Beer Forum

This feels strange. I'm usually answering questions here.

My question involves the use of campden tablets to deal with chloramines in the brewing water. These can be either potassium or sodium metabisulfite. Does it matter which you use for chloramine treatment? Related to that, I do have some pot met powder here but no campden tablets. I have read that the powder is more concentrated than the tablets (fillers in the tablets?) so what would be an appropriate amount to use to treat 5 gallons of water? I do have a gram scale suitable for weighing out cocaine so it should be good for this.

Thanks for the help.

Wayne

Hey Wayne,
Here's an answer AJ provided for me, checkout his website at www.wetnewf.org . The link to his paper on chloramine reduction is http://ajdel.wetnewf.org:81/Brewing_art ... lorine.pdf . The equivelance you are looking for is in this paper. I don't remember the exact weights, but he answered my questions about this a couple of weeks ago.

hope this helps,
Alan

Thanks! Most of the math in that gave me a headache but I see my computations are on the right track. The amount I figured appears to be a bit low, but many other brewers using the same water without treatment seem to be brewing acceptable beer. I will be brewing after work tomorrow and will give this a shot.

Wayne

It's been a bit since I've looked at that AJ paper, but I generally go off the recommended amounts for K meta vs campden for dosing recommendations. I believe it's 1 tab or 1/4 tsp, so based on what I've heard of 1 tab being good for 20 gal of water, 1/16 of K meta should be the equivalent, or there about.

As far as differences between Na and K, as I recall, K is preferred largely on the basis of not adding extra Na to the wort.