Recently switched to fly sparging - third batch this weekend on my new setup. My question is how do I add my water adjustment salts to my sparge?
You can’t add them to the HLT (not very soluble - they just sink and stick to the bottom of the kettle) and you can’t still the mash at the point of sparging since it will disturb the grain bed, plus you still have the first wort in there.
With batch sparging, I would just throw the salts on top of the mash, add the sparge water and then stir.
hmm - I don’t really know - I just follow Martin’s spreadsheet, but I never questioned if it was because of flavor or pH. I use RO water and build up from there.
Maybe I did not stir enough - my HLT was at about 160 when I added then and I stirred from a minute or so and the water became milky, so I stopped. But when the HLT was dry, there was a lot of salts precipitated on the bottom.
Try taking the salts out in bru’n water then check the mash ph on the mash acidification and sparge acidification sheets. unless you are doing a very light colored beer it’s probably not a huge issue pH wise and you could add them to the kettle. but stirring your sparge water really well should get the salts to disolve, unless you are using chalk, that doesn’t like to disolve at all.
Except for chalk, I think the salts should be pretty soluble in water. But, you shouldn’t be adding chalk to your sparge water anyway. I’ve never noticed a problem getting them to disolve in the hlt with just some gentle stirring.
Gypsum will dissolve more readily in cold water. Try adding the salts to cold water. The others you have will dissolve readily. You don’t want to add chalk or baking soda to the sparge water, as you want to keep the mash pH from going up. I do adjust the sparge water to around 5.5 pH with acid.
Why not add those to the kettle and adjust the sparge water with acid if necessary? Obviously, the pragmatic solution would be to go back to batch sparging!
I’ve lately been mashing all the base malts, adjusted to proper pH with acid, capping the finished mash with crystal and roast malts if any, then adding salts in the kettle, like Denny suggested. I add a little acid to the sparge water so the mash pH doesn’t rise during sparging.
I wondered recently if I could add the salts for flavor after I had the beer in kegs. This way I could make 10 gallons of pilsner, then turn half into a Dort Export with salts.
Flavor salts work with food…
I’ve tried this without a lot of luck. No matter what, there always seems to be some gypsum that settles out when I first add it to my strike water. Eventually, after a few rounds of stirring and letting it settle, it all goes into solution.
That has me thinking - for darker styles, if you waited until the sparge to add your color malts, would that provide enough buffer capacity where you wouldn’t need to further acidify your sparge water?
All the typical salts that you would be adding to sparging water will dissolve, even in hot water. You may not have mixed enough.
I did just that with my last batch…didn’t stir enough to get them dissolved. I’ve made this batch before, so I know that the salts had dissolved before. The problem is that I have a new electronical, fancy-pants HLT and all I have to do is fill it with the proper amount of water and turn on the power. I need to slow down and stir a little more and make sure the salts are dissolved!
But as tygo said, you can always just throw them into the kettle.
