With all of that in mind, are there any mineral ‘go-to’s’ that are common? Any to stay away from? Is it basically mix whatever you want until you get the profile style you’re after?
A great place to start is the water profiles in Brunwater. Martin knows his stuff, and they are proven to give good results.
With that said, I just try to keep it simple. Balanced styles are generally 75ppm each of Chloride and Sulfate, although if I feel like tweaking them a bit on the fly, anything within the 50-100ppm range is fair game for me. In those cases I’m typically using just CaCl2 and Gypsum.
For malty styles I generally shoot for 100ppm of Chloride. I use table salt to get up to 20ppm of Sodium, then get the rest of my Chloride from CaCl2. I haven’t played around with Sodium in hoppy beers, but I definitely feel it makes a noticeable difference in malty styles in small amounts.
For hoppy styles I use CaCl2 to 50ppm of Cl- and then go anywhere from 150-300ppm of sulfate. Right now I am only using Gypsum for my sulfate, but playing with Epsom Salts to get some added Magnesium is on my list of things to try.
I talked to Mitch Steele at the NHC and they don’t pay any attention to sulfate at Stone. They brew their IPAs at 165 ppm of Calcium. For what it’s worth…
Dave
At 165 ppm Ca, there is a lot of some other anions in that water…and its probably sulfate. By the way, there are several water districts in San Diego that have fairly mineralized (that means sulfate too) water. There is a decent chance that Stone doesn’t need to add more sulfate to their brewing water.
If one takes the Stone tour they see the big RO system on the wall. They blend tap and RO for the brewing water. There are also bag of CaCL2 and Terra Alba (gypsum) on pallets. How much they add to hit targets for the different beers is something I don’t know. I do know the tap water in Escondido tasted bad!