Brisbane water treat

[#brewlife]

hey guys,
Bit confused with the conflicting info about water treatment out there. Just looking for some advise for water treatment pre strike to get the mash Ph down to 5.4-5.2. Will also use this for sparge. I’m not sure about adding citric acid as you can taste it. Any ither advice without getting too involved?

 

[garage_life]

Best budget option is to use pH test strips and acidated malt to adjust pH. On the other hand buy a pH meter and RO water filter and add minerals / lactic acid as needed for you desired profile, citric works too but adds the taste as you mentioned. Tap water quality varies from area to area even within Brisbane and weather events like the recent rain also effect the town water composition and it's impossible to get live data without testing yourself.
That being said, I've been using the bru'n water spreadsheet and old water data to approximate my filtered tap water and have had pretty good results.

 

[user 37368]

Get the $10 ph meter off ebay, keep the calibration mix in a jar it's reusable.

It might only work a dozen times but you can compare it to the various recipe calculators every 3 to 5 brews to keep a check on how accurate they are for your water.

 

[#brewlife]

Will the acidulated malt at max 4% get the mash ph down to 4.2-4.4ish?

What about doing some pretreatment of the strike water with 1tsp of calcium chloride and 1/2 tsp of calcium sulphate, maybe lactic acid to drop mash if its still high?

 

[chesl73]

I assume you mean 5.4 mash PH, not 4.4...the acidulated malt drops PH by 0.1 for every 1%. You can use BrunWater or other brewing software to give you an estimated mash PH which depending on what you brew might say something like 5.7 and hence you can then add 4% to get it to a nice pH of 5.3.

 

[chesl73]

BrunWater will take into account your mineral additions when working out your estimated pH

 

[RobinW]

I spent a lot of time with ph strips, meters, acid etc and eventually gave it all the arse.
Don't matter what you do, so long as beer comes out.
We're not running a commercial enterprise here.

That said, I use RO water to make it. I can mineralise it anyway I want.
Beersmith tells me what to add.

 

[chesl73]

I bought a fairly cheap pH meter from ebay and it works well and so adding a few mls of acid and checking the mash pH after 15 mins isn't really much of an effort. And once you've done it a few times you don't need to measure it every time.

 

[Rocker1986]

I got sick of trying to guess what to add to the water as well, most of the time the water profile in Brisbane is pretty stable but when you have events like this rain the past week, if it ends up falling on the dam catchment areas which are full of limestone then it causes the water to go temporarily harder. Or at least it did when my dad was working as an industrial chemist where they constantly tested the town water, but in those days Wivenhoe Dam wasn't built yet. The effect now might not be as high as it was back then with the larger amount of water storage, although I have seen one water report which detailed samples taken weekly over a period of time and there were spikes in the mineral content from time to time, which if I remember rightly did line up with not long after big rain events out that way.

In any case, I've recently switched to using distilled water and adding minerals to it to suit the style I'm brewing, which has given me great results so far. I've been doing this for a few years with pilsners but decided to expand to all beers to see how it would fare. I make the water myself so I'm not spending a crapload buying it. The only recipe I use town water on now is my red ale, after playing around with the water a bit I found the plain old tap water worked the best in that beer.