Your water, pH and the mash

[Ben]

Recently I have seen some posts on how to deal with mash pH and difficult water. I figured I would share the way I deal with it, very easily.

Your water is made up of water (!) and a plethora of minerals, ions, bacteria and chemicals. So what do you do about it, and why?

The why is easy, it sets you up to have the appropriate pH for enzymes to act during the saccharification phase of the mash and, "magically" sets the wort up for the proper pH for yeast. It also enhances the flavor of your final product. The 5 minutes you spend on brew day adjusting your water can save you innumerable problems and heartaches with your fermentation, and ensures you are getting the most out of your ferment. It gives you a chance to get closer to replicating the distillate of a specific region.

FYI this doesn't necessarily apply to sugar washes. You need to look at some of the tried and true recipes to figure out how to deal with that.

In order to make adjustments you need to know what is in your water. Some towns and cities actually publish an annual water report. If you aren't so lucky they can be sourced from various companies, I got a basic brewing water test done by Ward Labs and these were my results:

pH 7.7
Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) Est, ppm 59
Electrical Conductivity, mmho/cm 0.10
Cations / Anions, me/L 1.0 / 0.8

The following portion is in parts per million:
Sodium, Na 9
Potassium, K < 1
Calcium, Ca 9.7
Magnesium, Mg 1
Total Hardness, CaCO3 29
Nitrate, NO3-N 0.2 (SAFE)
Sulfate, SO4-S 3
Chloride, Cl 3
Carbonate, CO3 < 1.0
Bicarbonate, HCO3 34
Total Alkalinity, CaCO3 28
Total Phosphorus, P 0.20
Total Iron, Fe < 0.01

In my case I consider myself fortunate, I have incredibly soft, slightly acidic water. That is a brewers dream, because I can simply add salts and acids to my profile to replicate the water from somewhere else, or come up with my own profile for a mash. Depending on your water source you could have very hard water. In that case you may need to blend in distilled or Reverse Osmosis filtered water to get the results you need. Or you could use distilled water and build your own water every time. If you aren't using distilled water you need to know what your base minerality is.

Okay, okay. So there are a bunch of numbers, now what do you do with them? The easiest answer is a program called Bru'n water. It isn't even a program, its just an excel spreadsheet you plug your numbers in to. I am not going to go into the program operation, there are how-to's out there already, and it has instructions, they are the very first thing you see.
Once you have opened the spreadsheet you will see tabs at the bottom. tab 0 is instructions, tab 1 is water report input, 2 is sparge acidification (which may not apply to distillers).

Tab 3 is grain bill input, this is especially important if you are using specialty malts. The specialty malts can effect your mash pH dramatically, you also have different pH targets depending on how dark your mash will be. The grain bill itself will act to stabilize the mash, if your water is right to start with. There can be significant saccharification and fermentation performance differences between a mash that runs at 5.2 and one that runs at 5.7. Target the appropriate mash for your SRM.

Tab 4 is water adjustment, if you scroll down on this tab it gives you profiles of many famous brewing/distilling regions.

Tab 5 is the adjustment summary tab: it tells you what to add at what stage of the mash. Consider it your instruction manual. Once you develop your water profile, click save as, and save it so you can reuse it any time you want to adjust your water to that particular profile.

You could also look up a water profile and hand calculate.

The salts and acids used are very common, most of them can be sourced from your local drug store (think Walgreen's in the states). You will need a jewelers or reloaders scale to measure the salts though, we are talking about 1/10th of a gram of a salt so you need a scale with resolution.

Chlorine: If you have Chlorine in your water you NEED to get it out before you start brewing. It is a major problem, in fermentation it will produce chlorophenols (the stuff that numbs your tongue in chloroseptic, tastes like wet band-aid). Easy enough, either boil your water for 10 mins before you get mashing, or pull water the morning before and let it sit to get the chlorine to evaporate. For this reason I do not recommend ever cleaning your components with chlorine bleach. Use an appropriate no rinse sanitizer and something like PBW (there are recipes for cheap PBW, google it)

pH 5.2 stabilizer: Don't use it, don't buy it. The cost of a jar of this puts you well on your way to the cost of a water report. You have to use so much of it to be effective you will end up with nasty flavored mash.

Not everyone needs to make adjustments: You may be somewhere with inherently great water for the type of product you want to create, you may never have a pH issue, in that case you are lucky and this is not for you!

[Bee]

What a great summary! Thanks!

I wish all the Tried & Trues included info on their water. I get the feeling that a lot of them just stumbled on something that works.

[Ben]

I don't think its seen as that important. Since the salts wont transfer out of the still I think the assumption is made that it isn't a big deal. If someone isn't having a problem they can detect they aren't going to dig for an answer.

Fact is good water chemistry = good mash and good ferment. In one sense its basic, and a good place to start if you are having trouble. It's also advanced in the sense that if things are already going well I doubt you are going to see more than a marginal improvement in your product. It's also a good way to improve your consistency between ferments/products, which will allow more focus on the distillation side of the spirit.