Water profile beersmith how to#

Munich – high alkalinity from carbonates enhances smooth malty character.

Burton – high calcium and sulfate enhance a clean hop bitterness.

Pilsen – soft water with low alkalinity produces a healthier mash when only light grains are used…the low sulfate also enhances a mellow hop bitterness.

Dublin – highly alkaline water allows for a healthy mash when acidic dark grains are used.

In addition to the mash schedules developed in the historical brewing centers of the world, the chemical composition of each region’s water drove certain styles’ evolution.

Advancements in malting have simplified the mash schedules needed to make good beer.

Properties including body, attenuation, and clarity were dialed in as a result.

Historically, enzymatic activity was optimized to balance starch and sugar length coming out of the mash through the development of different mash schedules.

Enzymes are the proteins in the mash that catalyze chemical reactions in the brewing process.

Water profile beersmith how to#

John Palmer has a great nomograph in How to Brew that will help you estimate residual alkalinity ().Higher residual alkalinity is generally better for darker styles due to the offsetting effects of malt (acidic) and water (basic).Residual Alkalinity: a more specific way to determine how your brewing water will resist a change in pH…essentially, alkalinity minus hardness.Alkalinity: the buffering capacity of water to resist a change in pH…roughly equal to the sum of carbonate and bicarbonate in solution.Strongly controlled by pH and temperature.Effective Hardness: a brewing term that ties Ca 2+ and Mg 2+ to residual alkalinity.Total Hardness: normalized expression of Ca 2+ and Mg 2+ concentrations expressed as ppm CaCO 3.Hardness: total concentration of multivalent metal ions in solution (Ca 2+, Mg 2+, etc…).Fermentation pH below 4.4 favors diacetyl uptake, clarity, and biological stability.High wort pH in boil favors higher (and rougher) bitterness as well as higher Maillard reaction rates.Low wort pH can negatively impact hot break, chill haze, hop utilization, etc….Mash pH between 5.2 and 5.5 necessary to prevent amylase enzymes from denaturing.

pH: the measure of how acidic or basic a solution based on the concentration of H + and OH – ions…the scale is logarithmic, so water with a pH of 5 has 10x the H + ions as water with a pH of 6.You should send a sample to an analytical lab to get individual ion concentrations. Most city water reports don’t have the necessary information for brewing.Some homebrewers use Campden tablets to remove chloramine instead of a carbon filter. The use of an activated carbon filter should take care of both of these if used properly. Organic compounds and disinfectants can derail everything you do to make world class beer.By enabling you to make some easy adjustments to your water, you will improve the health of your brewing process from mash to draft. The goal of this blog post is to give you a new tool in the endeavor of making great beer. If you have control of your sanitation and yeast health, you can make good beer.

Brewing water can be viewed as the last frontier to many in our industry, but it needn’t be intimidating in the way that quantum mechanics or neuroscience are viewed by many.