Folks, I’m going to give a talk on water at the next homebrew meeting. (I know, I know, but in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king). Basic introduction to pH, salts, using water software and such.
To make the talk more interesting I would like to fiddle with some commercial beers by adding salts, acid and what not, and have people taste. What would be a good scheme? Use simple lager, preboil salts in water and then add a drop or so into each glass or bottle? Which ingredients? What concentrations? Which combinations?
John Palmer did a talk some years back where he brewed a pale beer with a pale profile and a dark profile, and a dark beer with both of those profiles. The samples showed what the correct water could do.
You might do the same by doctoring a pale beer to have a higher pH, and doctoring a dark beer to have a low pH.
If you have a beer that you know the levels of SO4 and Cl, use gypsum and CaCl2 to dose samples with each to the maximum recommeced, or more. Have an undoctored sample as a control that they can go back to. So have a control, max SO4, max Cl to show what those do.
It will be fun and cool, but how do u measure sub milligram worth of salts? Considering that you seldom go above 10-12 grams of any one salt for a full 5 gallon.
I assume this will have many samples to be tasted. As said, use the minerals in a liter or 2 of water and add to beers, or pour a pitcher of beer and dose that quantity. For an IPA I use a lot of gypsum, say 5 grams for 20 liters to keep the numbers easy. So for a one liter sample, that rate is 0.25 grams, and my gram scale goes down to 0.01 grams, so no problem.
If you are a probrewer dealing with multi-barrel batch size, then a scale with 1 gram reporting is OK. But for the typical homebrew-sized batches, you really need to get a scale that reports down to a tenth gram for the mineral additions we deal with. Scales are relatively cheap.