Hot answers tagged water
10
First off, you're going to want to figure out the immersion chiller's flow rate. Depending on your water pressure, tube length, and tube diameter, I think it could range anywhere from 1 gallon a minute to 10 gallons a minute.
You can approximate it's output by timing how long it takes you to fill your carboy with a garden hose or sink, whichever applies to ...
9
I would strongly recommend brown glass bottles for bottling (hey why not ditch bottles and switch to kegging!). As mentioned there are many potential issues with reusing plastic bottles.
Water Bottles are not designed to hold pressure. I keep my kegs around 11PSI. Homebrewers always recommend to be careful with naturally carbed bottles as they might ...
9
The caps are not perfectly smooth - they contain nucleation points, imperfections or dirt along the surface, where a bubble could form (similar to how boils are formed at nucleation points when heating water). As the cold water heats up, dissolved gasses are forced out of solution. Some of this gas dissipates, but some of it will attach to the nucleation ...
7
There certainly isn't any harm on doing it at bottling. You just don't want to do it prior to bottling. Adding straight water to the beer might oxidize the beer. I'd just recommend that you boil the water for a good 15 minutes first to drive off any oxygen that's in the water. If you don't then that O2 will mix and oxidize the beer. I'd boil for 15, ...
6
Doing a full-wort boil (all 5 gallons) offers a few technical advantages over partial-wort boils. There are a number of reactions that depend on the concentration of wort.
First, the wort-darkening reactions are more pronounced at a smaller volume meaning your wort will come out a little darker than you expect.
Second and more importantly, the rate of hop ...
5
I wouldn't bother, unless you have a specific reason. If you think the beer is too strong and needs to be watered down, go for it. If you are worried because you are a half gallon off, but the beer tastes fine, don't worry about it! I've often been off by a quart or two, and the beer still came out great.
If you do decide to add water, be very careful. Make ...
5
I used strips for years before I got a meter. They can work well, but I recommend only using the colorPhast strips, which are pretty expensive. The cheaper ones just aren't accurate I've found. I now use pH meter. Don't get a cheapo meter...you'll just be wasting your money. Your pH should be 5.2-5.4 measured at room temp (around 70F). I use lactic or ...
5
Yes, definitely.
A good resource on water chemistry is sections 15.0 to 15.4 of Palmer's How to Brew:
http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter15.html
Generally speaking:
High bicarbonate (CO3) water has a higher alkalinity. Using water high in bicarbonates to make a pale beer such as Pilsner will yield a 'harsh' bitterness. This type of water tends to ...
4
The answer to your question is very much dependent on the water chemistry of the water you are using now. If you have alkaline water you will find that you'll have the most success with beers using roasted malts because the acidity in the malt will bring down the mash pH to the correct level (5.2-5.4). Lighter beers will be harder to brew due to your mash pH ...
4
Okay, well there are a few things to consider.
How big is your pot? If you don't have the headroom to handle the inevitable foam, you will have a mess.
Can you easily chill five gallons of wort without using a cold water additive? If you don't have a wort chiller, this can be a big issue.
The amount of wort you boil, the specific gravity of that wort, ...
4
Since you intend to build your water from scratch, I recommend you take a look at Martin Brungard's excellent (and free!) water spreadsheet at https://sites.google.com/site/brunwater/ . Not only will it help you to figure out what minerals you need for each beer style, there's a great water tutorial section in it.
4
In short, most early extract recipes work off the concentrated boil process as you have noticed. But if you have the ability to boil AND COOL 5 whole gallons then go for it.
Keep in mind one of the main reasons often overlooked for the concentrated boil is to use very cold water or iced water for the other two gallons to get to pitching temps.
You could ...
4
Your brew will definite taste salty with that quantity of minerals added. I would use a third of that amount. 150ppm calcium and 250ppm sulphates is really the upper limit of what you can comfortably use in the beer, and you will still taste a little salt up front, but often it goes with the style.
Here are some guidelines from the HBT wiki,
...
4
The most important parameter in water is residual alkalinity. It's the thing that determines what kind of beer you can brew and what adjustments you need to make for beer styles that aren't suited to your untreated water.
"How to brew" explains how to calculate it, how it is related to beer color and how to correct it.
3
http://www.amazon.com/Granulated-Activated-Carbon-1-cu-ft/dp/B0017677O8
You could probably also use the products labeled for treating ponds or fish tanks, since AFAIK it's all the same carbon - usually made from coconut shells. For water filtering, especially if you're using a gravity-feed, look for 12x40 or 8x30 grain sizes.
To use it, I would just make ...
3
Wow, that average pH is low compared to my water just over here in the Pittsburgh suburbs. Mine is 8.3. Your water is pretty neutral, mine is alkaline.
Anyways, here's my suggestion: Don't adjust your water this time. Water adjustment is a pretty technical topic and if you want to start doing it, be prepared to experiment. I recently switched to all ...
3
In a nutshell, distilled water is great for extract brewing since the extract has all the minerals in it from when it's made. In general, you want to have 50-100 ppm of Ca available for the yeast. It also aids the clarity of the beer. For hoppy beers, you can use CaSO4 for this. You can add it to the mash if you need to lower the mash pH, or just add it ...
3
Chloramines or Chlorine will give your beer a medicinal or band-aid type of flavor. The chloramine reacts with phenols in the fermenting beer to create this off flavor. The easiest way to get rid of the chloramine is to run it through a block carbon filter. You could also use the Britta type filters but these don't work quite as well as the block carbon ...
3
A city water report is the first place to look, but given where your city gets it's water, the values can fluctuate pretty significantly. For example, my city gets water from a few sources; sometimes they'll mix in well water, and thus the water has higher hardness, or they might be taking surface water shortly after a fresh rain.
The question to also ask ...
3
If you have city water, they usually sent out a water profile a couple of times a year. It will be an average of the whole city, but it'll give you a general idea of what you're dealing with.
You can also send your water away to a lab to get tested. I've never bothered, so you'll need to find a reputable lab.
3
You're right - you need minerals! Different minerals in the brewing water perform a number of roles througout the brewing process:
mashing: during the mash, minerals are used to adjust the pH - around 5.2 is considered a comprimise between the pH ranges favored by alpha and beta amylase. Chalk (Calcium Carbonate) and Baking soda (Calcium Hydrogen ...
3
In the strictest sense, yes. You just need a container that will hold pressure.
However, plastic scratches more easily than glass, which means they could be harboring wild yeast or bacteria that are very difficult to remove. Also, most beer bottles are brown glass because that particular color blocks most of the wavelengths of light that cause the ...
3
Fluoride isn't easily removed by boiling. Using an activated charcoal filter system is the most efficient way to remove it (Pur or Brita are common ones, I use the Brita).
You have to distill the water to remove the fluoride with temperature-based methods.
But I am not aware of any negative effects of fluoride on brewing other than if the concentration ...
3
Martin Brungard's excellent water spreadsheet (free at sites.google.com/site/brunwater/) not only will help you calculate what type of water you need for a particular beer, it also has a great section on water in general that should answer many of your questions. Your city water report may not give you all the info you need. For a complete analysis that ...
3
If you are using malt extract, you are probably best off using all Reverse Osmosis or Distilled water. The extract is boiled in water with appropriate mineral levels for most beer styles, so you have no need to add any more minerals to the process. The mineral figures in the chart seem kind of high to me, and will impact the taste. It's fairly easy even as a ...
3
I think you're on the mark. a minimum of 50ppm is considered beneficial, while some water sources have in excess of 250ppm with no problems, such as Burton (295ppm) and Vienna (250ppm) water. But since you want to reduce the amount of pH reduction, your plan to add only 50ppm in the mash and put the rest in the boil is a good one.
Calcium plays a role in ...
3
I use either lactic or phosphoric acid to reduce pH. You can also use acid malt. I think the absolute best water calculator around is Bru'nwater (https://sites.google.com/site/brunwater/). Its author, Martin Brungard, is a professional water engineer who has done work for many large breweries, including Sierra Nevada. It also has a great section on water ...
3
There's no risk of microbial contamination from anything you add before or during the boil. The act of boiling itself will sufficiently purify the water.
Water that you add at the end of the boil is a slightly different story. For the majority of people in the majority of circumstances, adding clean and unboiled water is no problem so long as it has been ...
2
Short answer: yes.
Longer answer is more complicated; sufficiently hard water will cause all sorts of hilarity during the brewing process. Remember, this is dealing with organic chemistry and living things doing our bidding, therefore difficult (for me) to fully understand. There's a great resource available from the Brewer's Friend that I'd strongly ...
2
Safe answer is to boil every bit of water that touches your fermenter. But that's sometimes overkill.
If you have a well like I do, follow the boil rule. Even if the well water checks out clean, they're only looking for coliform, not other things, and even though I have a UV sterilization unit to kill bacteria, there is no residual sanitizing effect in ...
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