Looking for Help Understanding My Water

[Kaiser]

Oh I have the salts, but the reason I ask is because of my so4 and Mg levels. My sulfate is high compared to my Cl, but my Mg and Ca are very low Ca 10. with this supplement, which has both Ca citrate and Carbonate, I could raise the two witout affecting so4.

You have 3 salts to bump calcium: Gypsum, Calcium Chloride, Calcium Carbonate. You can't add calcium w/o also adding an anion. If you don't want to raise sulfate you'll need to add calcium chloride. Technically you can also add Calcium Carbonate, but that will raise your pH and in most cases you want to avoid that.

Don't worry about Mg. Most of what the yeast needs is coming from the malt. I don't add Mg to my water anymore. Mg only needs attention when it is too high.

Kai

[mabrungard]

I'm with Kai on the Mg issue. Don't add it unless you really want its bittering effect. If its too high (somewhere north of 30 ppm), then the brewer probably needs to take measures to reduce its concentration to avoid the bittering and harshness it may produce.

The calcium citrate use is interesting, but I would be concerned with the flavor effect of the citrate ion. This is the same issue when using citric acid...it can flavor the beer. If sulfate is too high in the tap water, dilute with RO or distilled to bring that concentration down. Trying to back-door the sulfate issue by using calcium citrate is probably going to screw up the beer.

[brewindruid]

I want to make sure Barleypopmaker is straight before we go on, I really feel like I took over and I didn't mean to do that. Though now we have two of the best water experts on the forum now.
I would vote for a water sticky, especially with the esteemed crew present!

What about a universal style base line, is that even possible? One simple profile that will work for all but the most demanding style? I think Palmer has hinted at some "ideals", didn't he?

[barleypopmaker]

I'm good for now. I've got to go over the spreadsheets and so on. But if I have any other questions I will post them. Earlier you asked

I would be curious to know if you felt like your IPAs lacked snap,

and I never answered that. It's funny you ask because generally I don't brew a lot of what I call bracingly bitter IPA's. For several years when I have done IPA's I have used the hop bursting method so I would get the tons of hop flavor and aroma, without the bracing bitterness. I always preferred what I called a soft bitterness to my IPA's. When I started using this water I brewed an all grain pale ale kit from Northern Brewer and bumped it up a few notches to make it an IPA (it was the breakwater pale ale I tweaked) and I found that even without hop bursting the beer, the beer had that same soft rounded bitterness I preferred. The beer turned out fantastic in my opinion and even took a 3rd place and 1st place in a long running competiton here in WI when I entered it as a Pale Ale and and IPA. It took the 1st as an IPA and 3rd as a Pale. I also made an American Amber ale with the same results as far as the hop profile goes. Honestly I never thought it was the water that giving me that more rounded bitterness. That's great to know and I'm glad you pointed that out to me. I was just thinking it was the hop crop was not what it was in previous years. I will be kegging the first stout I've made since I started using this water and am interested to see the results.

[brewindruid]

I think when you are making beer as good as yours that water profile is like the last frontier. I have learned a ton from A.J. and Kai, Martin, and Palmer, and I have to be careful about doing the overboard thing. I made an excellent ESB, but there was something about it that I thought could be better,first thing I thought was water and that is because I had the water thing on my mind, variable control and all!
I would say if it aint borke don't fix it!. Everything you add or dilute effects the overall balance, and it can make things confusing as hell if you aren't careful!
If I were gong to brew a style where my water might really have a large impact, I might do I couple of test batches, one with the change, one without.
Another interesting thing that crossed my mind is that we may shoot for BoT water, but how do we know those district brewers don't adjust that water? It my Scottish Ales book, historically, they were very aware of water impact just form up and down the street. So it wasn't necessarily just lets use whatever comes out of the ground or local river, know what I mean.