PH Mash Adjustments

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Crusty

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I'm getting a bit more serious this year with my brewing & I've purchased a pretty decent PH meter to actually start checking the PH of my mash. What do I need for PH up or down & where are you guys getting it from?
I hear quite a lot of salt addition talk as well
Is there a spreadsheet somewhere that gives you a guide of how much of what chemical to add to bring the PH up or down that will also calculate the mash volume.
ie: How much of what chemical do I add to go from PH 5.8 to 5.5 with 5.080kg of grain & 29.53lt of strike water ( 34.61lt total mash )

Cheers.
 
Not such a simple question Crusty but I'll try and keep the answer simple and then direct you to some more complicated references.

First it is the pH of the MASH rather than the water that you want to alter and you can do this with calcium salts (namely calcium sulphate and calcium choride). These will drop pH. Dark grains will drop pH. Acid will also drop pH - commonly used are lactic, phosphoric and citric.

Calcium salts will also contribute to flavour and other things - calcium is good for yeast health, efficiency, foam stability. Sulphate will help brighten hop profile but is generally avoided in dark beers and chloride will help push malt flavours.

Too much of anything is never good.

Try and start with soft water and build the mineral profile you want for the beer you are making. Add salts for flavour, assess the pH then adjust with acid if necessary. You should be able to get salts and food grade acids from good AG homebrew places like craftbrewer, grain and grape, MHB etc.

You can also get things like magnesium sulphate and calcium carbonate, neither of which I recommend. Calcium carbonate will raise pH and is only ever used in really dark beers due to the acidity of dark grains but its actual efficacy is dubious and there are other methods. Some still swear by it. I won't go into the other methods in this answer and it might be a suck it and see approach for you. Magnesium sulphate does nothing Calcium sulphate doesn't do already besides add magnesium and there is enough already in an all malt mash. Calcium sulphate does everything else and does it better.

I'll hunt up some lengthier links for you.

Easiest spreadsheet is the metric version of the EZ water calculator. More complex but probably giving a more accurate result is the brun water calc linked above.

Post 11 here has the article I wrote a while ago: http://aussiehomebrewer.com/topic/46120-ahb-articles-water-chemistry/


Within that there are several references, including online references. Brun water knowledge page is also worth a look
 
+1 to the Brun water spreadsheet. It takes a while to get your head around it all but the Brun spreadsheet has a lot of info on it.
 
Just FYI, the online version of "How to Brew" is full of all sorts of outdated information. I dunno about that section you linked or anything, but I know there is a lot of information in there that even Palmer himself says have been proved wrong over the (many) years since he wrote it.
 
slash22000 said:
Just FYI, the online version of "How to Brew" is full of all sorts of outdated information. I dunno about that section you linked or anything, but I know there is a lot of information in there that even Palmer himself says have been proved wrong over the (many) years since he wrote it.
Maybe he's trying to sell more copies of the print version?
 
mondestrunken said:
Maybe he's trying to sell more copies of the print version?
JP has a book coming out on water in the near future.

No affiliation etc etc :)
 
Just about to "examine" my water profile in ezwater calc, and had an idiot question to start.

Lrgoomba recently suggested my overall efficiency may be improved with ph adjustments.
My local water has a mean ph of 8, min 6.4 and max 9.2. Being quite alkaline it seems from what ive read my mash may suffer?
Is this correct. &
Could this also effect hop isomerisation? I have a sneaking feeling I'm not quite getting all I could from my hops (galaxy and ass. Fruit and us and nz hops in pale grists.

As it has been suggested not to mess with water unless necessary, and it seems a complex learning curve, can I improve beer quality starting with ph alone?
 
Mash pH. Water pH may affect mash pH a bit but it is mash pH you want to adjust. Minerals that make the water hard will also affect mash pH, enzymatic behaviour, yeast activity and other factors.

If your water is hard and you are sparging, you may want to look at acidifying it before the sparge but mash pH is the first key point.

So - you need to know what is in the water and you need to know what your mash pH is.
 
Pickaxe said:
Just about to "examine" my water profile in ezwater calc, and had an idiot question to start.

Lrgoomba recently suggested my overall efficiency may be improved with ph adjustments.
My local water has a mean ph of 8, min 6.4 and max 9.2. Being quite alkaline it seems from what ive read my mash may suffer?
Is this correct. &
Could this also effect hop isomerisation? I have a sneaking feeling I'm not quite getting all I could from my hops (galaxy and ass. Fruit and us and nz hops in pale grists.

As it has been suggested not to mess with water unless necessary, and it seems a complex learning curve, can I improve beer quality starting with ph alone?
I think getting your PH right will definitely improve your beer.
I'm still reading up on this subject myself but now I have the PH meter, I want to maximize the ability to control the mash & make sure that adjustments are made to get me the best results possible. I'm very happy with my beers at present but I'm also a tad excited about the possibility of them being even better.
 
I have just started to use 5.2. As yet I have not tasted a brew made with it but this is about as complicated as I wish to get on water chemistry.

Cheers.
 
manticle said:
At least measure the mash and see if it is really 5.2.
From the few brews done with it my mash is around 5.4 with 22g added. 440g in the packet 20 brews a pack at $20 is $1 a brew. If it improves my beer I can live with that.

Cheers
 
5.4 is good. pH drops as temperature rises so it will be different if you are measuring at mash temps to measuring at room temp but in either case 5.4 is fine. 5.4 measured at room temp is ~5.1 at typical mash temp. 5.4 at mash temp is ~5.7 at room temp.

What is it without the 5.2 (assuming similar grain bill etc)?
 
What is a good tool for measuring ph? Litmus paper I seem to remember from high school chem? Pool testing kit?
Probably need a cheaper option right now.

Thanks manticle, been reading a lot of your posts and article and see that it is a complex balancing act with many factors, I might have more questions once I look at ezwatercalc and read some more.

It was mainly spurred by goomba saying he played with mash ph and upped his eff.

Another huge learning curve is imminent!
 
manticle said:
5.4 is good. pH drops as temperature rises so it will be different if you are measuring at mash temps to measuring at room temp but in either case 5.4 is fine. 5.4 measured at room temp is ~5.1 at typical mash temp. 5.4 at mash temp is ~5.7 at room temp.

What is it without the 5.2 (assuming similar grain bill etc)?
I measured it with paper dip in strips from CB. A bit hard to read but was over 6 with 11g of 5.2.

Cheers
 

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