Water Chemistry: Tips from the Pros
Brewer: Greg Noonan, Vermont Pub & Brewery in Burlington, VT
Homebrewers who want to analyze their water and make measured treatments will find it isn’t really much trouble at all.
The kits to test hardness and alkalinity are available from aquarium supply retailers and calculators and spreadsheets are available online that will do the math for you. If you like the beer you are brewing, don’t worry about it. Add gypsum to styles that call for hard water, and adjust amounts by taste. If your water is alkaline, sometimes described as having “temporary hardness,” add some lactic or phosphoric acid to brighten the beer’s flavor and brew a clearer, cleaner-flavored brew.
Alkalinity should be the biggest concern for all brewers. High pH is the indicator, acid addition is the correction. For all-grain brewers, mash alkalinity is a problem if your mash pH is usually above 5.3. Alkalinity not only reduces sugar extraction and increases tannin leeching from the grains, but also negatively affects the flavor of your beer. If your mash pH is over 5.3 or your wort at the end of the boil is over pH 5.1, your beer will taste better with water adjustments.
Calcium and magnesium lower mash pH, and some alkalinity can be overcome by gypsum or calcium chloride additions. IPA is awful brewed with alkaline water, but a gypsum addition enhances the hop flavor and overcomes the alkaline harshness. It also reduces soapy flavors and gives a cleaner, more defined bitterness.
A little calcium chloride accentuates maltiness and reduces the perception of sweetness a bit. Scotch ales really benefit from some calcium chloride.
Brewer: Keith Villa, Blue Moon Brewing Company in Golden, CO
There are a few main water concerns for homebrewing. First, is the aroma or taste. The water should be cleaned up using a carbon filter and any other filtration that would be appropriate. Second is the hardness, which should be removed using a water softener. Third, is water chemistry. The chemistry should be adjusted to be as close as possible to the water from the city in which the desired style originated. For example, if a homebrewer chooses to brew a Dortmunder style of beer and has very soft water, then he or she would have to add the appropriate amount of table salt, gypsum, chalk and epsom salts to get the correct ion concentration. The water chemistry of the classic cities is available on the Internet or in back issues of most brewing journals.
If you are a beginning brewer, you probably don’t need a water report. Just run it through a carbon filter, then through a softener if it is hard, and start brewing. If you are an advanced brewer then a water report is necessary so that you can see how the water will affect the brew. For example, water with a high sulfate content might be good for brewing a pale ale, but it would be bad for brewing a Pilsner.
I would, however, advise obtaining a copy of your municipal water analysis. These are usually free of charge and contain all the chemistry of the water. Water can then be adjusted to brew certain styles by adding the appropriate salts. If, for some reason, the water analysis shows that it is inappropriate for brewing a certain style of beer, purchase distilled water or spring water and use it for brewing after adjusting the salt ion content, if necessary. Try to remember that one teaspoon of the following salts into 5 U.S. gallons (19 L) of water adds the corresponding parts per million (ppm) of ions: table salt (110 ppm Na+ + 170 ppm Cl–); gypsum (59 ppm Ca+2 + 142 ppm SO4-2); chalk (39 ppm Ca+2 + 57 ppm CO3–); and epsom salts (25 ppm Mg+2 + 99 ppm SO4-2).
Brewer: Kraig Bridgeford, Butte Creek Brewing Company in Chico, CA
I find it of the upmost importance to know what your water is made of in order to brew consistent, high-quality beer. If you want to brew true to style you need to know your water and the water source of the style you’re brewing and adjust yours to match as closely as possible. If you check out famous styles and where they were created, you will find that the beer was successful because the mash pH was in the proper range due to the acidity of the malts used and the mineral content of the water. For example, Guinness is a success due to the high content of bicarbonate in the water and dark acidic malt.
Because Butte Creek is an organic brewery, our options for water changes are limited. We can use lactic acid, calcium chloride and calcium bicarbonate but they must be organic. The water in Chico is slightly alkaline because we have a high bicarbonate to calcium ratio. So for reasons such as mash and boil pH, yeast health and beer stability we want more calcium in our water.
We rely on annual reports from the water company and base our treatment on the yearly averages. We also check our pH frequently to maintain our target range.
For lightly-colored beers we need a combination of lactic acid and calcium chloride to get the pH in the 5.1 to 5.5 range. Because a light beer lacks acidic specialty malts, more acidity is needed to achieve the proper pH. If you use too much calcium chloride the beer will taste medicinal, so you can supplement it with lactic acid to get the pH down.
For beers that are in the 13 to 19 SRM range, we could get away with using nothing and rely on the specialty malts to achieve the proper pH, but because we have so little calcium in our water it is always good to bump it up to a more acceptable level.
When brewing dark beer that’s naturally acidic, causing the beer to become sharp and astringent, we can use chalk, which is calcium carbonate. This helps bring the pH up to the proper range and supplies needed calcium. The problem with chalk is that calcium and bicarbonate fight against each other, with bicarbonate being stronger. It takes 3.5 parts of calcium to neutralize one part of bicarbonate.
Water treatment isn’t 100% accurate; you have wiggle room but it’s important to be in the proper parameters. Every source is different and water treatment has to account for that.
