Ever the studious brewer, I’ve come across the concept of oxalate. If I’m understanding this right, you want enough calcium in the mash so that it precipitates during the mash and doesn’t end up in your kegs, fermenters etc. my questions are;
What effect if any does it have on your overall beer profile like flavor, ph, water profile (softens, hardens etc) if it doesn’t precipitate? Would a recipe become all out of wack?
If the malt itself has enough calcium for things such as yeast why do we require more for oxalates?
The reason you want to remove oxalate is because it forms beer stone, which you do not want in kegs or fermenters because it shields microbes from chemical sanitizers. It has nothing to do with flavor or pH or whatnot.
It appears that if your water has at least 40 ppm of calcium in it, that will be high enough to get the calcium oxalate to precipitate in the mash tun. The 50 ppm Ca target is conveniently high enough to keep this from being a problem to most brewers.
