For my upcoming beer there is 7.94 gallons of water needed, let’s call it 8.
Using a brew calculator the mash thickness is set to 1.33 qt/lb. My good pal Jonathan mentioned to use 2 qt/lb on this.
The difference between the two gives me 3.39 strike and 4.55 sparge for the 1.33 figure. The other gives me 5.10 and 2.84 respectively.
What are your thoughts? Can I just do 4 and 4? I’m concerned with not being able to measure these volumes close enough and I want to be able to add my gypsum and Calc. Chl. in equal enough portions to the water volumes.
Either way I plan on heating these separately as I think it’s more fuel efficient.
As long as the 4 and 4 leaves you at or above 1.1 qts/lb, you could do that and be fine. I like to go upwards of 2 qts/lb (usually ~ 1.8 qts/lb) for 2 reasons - a little better efficiency, and it gives you an easier lauter using a thinner mash. But like you said just be sure to scale your water salt additions for that amount of mash water.
+1 I tend to balance my mash and sparge water so that I get roughly equal collection from both. as said, enough volume for each makes for good runoff/lauter. Im usually 1.6-1.8qts/lb.
You’re over thinking it. If you’re batch sparging, use whatever mash ratio you like. I usually go for 1.65-2 qt./lb. After you runoff your mash, measure how much wort you have. Subtract that from the amount you want to boil. The answer you get is how much sparge water to use.
Denny,
That makes sense…however, there is still the issue of adding the correct amount of water additives. Anything outside of 5 gallons of 2.5 gallons might be a struggle for me to calculate.
Well, you can easily calculate additions for the mash before you start since you’ll know the volume. After the mash, you’ll know how much sparge water to use, so you can calculate those additions then. BTW, I made award winning beers for nearly 15 years before I ever touched a water addition. IMO, it’s important, but mostly in the sense of getting the last 5% of improvement in your beer. Other things make a lot more difference. I’m not saying don’t do them, but I certainly wouldn’t worry a lot about it at this point in your brewing.
Denny, thanks for that. For whatever reason I thought the water was WAY more important. I ended up paying over a dollar a gallon for distilled. Trust me, I’ll be switching to tap water ASAP.
While I agree that the minutia of mineral additions isn’t critical early on in the game, you should at least be sure that A) your tap water tastes good and is free of chlorine/chloramine and B) you hit an acceptable pH for the mash.
You’re going to want to get a sample of your water analyzed eventually, sooner if it’s particularly hard water.
Get an analysis of your tap water from ward Labs. But in general, if it tastes good it’s close enough for a start. If you make a hoppy beer (APA, AIPA) toss a tsp. or so of gypsum in the kettle. You may find eventually that very light or very dark beers are better with some additions, but for now just worry about your brewing techniques. Of course, if your water has chlorine or chloramine you should remove it, but that’s easy.
I do have great tasting tap water, unfortunately it’s running through a filter/ water softener unit. So I thought it may be better to use distilled w. the additions over that. What do you think?
And generally, bulk RO is cheaper than and more readily available than bulk distilled. Just picked up 10g for tomorrow’s brew day for $3.90 and I will have to add maybe $0.20 worth of additions.
In general you want to avoid water from a softener becasue ot may have a high level of sodium. Filter may be OK. I’d send a pre softener sample to Ward and see what they say.