What is an appropriate water profile for a Marzen/Oktoberfest beer? I’m leaning towards amber balanced. Considering amber dry but want to avoid the bitterness.
Suggestions
Thanks!
https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=6832.0
I’d like to add to the above concerning software to determine water mineral additions: the first time you brew with certain preset additions recommended by the software designer will probably not be the final solution. Like IBU, the numbers are a reference point to start from. Each of us is different in our preferences and perceptions of our beers.
For example, 40 IBU called out in a recipe, calculated by a beer design program of choice, is perceived by one brewer as plenty of hops but for another as not near enough.
Likewise, the preset additions in the water software may not give the final desired results. It’ll get you started and definitely in the ballpark, but a bit more of this or a bit more of that discovered thru trial and error to nail down a profile to your preference will probably be required.
Good points,for sure. Here is a recent podcast that speaks simply but fairly completely on the subject of water salts. My only disagreement with their conclusions is their suggestion that an RO system is not advisable for Homebrewers, because they won’t know when their filters are in need of replacement and if their water mineral content has drifted. My home system is used only for my brewing and has a meter to read total dissolved solids, so I simply rely on that. Below 20 TDS is a pretty low mineral water that I can rely on to adjust and brew with, or so it seems anyway.
https://www.experimentalbrew.com/podcast/brew-files-episode-86-water-primer
Water Profiles are a rabbit hole just waiting to be fallen into. No two software sources canned water profiles will likely find a match, and this may well be an indication of just how arbitrary they actually are. When it comes to water profiles, vague subjectivity and loose equivocations abound, and hard objective truth is not easy to come by within this arena. In fact, there is likely to be little to no objective truth to be found within it.
In addition to this one often finds advice like “you need at least 50 ppm calcium in your mash water”. In a world where you mash and sparge and I don’t sparge at all, my mash water at 50 ppm calcium may well contain twice the calcium of your water on a mass basis. Yet both of us are targeting “precisely” 50 ppm for some mysterious reason. This shows that measuring mineralization itself via units of ppm (mg/L) is purely a voodo science.