As I’ve mentioned in other threads I’ve wanted for a long time to understand why my IPAs are substandard (according to me). After Denny shot holes in my lower boil idea, I continued reading, listening to podcasts and searching for answers. I don’t think I have just one problem, I suspect there’s several. While searching last week I found a folder on an old computer that had my very first Bru’nWater spreadsheets I used on a couple batches before I got the paid version. It so happens they were IPAs (and good ones). My lack of “knowledge” evidently was a good thing. :D Once I got the new paid version, I parked the free version files in a separate folder and decided to ignore them. Till now.
Listening to a BeerSmith podcast yesterday I heard a mention of sulfate to chloride ratio potentially being a concern when doing highly hopped beers. This is something I never considered before, and wondered how common it is for folks to chase that. I am considering trying another batch with a lower pH and more gypsum than calcium chloride. My method in the past has just been to massage the numbers till the adjustment cells are generally green, with perhaps a few yellow ones in there, but the final water profile all green.
My version of Bru’nWater is quite old (V3.0 is says on the reports, but I noticed it says 3.4 on at least one of the spreadsheet tabs). Regardless, I am obviously not going to post up copies of my paid BW. I’m not sure I could if I wanted to. Images I post won’t show here due to me not paying for a security certificate, so screenshots are not much use. I did PM Martin last week to ask this but he may not monitor PMs and might also not respond to same for obvious time reasons. I said in the pm I understand such a stance so that’s no big deal.
It goes without saying, if I listen to enough interviews or read enough web pages, opinions differ on proper ion concentrations for differing styles. It seems like many folks simply jack up the calcium one way or another without regard to balancing ions and that seems to work too. Or at least they say it does. And this goes for some pretty big names in the commercial brewing world, so I don’t just dismiss that.
I do not have issues with pH control and consistency. I can hit those numbers with astonishing accuracy. What I don’t know is if the numbers I’m shooting for are ideal.
To give a humorous example of what I perceive, let’s say we take 8 oz of magnum and throw it in a boil for 15 minutes. Pull those hops and throw that wort away and stick the hops in a new kettle and boil 90 minutes more. Now be sure all that stuff goes in the fermenter too. Make sure to get all the undesirable characteristics in the wort with none of the desirable. It’s more or less how I feel about it. Maybe I should be intentionally shooting for an even lower pH, IDK. I didn’t have a meter for quite a while when I first used BW, so I can’t say what those pH numbers were then. They were probably super close to the estimated 5.2-5.45 (various brews I’d change up). They’re consistent enough today that I rarely check any more. I’ve wasted enough buffer solution, distilled water and time double checking, only to find out it’s right on and I wasted my time.
Last question here is, my BW has 2 water profile check areas. One is mash water profile and the other is finished water profile. I have always concentrated on the finished water profile to make sure it was within tolerance, allowing the mash water profile to be the one with yellow cells if there wasn’t a way to balance those. Is that a fundamental mistake for an IPA?