are going to counteract that or bring up the levels of different of different salts to enhance different flavors. I would be most more likely to use. Things like lactic acid to have to bring the pH of by water down because I’m already starting at a really high base content of my water.
My pH there was also very high. So those are the kinds of things you’re going to find out about your tap water if you go and get it tested. And also then you can get really dialed into your tap water in a way to get those water adjustments. But in the end, it’s super easy. Another thing I would like to point out is that your brewing software is also now able to do so.
When I first started brewing brewing software, didn’t really do water adjustments. When I first did it, it was just a recipe builder and they went through your brew day. But now today, any good brewing software’s going to be able to. Adjust your water. One is beer Smith. I think most brewers that I talk to still use beer Smith.
If you’re using that, it’s going to be able to do greater water adjustment. I personally use brew father and of course they’re a sponsor of this show. Highly recommend you doing it. Even if you get the free account, you’re able to do water adjustments in brew father’s software, and that water adjustment is really killer.
It’s very similar to the same method of, of of the approach is the Bruin water. Spreadsheet and you just can go in, select the profile you’re going for based on the beer style. They even have the different cities in there. And you can actually hit a button and say, adjust it for me. And it tells you the amounts.
It’s actually super slick and I highly recommend it, and it’s made my water adjustment even easier. And a lot of the guessing gets taken out of it. So if you’re using distilled water, it makes it really easy, but you can still put your water profile in there if you choose to go off and get it tested. So.
You know really that that’s pretty much it when it comes to my deep dive on water chemistry and the approach that I take. Like I said, my goal when it comes to water chemistry is to really keep things as simple as possible and to look at it in a way that is overly complicated. If I were to dive into the different parts per million are going to enhance this flavor and this parts per million is going to enhance that flavor.
I think that when you’re looking at it from a beginner. You. It feels like it’s overwhelming when really it’s not. The best way is to just get in there. So just to recap, what would you need to get started if you wanted to start adjusting your water today? I would say go and buy you. A set of salts. If you go to the Homebrew store, you would just go in and say, Hey, I need to set a brewing salts.
I’d like the whole spectrum and they’ll be able to sell it to you easily, but the ones you definitely need out the gate are going to be gypsum, calcium chloride, magnesium chloride or Epsom salt table salt, and then you’re going to want to get some baking soda and those salts is are going to be a great set to get.
You started. A lot of them. You can just buy at the grocery store. Most of them I did. The only one I actually bought from the Homebrew store was the calcium chloride. Everything else I was able to buy either online or from the grocery store. And then the other thing you’re really going to need is a good scale.
And I mean. A scale that can get to the 10th of a gram cause you want to be able to not just be locked into whole grams cause there’s a lot of difference there when it comes to these salts. You want to be highly accurate. I have a scale that I bought off of Allie express. It costs me about $10 I also spent a dollar on calibrating weights so that they were, it could be perfectly weighed.
And my scale goes to 103 hundredth of a gram, which I think is a little bit overkill, but it works great and highly recommend doing something like that. But getting a scale is very important because that is what you’re going to weigh all of your different salts on and just having a kitchen scale that does.
Things like at the whole gram is not going to be enough. You get to get to that 10th of a gram cause a lot of the weights that you’re going to get here are going to be like 2.7 grams to get it into your beer. Other than that, that’s pretty much all you need to get started. I guess the last thing you would need is either brewing software such as brew father or the Bruin water spreadsheet, which I’ll link to in our notes.
Other than that, that’s going to be everything you’re going to need to get your Bruin water up to the level that you want to to really improve the beer that you’re making.
well, I’d like to thank you for sticking with me through the . Deep dive on water chemistry. It was really fun to kind of get it out there and talk about the things that I do to improve my beer. When it comes to improving it through the base product, which is water. Don’t forget, next week we’re doing the first ever brewers Q and a, so we head over to the website and join the discussion and head over to our discord servers that you can join that and we’ll talk to you next week on.
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