Lennie, you are right. But, the raw water from Vienna is exactly that…moderately hard, carbonate rich water. As I point out, brewers still had the capability to alter their water and they did. The other point to consider is the raw Vienna profile could not produce a good amber colored beer, its far too alkaline. This revised profile is most likely what the originators of the Vienna style had to work with.
So then, does my profile look acceptable for an amber colored beer? I will bump the Ca up a tad…
I should add, I am making up this water here in about 30 minutes! 
Kai,
Thanks for the tips! I am a faithful follower of your blog. I love your evidenced based brewing. Allright, enough of the love fest ;D I have actually performed your procedure for my local water and did send it off to Ward labs as well as my tap water and some R/O so I knew my actual water values. I went back and looked at the results and it did work. It took my Ca+ from 61 to 39ppm, HCO3 from 190 to 59, and CaCO3 from 161 to 156. So, it made a difference in my bicarbonate. I am sure I made some errors along the ways… My chemistry is a little rusty from my pre-med days. I do have a GH/KH test per your blog as well, so maybe I will do that test this weekend and match it against the slaked lime test I did earlier.
Martin,
I can’t wait to see how you calculated the post boil numbers and how those stack up against my slaked lime experiment.
Thanks again guys!
[quote]For the love of gawd why don’t someone simply make a stupid calculator that you input your volume (20 gal) and the profile you want to hit and kabam!
[/quote]
FWIW, Ken Schram’s BreWater is exactly that. While it is a flawed calculator in many ways it is the perfect tool for finding the needed salt additions to hit your target profile. You plug in a profile, what salts you’d like to use, and hit cntrl-f then KABLAM.
Alternatively, You could use the ‘solver’ excel plugin with any of the current popular spreadsheets and have if find the best solution by changing only the cells you choose.
Hmm, I never thought of using solver. I might have to play around with that.
Lonnie,
I know this will be 20 20 hindsight b/c you have finished this water build.
But I wonder if you have used Palmers nomograph? Once I learned how
to manipulate the thing, it does a LOT of the drain bamage for me…
Sean pointed me to it at this location…
http://nomograph.babbrewers.com/
Thanks Sean
Thanks for the help fellas… Yea, I have used Palmers nomograph as well.
I basically used the boiled Vienna profile, and bumped up the ca a bit. The brew went great! We will see how it turns out.
If you get a negra modelo ringer, please let me know. I got very close
IMO with an ale yeast believe it or not, colors were indistinguishable
…side by side taste test (blind) the groupo modelo was NOT the preferred beverage.
just sayin.
Ok time for that update Lonnie, What did the beer end up like???
I got my WhiteLabs 940 waiting for the time to make Mex Lager…soon soon…
was gonna make a Negra Modelo wanna be…