Good article and I follow the recipe. Where I had questions is where the author gives the water profile for Grodzisk. It is very hard and very alkaline.
One has to wonder if they treated the water to make a beer with just wheat malt and finished color given as 3oL (SRM?) in the recipe. That water looks a lot like my tap water, so I would think the RA is in the 150 to 200 range. I smoked wheat malt and made on last year with the ‘yellow’ profile from Brunwater.
Any ideas? I might shoot an e-mail off the the editors and see if the author can respond.
The New Brewer magazine lists the water profile in the July/August issue. They actually have two profiles from wells at the original Grodzisk brewery. The following are for the two wells, in ppm:
Ca 122, 121
Mg 34, 31
Na 39, 32
SO4 183, 145
Cl 81, 67
Alkalinity as CaCO3 350, 325
My water has similar alkalinity, so I just adjusted the minerals up to close to these levels and used phosphoric acid to get my pH right for the mash.
I haven’t read the Zymurgy article yet, so don’t know what details are or aren’t in there. The New Brewer article is pretty thorough, so let me know if you need anything else.
I’ve been really excited to try to make one of these and kept putting it off because I haven’t smoked my own malt yet. The article turned me on to the Weyermann oak smoked wheat malt which Country Malt carries. I’ve got a bag of it and soon I hope to make up a batch of it.
I know that the water at the Choc Brewery in McAlester, OK is very soft, so they had to seriously modified it to as closely emulate the Grodzisk water as possible. I’m brewing another batch over the holidays using the Weyermann Weizenrauchmalz, the Polish Ale yeast & some of the brewery’s water. I’ll let you know how it comes out! Did I send you a bottle of Choc Grätzer? What’d you guys think?
Will do! I’ll have to send you & Susan a couple of fresh bottles of the Choc Grätzer for “evaluation” purposes. I was given part of an open bag from the brewery and have just enough for another batch!
