8

SIMPLE WATER

“Taste your water, observe it, pay attention to it, and you’ll notice when it changes.”

Leonardo da Vinci declared that water is the driver of nature. Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize winner Albert Szent-Gyorgyi wrote: “Water, the Hub of Life. Water is its mater and matrix, mother and medium. Water is the most extraordinary substance!” Author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, proclaimed: “Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.” A Slovakian proverb notes that pure water is the world’s first and foremost medicine.

You might be more familiar with, “Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Even Henry David Thoreau gets in on the action, proclaiming, “I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.” OK, maybe we can agree that Thoreau went a little too far there, but it’s obvious that water is not only the stuff of life, but also the foundation of our favorite hobby. Water makes up about 95% of our favorite beverage; maybe only 85% if you’re a super high-gravity brewer!

For many years, homebrewers were told that if your water tastes good, you can brew with it. That’s true to an extent, but without knowledge of your water—what it contains and how to adjust it—you’re limited to the few styles for which your water is ideally suited. Many of the world’s great breweries started out by only brewing what the water dictated (we’re looking at you, Guinness), but these days few are constrained to one type of beer due to their water.

What we’re going to do in this chapter is go over the basic ideas about what your water should be like and how to get there, simply. We promise to go light on the chemistry and heavy on the pragmatism.

You can make really good beer and never worry about adjusting your water if you stick to the styles that your water is suited to. That’s what breweries historically did. It’s why you get Guinness from Dublin and IPA from Burton-on-Trent. You can even make decent beers in styles your water is not perfect for. But we all know that homebrewers aren’t going to be content brewing only a couple of styles of beer. We want it all! And to make great beer in any style, there’s no way around getting to know your water and what you need to do with it to nail the style.

So, at the risk of an incredibly bad pun, let’s dive in to water! (OK, we’re sorry!)

SIMPLE TRUTHS ABOUT WATER

Brewing Water Basics

Before we get serious about water, it’s important to understand five basic things. And no, “water is wet” isn’t one of them. The following list comes from our good friend John Palmer. We’re using it here because we couldn’t say it better.

Treat Your Brewing Water

Before we go for our deepwater dive, we want to give you a few simple guidelines you can follow when thinking about what you can do for your brewing water and your beer. You can go a lot deeper, but here’s the basic stuff to get you thinking in the right direction.

WHAT’S IN YOUR WATER?

Before you can figure what to do with your water, you need to know what’s in it. How can you decide where you’re going if you don’t know where you are, right? There are a few key “ingredients” in water that influence your beer. These are what you need to know about:

You might also want info on nitrates, nitrites, iron, manganese, and potassium levels, but that’s more about overall water quality than suitability for brewing; you just want to make sure all of those are below the taste threshold. Remember, if your water tastes bad you’re not spinning gold medal winning beer from it. The list above is what you absolutely must know if you want to get deep into water, but otherwise you really only need to know the levels of calcium, magnesium, total alkalinity, sulfate, chloride, and sodium before you start messing with your water.

OK, so now we know what we need to know, but how do you get this information? All municipalities or water districts can provide you with a water quality report, at least in the US. However, the type of data the your local water utility provides may vary. Sometimes a utility will have all of this info, but many others won’t. It just doesn’t matter enough to all utilities to track these things. Sure, they have to tell you what is in there that may kill you, but they don’t have to report the secondary parameters that brewers need for assessing brewing capability. A water utility may not have the resources to provide you with much more than a yearly average, which is probably sufficient if you’re drawing from a steady source of water, but maybe not enough once you get persnickety about brewing and really want to dial in your water.

If a running average isn’t good enough for you (and for a number of brewers it isn’t), you can find a local company to analyze your water and give you the data you need. Many homebrewers have turned to Ward Laboratories, Inc. (https://www.wardlab.com/), which provides quick, easy, and complete analyses for a reasonable price. Ward has a number of water tests available, but for our purposes test W-6 will tell you all you need to know about your water. All you need to do is take a sample of your water, pay for the test online, mail in the samples, and wait for the analysis. It’s easy, as long as you don’t mind visiting the post office!

For those wanting more immediate results, there are also home water test kits available. Kits from companies like Lamotte (http://www.lamotte.com/en/food-beverage/brewlab) and Industrial Test Systems’ SenSafe® line (https://sensafe.com/brewing) allow you to do your own complete water analysis at home, at your convenience. There are other products, like the SenSafe iDip® kits, that are bridging the gap between testing and reporting the results via a phone app. All of these kits set you up to understand basic water testing. Shake, mix, and observe or measure a change to dial in your value.

If you don’t want to be troubled with frequent testing, you still have a few routes open to you. The cheapest is to become a water sommelier, at least for your water.

Taste your water, observe it, pay attention to it, and you’ll notice when it changes. Secondly, and more expensive, go buy your water. Sure, most of the water you buy is just municipal water that’s been treated, but the treatment makes it consistent. Lastly, there’s distilled and reverse osmosis water. We’ll get to those later, but first, let’s look at these extra ingredients hanging out in our beer, how they influence it, and finally how to deal with each of them.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR WATER

We’ll start with a sample from Denny’s well, since it’s a fairly consistent water supply (see fig. 8.1).

Denny’s Ward Labs Water Report

Results For: DENNY CONN

pH 7.4

Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) Est 164

Electrical Conductivity, mmho/cm 0.27

Cations / Anions, me/L 2.8 / 2.7

ppm

Sodium, Na

11

Potassium, K

2

Calcium, Ca

34

Magnesium, Mg

7

Total Hardness, CaCO3

114

Nitrate, NO3-N

<0.1 (SAFE)

Sulfate, SO4-S

19

Chloride, Cl

3

Carbonate, CO3

<1

Bicarbonate, HCO3

90

Total Alkalinity, CaCO3

74

Figure 8.1. Ward Labs water report for Denny’s well water.

Calcium

Calcium is essential for enzymatic activity in the mash and for yeast health and reproduction. In general, barley and wheat, the grains most often used for homebrewing, will provide plenty of calcium for these purposes. Calcium is also essential for yeast flocculation and beer clearing.

In the past, brewers were often told that they needed at least 100 ppm of calcium in their brewing water. More recent studies have found that 50–100 ppm is plenty for ales. Lagers can get by with no additional calcium and in general can be fine with 25 ppm or less. That’s because the cold lagering period will help drop the yeast, reducing the need for the calcium to do that.

Calcium also interacts with oxalate, resulting in calcium oxalate precipitating out of solution. Calcium oxalate precipitation leads to the formation of beerstone, a buildup of calcium oxalate and proteins. If beerstone forms on heat exchangers, fermentors, and serving equipment it can make them nearly impossible to sanitize. For that reason, some recommendations are to keep calcium levels at least as high as 40 ppm, which causes calcium oxalate to precipitate in the mash rather than in downstream equipment or the finished beer.

Calcium also reacts with phosphates in the malt, which reduces your mash pH. That’s a desirable side-effect, because you want your mash pH to generally be in the 5.2–5.6 range (more on that later). Most water isn’t that low, so the calcium in the malt can be one way of reducing your pH to the proper brewing level. In fact most drinking water is mildly alkaline like Denny’s. But grain and calcium will go a long way to pull the pH down before you even think about acidifying.2

Chloride

Chloride (which is distinctly different from chlorine!) contributes to sweetness and “fullness” in a beer, in that it can enhance the perception of malt. Like everything in life, you want enough but not too much. A range of 10–100 ppm is generally recommended, with the exception of beers that are high in sulfates. Too much chloride in high-sulfate water can create an unpleasant “minerally” taste, which is generally not wanted.

Sulfate

When Denny and Drew started brewing, the rule of thumb was that you added gypsum (which is calcium sulfate) to “hoppy” beers in order to accentuate the hops. Of course, that overlooks exactly what “hoppy” means and what character of hops it supposedly accentuates! More recent thinking says that sulfate helps give the beer a dryness that helps the bitterness stand out. Sulfate is pretty much essential in an American pale ale or IPA to get the hop bitterness character that we expect the beer to have. Sulfate won’t really help with hop flavor or aroma other than to dry the beer enough to make those characters stand out a bit more.

In recent years, the flavor impacts of sulfate and chloride have been found to be closely intertwined, but more on that later.

Magnesium

Magnesium is important for yeast health, especially if you intend to harvest and reuse your yeast. You need at least 5 ppm of magnesium for reusing yeast in this way, but wheat or barley should provide you at least that much. You can go a bit higher with the magnesium in order to be certain that your yeast is strong and healthy, but keep it below 40 ppm to avoid adverse effects on flavor. Although magnesium will lower your pH a bit, it’s not recommended specifically as a tool to lower pH. We use Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate) to augment gypsum (calcium sulfate) when we want to increase the sulfate level without adding more calcium. This is often good practice for American pale ales and IPAs. A bonus is that we also get the magnesium from it.

Sodium

When used at moderate levels, sodium can boost the malt flavor and sweetness of a beer, especially if present alongside chloride. Any good dessert chef will tell you that even sweets benefit from a pinch of salt to activate your taste buds. In general, you want to keep sodium below 60 ppm; too much can leave a harsh, unpleasant flavor.

It comes dancin’ across your water

Chlorine

Chlorine

What a killer.

—(Apologies to Neil Young, Cortez the Killer)

Chlorine the Killer

Chlorine is the one you don’t want in your beer. As we’ve brewed for more and more years, one thing we’ve found is that it’s really hard to screw up a batch of beer to the point that it’s undrinkable. Poor recipes, out of whack fermentation temperature, no carbonation—all of those are things may not be great, but at least leave you with a beverage that you can usually imbibe. But we’ve found that there is one flaw that practically guarantees your homebrew will become toilet cleaner, and that’s chlorine, along with its close cousin chloramine (a stable chlorine compound that prolongs chlorine’s disinfectant properties). The harsh plastic flavors imparted to your lovingly crafted homebrew by chlorine and chloramine will pretty much guarantee a gag-and-spit experience rather than the beery nirvana you were hoping for.

If we had to guess (and we will, since it’s our book!), probably 90% of homebrewers are on a city water supply that uses chlorine or chloramine for water treatment. In terms of public health, that’s a good thing; you want to know that the water you drink is uncontaminated by disease-causing organisms. But while chlorine-treated water might keep you safe, it’s death for your beer.

Every homebrewer is familiar with sodium hypochlorite, a.k.a. bleach. In the early days of homebrewing, bleach was the preferred sanitizing solution, and many people are familiar with the bleach aroma in their water. Chloramine is a little less well known. Chloramine is a reaction product between chlorine and ammonia. Many major water districts have switched to chloramine because it doesn’t outgas as readily as chlorine, which means it protects better as the water moves through the long supply runs typical for modern cities.

You can find out if your water contains chlorine or chloramine by contacting your local water board or by looking at their annual water report. If your water contains chlorine or chloramine, you would be well advised to remove it before brewing with the water. Not doing so puts you at risk of chlorophenols in your beer, which produce a harsh, plastic aroma and flavor that is compared to Band-Aids. And let’s face it, no one wants their beer to smell or taste like Band-Aids!

Chlorine removal is relatively simple. The easiest way to remove it is to draw your brewing water 24 hours before you brew and let it sit uncovered until you use it. The chlorine will outgas and you will be left with chlorine-free water. Exposure to sunlight speeds this process and can reduce it to a few hours. You can also boil the water to remove the chlorine and be done pretty much when the boil happens. Lastly, you can aerate the water as well to force the offgassing process.

Chloramine is a lot tougher. It won’t dissipate if you let the water sit, boil it, or aerate it. That’s the whole reason water districts use the stuff! You need to take more active measures. All of these active measures will work for chlorine as well.

Our favorite, easy and cheap method is to use Campden tablets (sodium or potassium metabisulfite) to remove it. As well as Campden tablets, sodium and potassium metabisulfite also come in powder form. Most homebrew shops will carry Campden tablets because it’s a popular wine sanitizer. One typical (695 mg) Campden tablet (or a healthy pinch of powder) can remove the chlorine from 20 gallons of water, unless your water has a very high level of chlorine in which case you should use a bit more.

To use, crush the tablet (or part of it, depending on how much water you want to dechlorinate) and mix it into the water. The reaction happens within a few seconds and you’re ready to use the water. Some people worry that using Campden tablets might add sulfites to their beer, but that doesn’t happen. The end byproduct is chloride (in the case of chlorine), and also hydrogen, sulfate, and ammonium (for chloramine), as well as either sodium or potassium depending on whether your Campden tablet is sodium metabisulfite or potassium metabisulfite.

Now, before you freak out about these new compounds, you need to know that the amounts are infinitesimal and will not affect the flavor of your water or beer. We could go into scary math here to show you how little, but this book is about simplicity. Just know that the theory is sound and that thousands of homebrewers have been doing this for years. We have empirical proof that it works!

Finally, you can use a granulated activated charcoal (GAC) filter system to remove both chlorine and chloramine. This is a more expensive solution, but many people already have these installed for their entire house. There are two things to keep in mind about GAC systems. First, remember to change the filter regularly to avoid bacterial contamination. Second, run the water slowly to ensure that the chlorine/chloramine is actually removed. Because of the amount of water you need for brewing and the slow recovery time of some GAC systems, you may need to draw your water in batches for a day or two before you brew.

You occasionally hear the question, “Since boiling removes chlorine and I’m going to be boiling my beer anyway, doesn’t that remove the chlorine?” If only it was that easy! Unfortunately, by the time you start boiling the wort, the chlorine will have reacted with your grain or extract to form the dreaded plastic, medicinal-tasting chlorophenols. And once they’re in your wort, there’s no way to eliminate them. Your beer will have flavors and aromas reminiscent of plastic or Band-Aids. Take it from us, it’s bad, it’s disgusting … there is no way to save a beer with chlorophenols. So, take a few minutes to deal with chlorine/chloramine before you start brewing.

DISTILLED AND REVERSE OSMOSIS WATER: THE LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

Rather than trying to deal with stuff that’s already in your water, you can take the opposite approach and start with water that has no minerals in it. That’s the beauty of using distilled or reverse osmosis (RO) water. Distilled water is devoid of minerals and is a blank slate for water treatment. You know there’s nothing there when you start! Although RO water has greatly reduced mineral levels, they’re still only there to a small extent (less than 10 ppm). Reverse osmosis water can be a good base if the residual mineral content is low enough—the only way to know is to get an analysis of the RO water, or just brew with it and see what happens. Water put through a well-tuned RO/distillation process can be treated as a table full of zeros, an aqueous blank canvas for you to paint your beer on. And while you don’t want to brew with water that has no minerals, starting with distilled or RO water means that you can add the proper amounts of just those minerals you want for the beer style you’re brewing, rather than trying to compensate for what’s already in your water.

You can find distilled or RO water in jugs or bottles in most grocery stores. Avoid water labeled as “drinking water” because it will likely have minerals in it. Most of the major brands have water profiles available online, so you can look and see the numbers, but it’s not the same as starting from scratch.

We also recommend you avoid the bulk water dispensing machines. There have been many disturbing reports of the water from those machines not being free of minerals, even when they carry a recently dated seal assuring you of the water’s purity. Some homebrewers even go as far as carrying a total dissolved solids (TDS) meter with them to check the water from those machines before purchasing it. In far too many cases, what they find is that it isn’t as pure as claimed and should be avoided for brewing.

You can also buy RO filter systems for your tap water. They work well but RO tap filters have their drawbacks: they waste a lot of water as they filter it; they require frequent maintenance in order to keep the filter in good working condition and free of bacteria; and they usually require you to draw the water slowly in order to filter it, which may mean you need to collect the water over the course of a few days before you brew. Since many RO filter systems produce a fair amount of wastewater (this is water that doesn’t make it through all the membranes), you’ll need to do something with it. If you live where water conservation is an ongoing concern, don’t waste it! Water your plants, fill your laundry machine, make beans. Whatever! Just don’t put it down the drain.

Despite these drawbacks, many people find RO filter systems to be just the ticket for their situation. If you think one of these might be solution for you, we encourage you to compare the various systems out there and determine which one best fits your needs.

Another benefit of using distilled water as a blank slate is that you can take advantage of the prepackaged mineral additions sold at local homebrew supply stores. Kind of like using the Bru’n Water software (which we look at below), pick a color and flavor profile, then add the prepackaged minerals to the water. There are several companies out there making these packets. We’ve had an opportunity to test the salts from ACCUmash™ (http://www.accu-mash.com/) and we were really impressed by how easy they were to use and how well they worked. The ACCUmash products simulate the type of additions you’d get from water profiling software and makes the water part of your brew day as easy as “get distilled water, drop packet in water, brew”! The same type of product is available from other companies too. Beer Dust (https://beerdust.com) is one that has gotten very good reviews, but look around, try several, and determine which works best for you.

ADJUSTING YOUR WATER

So now you know what’s in (or not in) your water and what kind of effect the various mineral salts will have on your beer. Where do you go from there?

First, we recommend you get some water treatment software. Some popular brewing software, like BeerSmith™, will have it built in. There are online water calculators like Brewer’s Friend that you can use; there are also many standalone calculators like Bru’n Water (which Denny uses), Brewer’s Friend (https://www.brewersfriend.com), or Palmer’s Brewing Water Adjustment App that you can download. If you’re really, deeply interested in being nerdy, then go forth and make your own spreadsheet (that’s how Bru’n Water started), but we really do recommend going and finding a calculator that works for you because the math gets weird.

These are all basically spreadsheets that allow you to play “what if” games. You input the profile of the water you’re using, select a target profile for the beer you’re making, and start manipulating the various salt additions until you get close to the profile you want.

A word about target profiles before we get into how to make the chemistry happen. If you look through a lot of older brewing books, you’ll see tables of famous brewing cities and what their water profiles look like. The old way of talking about water treatment was: “Oh, you’re making a Scottish beer? You should make your water look like that from the Edinburgh rows in the table.” This ignores the fact that Edinburgh water varies (drastically) from well to well. But it also ignores the fact that breweries worldwide treat their water, removing minerals and adding others all with the same goals in mind. Very few brewers just hew to their native water source. The newer means of targeting water is a sort of “color and intent” model. For instance, in Bru’n Water you have profiles for “golden, bitter” and “golden, malty”. These profiles are modeled using mineral flavor impacts, pH, and residual alkalinity. We already walked you through the first one, so how about the latter two?

pH

When we build a water profile, we think of it as two distinct steps: how it will affect mash pH and how it will affect beer flavor. pH gets manipulated to affect the function of your mash and boil, and mineral salts get manipulated to affect the flavor of your beer. Sure, there’s some crossover—pH will have an effect on flavor and the salts can have an effect on pH—but thinking of them as separate adjustments helps you get a handle on what you’re doing and why.

pH is a measure of how acidic or basic something is—technically, it’s a measure of the hydrogen ion activity in a solution, hence “power of hydrogen” or pH. Keep in mind that the pH of your source water makes little difference. The pH of the mash is what matters and the grain you use will affect that. The more dark grain you add, the more the mash pH will be pulled down. Enzyme activity in the mash is influenced by pH: beta-amylase has a pH optimum in the 5.0–5.5 range while alpha-amylase is in the 5.2–5.7 range. Note these ranges overlap, which is why pH 5.4–5.5 is the sweet spot many homebrewers aim for. You’ll notice that some products on the market offer the ability to automatically dial in your pH to this magical pH zone, but neither of us have had much luck with them. Sometimes the hard way is the only way.

Alkalinity

Along with pH, we need to talk about alkalinity. Alkalinity is a measure of how resistant to pH change your water is. Water high in carbonate and bicarbonate will have a high alkalinity and require more acid to bring about a change in pH. Alkalinity is NOT the same as hardness, it’s actually the opposite. Hardness comes from high levels of calcium and magnesium ions in your water. Some hardness in your water is not necessarily a problem and can actually be a good thing for some styles.

Alkalinity can be a big obstacle to you hitting your mash pH and usually needs to be neutralized by an addition of acid when brewing lighter-colored beers. Brewers use either lactic or phosphoric acid to neutralize alkalinity and adjust the pH of their mash (notice we said mash, not water). Too much alkalinity can result in a high pH and a muted flavor to the beer. Too little alkalinity can result in low mash pH and tart, almost wine-like flavors, as well as poor conversion. On the other hand, alkalinity is a good thing when you brew dark-colored beers. It balances the acidity from the dark malts and helps keep your mash pH from going below 5.2.

Residual alkalinity (RA) is a concept introduced by Paul Kolbach as a specific tool for brewers. It’s the alkalinity that is not neutralized by the calcium and magnesium in your water. It’s what’s “left over” after the neutralization reactions, hence the “residual” part. It’s the true measure of what a brewer needs to know about their water. Darker beers benefit from a higher RA and lighter beers from a lower RA. You can increase RA by adding calcium carbonate (chalk), sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), or calcium hydroxide (pickling lime). The easiest way to increase the alkalinity of your water is to use baking soda, because calcium carbonate is hard to dissolve. You can reduce RA by hardening the water with additions of calcium or magnesium, or by adding acid.

Function and Flavor

OK, does your head hurt yet? Yeah, we understand. But we think it’s important to have at least a bit of an idea how and why things happen with your water. Here’s the takeaway from all of this (i.e., the simple part):

Adjusting Your Water: An Example

Let’s walk through a water adjustment for a beer. We’ll be using the Bru’n Water spreadsheet, but other water calculators work similarly. Denny’s Noti Brown Ale, an American brown, was the first beer that won a ribbon for Denny and it’s always been a tasty, reliable recipe. But it had always struck him as coming off a bit harsher than he wanted it to be. Adjusting the water he used took care of that.

Denny started by entering the water profile he had gotten from Ward Labs into Bru’n Water (fig. 8.2). He then entered his grain bill (fig. 8.3). Remember, the grain will affect mash pH so the calculator has to know what grain you’re using and how much of it. Note: It is important to understand that the predicted mash pH, such as that shown in figure 8.3, is just an estimate made by a numerical model. Every malt from every maltster will be slightly different. In other words, your mileage may vary.

Figure 8.2. Denny’s water profile in Bru’n Water. Image courtesy Martin Brungard.

Figure 8.3. Mash acidification estimate using Bru’n Water, based on Denny’s well water composition and grain bill. Image courtesy of Martin Brungard.

Next, Denny moved on to the “Water Adjustment” page and chose the “Brown, Balanced” water profile. Bru’n Water lets you select your target profile based on beer color and desired flavor. It also has water profiles from some of the great brewing cities in the world, but we encourage you to not use those. For one thing, there’s no guarantee that the city profile is indeed what the water there is really like. And you have no idea if or how the breweries there treat the water. You can be pretty certain that almost none use it as is, though. So, by using beer color and desired flavor you can tweak your water to give you a beer that might be brewed in these cities after they dealt with their water.

Denny entered the amount of mash and sparge water he was using, as well as the total batch volume (fig. 8.4). The more water you use, the more minerals and/or acids you’ll have to use to adjust the profile to your liking. To start, Denny compared his existing water profile to the target profile, which let him see where he needed to add mineral salts and where the existing values were close enough (remember, you don’t have to be exact).

Figure 8.4. Denny compared his existing water profile to see how it might be djusted to more closely match his desired water profile. Image courtesy of Martin Brungard.

By entering different values to the “Water Additions” table, the values in the line “Finished Water Profile” changed and could be compared to the target profile. If some minerals start out too high in the existing water, you can cut your water with distilled water to reduce those and then build back up any that were diluted too much. After experimenting with his additions, Denny finally took a look at the predicted pH and found it higher than he wanted, so he added some lactic acid to pull it down to 5.4. Here are the additions he ended up with:

Mash

  • • 0.6 g gypsum (calcium sulfate)
  • • 2.2 g calcium chloride
  • • 1.1 mL 88% lactic acid

Sparge

  • • 0.5 g gypsum (calcium sulfate)
  • • 1.9 g calcium chloride
  • • 1.6 mL 88% lactic acid

The mineral amounts are really close to the target profile and the mash pH ended up at 5.4 (fig. 8.5). Bingo! Not only did the intellectual exercise work out, but the beer had a much more rounded flavor and that was what Denny wanted all along.

Figure 8.5. Denny adjusted his mineral amounts and added lactic acid to reach an estimated mash pH of 5.4. Image courtesy of Martin Brungard.

IS THERE A SIMPLER WAY?

“My head hurts. Is there a simpler way?” Yes and no. The simplest answer is, don’t worry about all the adjustments: clear your water of chlorine/chloramine and learn what your water is best at by brewing beer. It’ll cost you some time and some batches of beer, but the math is a lot simpler! The next simplest is to start with distilled/RO water and use premeasured water salts—they can really up your game. If you decide you want some math after all, let’s go back to our brief aside about the flavor impacts of sulfate and chloride.

Sulfate-to-Chloride Ratio

The impact of sulfate and chloride on flavor in the final beer is known to affect how the balance of malts and hops is perceived. Professional brewers don’t necessarily want to go digging into water calculations every time they start designing a beer, and everyone loves an easy to understand rule of thumb to make them feel like they’re in the ballpark. Calculating the sulfate-to-chloride ratio is a simple division: you take your sulfate level and divide it by the chloride level in your water.

The effect of the sulfate-to-chloride ratio increases as you move to the extremes, but we suggest you stay somewhat near the middle until you really understand the impact. Take a look at the “Brown, Balanced” profile Denny used for Noti Brown Ale in figure 8.5. The desired water profile calls for 70 ppm sulfate and 55 ppm chloride. That’s 70/55 or 1.27, squarely in the “balanced” perception range.

Please note that this ratio only works when you’re not pushing to the extremes or dealing with water that is naturally excessively low or high in minerals. A sulfate/chloride ratio of 3 when your numbers are 30 ppm sulfate and 10 ppm chloride will give you far different results than the same ratio when your numbers are 300 ppm sulfate and 100 ppm chloride. If you find your natural levels are in the extremes (e.g., >200 ppm), you’ll want to dilute first.

It’s Never Too Late

Sometimes a beer doesn’t turn out exactly like what you had in mind. Maybe it’s too bitter, too “thin,” or too “flabby.” Your choices are to suffer through it or dump it, neither of which we want to do! However, you can actually add some water treatments directly to a keg or glass of beer. It still might not be what you had in mind, but chances are it will be a lot closer!

There’s no formula to determine how much to add to a glass or keg because there’s no way to quantify flavor. It’s a trial and error thing, with hopefully the emphasis on the trial! Denny just adds a bit to a glass and tastes until he decides the beer has been improved. You can carefully measure the amount you put in a glass (hint: it’s not very much) and scale that up to the size of the whole batch you want to treat. Or you can add a bit, taste, and add more if needed. It’s unlikely the beer will turn out to be the perfect pint you had in mind, but you’ll undoubtedly end up with a beer that you can enjoy both for itself and for the simple reason that you saved it from a fate as drain cleaner.

We don’t know about you, but after all this water talk, we need a drink!

PROFILES IN SIMPLICITY: MARTIN BRUNGARD

Martin Brungard has been homebrewing since 2000. You can consider him a beer nerd with tools. He has applied his engineering education and homebrewing experience to solving brewing problems and dispelling brewing myths for the brewing community. Martin is author and presenter of numerous brewing articles, a professional brewing consultant, and author of the Bru’n Water software for brewing water chemistry that we have mentioned throughout chapter 8. Martin also served as a technical editor for the Brewers Publications book, Water: A Comprehensive Guide for Brewers.3

We asked Martin for his simple guidelines about adjusting your water:

While there is plenty of discussion on mineral levels in brewing water, I find that brewers gain the most from water adjustments by focusing on getting their wort pH into the proper range. It doesn’t take a pH meter to figure if your pH is too high or low. You can look at the relative success of your past brews to guide you. If you find that your pale colored beers tend to be dull or coarse tasting and your dark beers are decent, then it’s likely that your water has high alkalinity. If your dark beers tend to be too acidic or sharp tasting, then it’s likely that your water has low alkalinity. With just that assessment, you can start making meaningful changes to your brewing.

The following are water adjustments that can be applied relatively safely simply from the assessment above. In the case of high alkalinity water, adding acid to the water does make a big difference. Try adding either 0.5 mL of 88% lactic acid or 5 mL of 10% phosphoric acid to each gallon of mashing and sparging water when brewing pale colored beers. Those additions should make the resulting beers brighter and crisper.

In the case of low alkalinity water, adding alkalinity to your mashing water can help take the acidic or acrid edge off your dark beers. Adding about 1/16 tsp of baking soda per gallon of your mashing water (about 0.5 g/gal., which is equal to 75 ppm of bicarbonate alkalinity) should be a safe dose for dark beers. Do not add baking soda to sparging water.

If those beers are better with those simple water adjustments, then paying more attention to your water may be worthwhile. While pH adjustments hold the most bang for your buck, simple adjustments to chloride and sulfate levels in your brewing water can also improve your beer.

To make meaningful adjustments to chloride and sulfate in your brewing water, it’s important that neither of those ions be at too high a level. Therefore, you’ll either need to get into more complicated chemistry calculations or you can start with water that has low mineralization (RO or distilled water). With unmineralized water, it’s easy to add minerals to alter beer flavor and perception.

Adding chloride to your brewing water helps with the perception of fullness or mouthcoating maltiness in beer. A safe dose for enhancing those perceptions is 1/8 tsp of calcium chloride per gallon (1.7 g/gal.) of brewing water (mashing and sparging water). Higher dosing can increase those perceptions, but this is a safe starting point. Don’t be afraid of boosting that level in the future based on your prior results.

Adding sulfate to your brewing water helps to dry the finish of your beers. While it doesn’t make beer more bitter, that dryness does improve the perception of hoppiness and bittering. If your beers end up with maltiness that lingers too long, adding sulfate can dry that finish out. A safe dose for drying your beer’s finish is to add 1/4 tsp gypsum per gallon (3.35 g/gal.) of brewing water (mashing and sparging water). Again, don’t be afraid to experiment with larger gypsum doses as your experience grows.

These simple water adjustments are based on your perceptions of your beer. They can be implemented without calculation. However, if you find that they make your beer better, you may want to investigate further trials at higher doses to see what your preferences are for different styles. Different beer styles do benefit from different levels of mineralization and acidification. While you can make good steps in improving your beers with these simple recommendations, the many brewing chemistry calculators available may make your job easier.

Want an example? Here’s a simple recipe where the whole character changes based on the water. Please note, although this recipe is for a lager, you can substitute a clean, neutral ale yeast and see the same effect.

RECIPE

Hobo BoHo Pilsner

Variant

Johann’s Pils

Batch size: 5.5 gal. (21 L)

Original gravity: 1.051 (12.6°P)

Final gravity: 1.010 (2.6°P)

Color: 3.2 SRM

Bitterness: 40 IBU

ABV: 5.2%

Malt

Hops

Yeast

Water

Mash

Fermentation

1 John Palmer and Colin Kaminski, Water: A Comprehensive Guide for Brewers (Boulder: Brewers Publications, 2013).

2 “The Oxford Companion to Beer definition of calcium oxalate,” Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine (online), accessed October 8, 2018, https://beerandbrewing.com/dictionary/ksblED3u4Y/calcium-oxalate/.

3 John Palmer and Colin Kaminski, Water: A Comprehensive Guide for Brewers (Boulder: Brewers Publications, 2013).