I am using Bru’n water to build out my water from RO. Right now I am working on a robust porter recipe and I can hit my numbers on the sheet by adding the following minerals,
13.5 g gypsum
9.1 g calcium chloride
12.6 g chalk (to the mash, I actually mixed it in with my grain before mashing in last time)
or
9.8 g pickling lime.
so the first question is why would one choose to use pickling lime over chalk or vice versa?
If it helps, here is the VERY ROUGH draft of the grain bill.
13 lbs US pale malt
3 lbs munich 10L
1 lbs crystal 60
1 lbs chocolate
Chalk does not dissolve readily. You can bubble CO2 through water and chalk to dissolve it. If you have a carbonator cap and a big plasitc drink bottle, you can fill about 3/4 full, add chalk, pressurise with 30 PSI and shake. If all the chalk does not dissolve, vent, add more pressure and shake again. And so on.
Pickling lime dissolves quickly. The OH ions combine with the H ions to form water. The other thing you add is Ca, which does not impact the flavor. I point this out due to the fact that some use baking soda, but that adds Na.
You add chalk to the mash to get some of it to dissolve at mash pH. Even at finished beer pH it doesn’t all dissolve. Try it!
In beer it should dissolve, but the issue according to John Palmer is that the reaction takes a long time. Same for the mash, you are done with the mash before the chalk is all dissolved, that is from a talk he gave at the WEB homebrew competition.
This is more chemistry than this engineer cares to digest - from UC Davis!
Lime packs more “alkalinity punch” than chalk. High amounts of calcium are noticeable, to me, though I’m talking really high amounts. You’d probably be ok with around 10g of lime. Chalk tastes like chalk to me, so I don’t like using it.
If you want to get really fancy, you could use caustic potash. That would just add potassium, which your yeast would probably enjoy. I agree with Hopfen re: baking soda. I don’t care what the question is; in brewing, baking soda is never the answer.
Edited to add my standard pickling lime disclaimer: Gloves and goggles. Use them. That stuff is nasty and gets airborne easily. I use it all the time, and you really don’t want to get it on your skin or in your eyes.
As pointed out above, the problem with chalk is that you can’t get it to dissolve and contribute its theoretical alkalinity. Bru’n Water assumes the chalk IS properly dissolved via CO2 and water and the full theoretical alkalinity is provided. As Kai Troester and AJ DeLange have experimentally confirmed, chalk only delivers about half its theoretical alkalinity when placed in water without proper dissolution with CO2. Some water programs take this into account and they assume half the alkalinity is added when chalk is used this way.
I’ve used chalk in the past and found it to be too unreliable for mash pH control. Lime is highly soluble and it is very complete in neutralizing excess acidity. If you have the capability to measure out the small amounts of lime needed in the typical 5 gal grist, then its a no-brainer for use. Its cheap and its very effective. But its quite hazardous as Nate points out above. Measure and use with care!
I’ve found for mash adjustments it’s good to make large amount of 5% lime solution, and keep that on hand if you need more alkalinity. Once it’s dissolved in water it’s a lot less trouble to handle and dispense, so you’d only need to handle and measure the powder occasionally.
Baking soda contributes a low amount of alkalinity, and contributes relatively high amount of Na. So if you add enough baking soda to change the mash pH, you’ve added a lot (I would argue too much) sodium. If your addition is very small, the amount of sodium would probably not be deleterious, but at that point, you’d probably be better off with a slightly low mash pH rather than the excess sodium.
I don’t think there’s ever a situation where baking soda is the most appropriate base to use to increase alkalinity in a mash.
Try it yourself, if you don’t believe me. Dissolve 100ppm of chalk in water, and dissolve 100ppm of baking soda in a cup of water. Drink the water, then decide which flavor you’d rather have in your beer.
okay, I will look into getting some lime, shouldn’t be hard, the hardware store in town has a good pickling section. So my current scale only has a 1 g precision. and I would guess (I don’t have the sheet available to me right now) that I want ~3 g PL for this next brew. if I am within 1 g of that is that close enough or do I need to get a more exact scale?
Don’t really agree with this, especially since you’re going to get half (or less) of the theoretical bicarbonate contribution of chalk in reality, while baking sodium is readily soluble. According to Palmer, one teaspoon adds about 75 ppm of sodium and 191 ppm of bicarbonate. I’d feel comfortable adding half of this amount to a dark beer when starting with RO water.
At that precision, given how strong of a base lime is, I would probably dissolve 100g of lime in 900ml of water. If Bru’n water tells you to use 9.8 grams, you could then pretty safely use 98ml or 98g of the lime solution, assuming I have my decimals correct.
Adding a gram or two to my mash water only brings the sodium up to around 50ppm according to Bru’n water and it gets my pH and RA in line with what I need. That doesn’t sound like a bad thing to me. Am I wrong here?
YMMV, but from my experience, any sodium is too much sodium. My water contains about 2ppm of sodium. I’ve added NaCl to some of my darker beers, because I read somewhere that sodium rounds out malt sweetness. I’ve found I prefer the beers without added sodium.
Whoa, that’s a lot of sodium. I use CaCl to boost my calcium to around 50ppm, so I don’t think it’s the chloride I find objectionable. When I think San Diego, I think IPA. Maybe sodium is more apparent in certain kinds of beer, and not others? I mostly brew Belgian and German styles, with a few UK styles occasionally.
