bru'n water alkalinity

General Homebrew Discussion
21

Hm, brewing a porter on Sunday. I’ll buy water at the supermarket for now, until I get this alkalinity stuff sorted out. Unfortunately supermarkets don’t sell RO water, but they do have decent mineral water. Just a bit expensive…

22

Would it make sense to dilute the tap water with, say, same amount of mineral water?

23

Not really.  Minerals are the problem.  You want to dilute it with distilled.

24

Not even with this composition? It’s very soft, suited for babies.

amount per 100 l

salt 0.0008g
Calcium 0.4mg
chloride 0.08mg
Fluoride 0.01mg
Magnesium 0.1mg
Potassium 0.08mg
Sodium 0.0003g

25

Sorry I don’t really know how those translate into measurements I’d use in Bru’n Water.

26

But I may have been off base with the minerals are the problem comment.  Alkalinity is your problem, right?  Do you know the alkalinity of the mineral water?

27

From the content of that mineral water, all that would contribute to alkalinity are very low.

28

In mg/liter:
Ca = 4
Mg = 1
Na = 3
K = 0,8
HCO3 = 23,4
SiO2 = 19
Cl = 0,8

pH = 6,7

29

so you can plug that into bru’nwater as PPM. thats water you can work with. is it expensive?

30

33 dollar cents per liter.

31

Good price.  $1.24 a gal

32

Plus the price of a broken back.

33

To get me back on topic…

For all practical purposes 1 mg/liter=1 ppm.

34

Aha, I KNEW that!  8)

35

As I mentioned earlier, blending that with tap water (high alkalinity) with RO (or spring water in this case) should get you close to a good mash pH for that porter. Bru’n can help you with the dilution factor… and since you know some of the ion concentrations, you could edit the RO or DI line on the Water Input page.

36

Last I saw Real Ale was only doing tours on Friday and Saturday. They put some good stuff out for samples on the tour so it’s worth going out there any time it isn’t 100+ outside.

37

You have a spreadsheet walkthrough!!! Maybe there IS a beergod above!

38

OK, with the help of http://accidentalis.com/archives/275, I managed to fill in the spreadsheet with the spring water data and have the adjustments generated for a porter. I actually had to add baking soda to increase the alkalinity, so next time I brew a dark beer I will look for a blend between tap water and spring water…

There may now even be some small parts of water chemistry that I actually understand. That’s maybe.

Thanks for the help!

39

Cool. Glad that helped.