Wyong Water Report vs Lamotte Brewlab Plus

[fungrel]

Thought this may be interesting to those in the club that use a similar water source. The kit is pretty close to the average report from the council's website but total alkalinity and total hardness are interesting. I'm located in Long Jetty.

Note that pH readings have varied from 7.01 tonight to as high as 7.8 six weeks ago. Does anyone know how our water is sourced? Is it from 100% runoff?

 

[gone brewing]

Hey Fungrel. Thanks for posting that. It's much the same as what I got from the council 5 years ago, which isn't too surprising, these things don't change that much. The water we have here is soft but saline, apparently typical for water catchment areas that are on a sandstone base. What I mean by "soft but saline" is the calcium and magnesium are low and the sodium and chloride are kinda medium. What you expect to get with a water source based on rainwater/runoff plus what seeps through the sandstone bed (this is what I understand to be the water source here).

The pH changing from 7.0 to 7.8 doesn't amount to much in my understanding of these things. It's more about what minerals are present. My approach to water chemistry is to add 6.0g of calcium chloride to every batch (around 20L in the mash), and this gets calcium to around 80ppm. Mind you, I do mostly malty beers which suit a high chloride:sulphate ratio. If you want to do IPA's then you can consider calcium sulphate additions as well but I can't comment too much about that as I don't do such insanely hoppy beers.

Hope that helps.

Cheers
****