Cold or hot?
IIRC it is better to add salts cold. I can’t put my finger on where I read it. However this big brew day for 5/6 I wanted to treat my RO prior to getting packed up. I forsee disaster trying to measure to the .01g in a parking lot in the elements. However is there any concerns to doing this in the plastic 5 gallon jugs the morning of? Should I hold off on acidifying my Water?
I feel like I know the answer but I can’t find my reference. So, buddies… help a brother out?
They’ll go into solution more readily when warm, but with the amounts added, I’m sure most salts will be in solution if you just let them sit overnight. Gypsum is the only one I’d wonder about. Just give the water a swirl before fully decanting to make sure anything not in solution is at least suspended and you should be good.
From experience, I’ve had issues with minerals clumping up (gypsum in particular) and not wanting to dissolve when added to cold water. These clumps are a pain to break up, and at times I’ve just given up and doughed in with them still being present. My general practice is to add everything once the water is above 100ish degrees. I’ve had no issues with minerals falling back out of suspension at times when the water has cooled back off.
For brewing at other places, I just pull a blender bottle worth of water from the mash/sparge volumes, nuke it in the microwave for a minute or so, add my minerals and mix to dissolve. Then I just add that to the main volume when brewing.
If you dissolve it ahead of time then it will be fine.
I believe Martin has said to add them prior to heating. Hopefully he’ll clarify or correct.
Warm water dissolves better, but why not just package up your salts the night before and bring them with you already measured out?
Yeah, I always weigh mine out and put in ziplocs the night before (hops, too).
I opted against this method for one reason: If I got pulled over it would be a lot easier to explain the baggies of hops if there aren’t bags of a white powdery substance right next to them…
The relatively minor concentrations that we brewers use in our water require small mineral doses that will dissolve in either hot or cold water. However, I’ve found that you can’t just dump minerals into the water and expect them to dissolve from the pile they are in. You do have to stir them up to suspend them in the water and then they will dissolve fairly quickly. Less than a minute of stirring works well for me.