Do I have to use co2 to dissolve the chalk for building my water? How do you add chalk?
Check out Kai’s site:
http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php/Building_brewing_water_with_dissolved_chalk
The carbonator cap method that is shown on Kai’s website is a good way to go. You can dissolve a lot of chalk into a volume of water that way.
One thing that the website mentions that you shouldn’t do is add chalk (or any alkalinity source) to sparging water. Sparging water MUST have low alkalinity to reduce the potential for leaching tannins from the grist. We use pH goals for sparging water, but that is just an indirect indicator of alkalinity reduction that is the real result. If you use RO or distilled water, you don’t have to adjust its pH for use as sparging water since its alkalinity is already low.
I use either a keg or a liter soda bottle full of 1/2 gallon of distilled or DI water
and charge it up with lots of CO2 gas to get the carbonic acid happening.
of course I add the chalk to the water first then the gas…makes for good
results dissolving that material. Into the mash water that saturated solution goes
By the way when properly dissolving chalk in carbonated water, the full alkalinity of the chalk is obtained. To my knowledge, only Palmer’s sheet and Bru’n Water calculate the correct amount of bicarbonate added to the water under this condition. Most water calculators calculate roughly half the actual alkalinity that is provided by the fully dissolved chalk. That half number is a decent approximation of the bicarbonate increase when the chalk isn’t fully dissolved.