WATER CHEMISTRY FOR BREWING (adding beer salts to homebrew)

but we've got lives to live not knowing about water can feel very overwhelming but not knowing about anything could feel overwhelming but I promise you if you stick around to the end of this video you will know as much as I do about building water profiles in your home brew and we're going to feel less dumb at the end of the day there's only two things that I care about making sure my rent check doesn't bounce and feeling less dumb than the previous day we're going to learn about water we're going to learn how to add it to a beer recipe I'm sure we can make this video in 4 minutes on how Add Water adjustments to beer Smith or Brewer's Friend but we're going to learn why we're adding those we always hear that New York city has the best pizza the best bagels the best coffee and they claim that it's from their water what am I drinking right now I'm drinking water every city has different water in New York is said to be soft which means it's been filtered but soft isn't always the profile we're going for for a particular beer style so in this video we're going to learn three things beer salts and the basic chemistry of them what water to use and how to accurately know what's going into our mash and three how to plug it into software Brewer's Friend beer Smith there's a bunch out there so sit back crack a beer take off your shirt and let's see how hairy you [Music] [Applause] are all right beer salts for salts our chemistry it's a lot easier to understand if you're working backwards from beer salts than to start from the beginning if you're starting from the beginning we'd have to get into atoms the smallest form of matter and getting into protons neutrons electrons protons have positive charges electrons have negative charges and neutrons have no charge Jimmy Neutron I missed that [ __ ] man if the atom has more protons than electrons it's considered a positive charge a positive charged atom and if an atom has more electrons than protons it's a negative charged atom and all those pluses and minuses create different elements mess with the numbers the positive and negatives you change the element common positively charged element calcium in beer calcium magnesium sodium common negative charged elements chloride carbonate sulfate take a positive element and a negative element and you put one of these together it creates a salt any which way you want to mix and match these Opposites Attract it's just like a battery it's just like love and that Paulo Abdul song what is table salt sodium and chloride what is magnesium sulfate it's Epsom salt what is calcium sulfate it's gypsum the same [ __ ] that they make drywall with what is calcium chloride uh I think it's just calcium chloride I don't think there's a common name for it but unlearn all that [ __ ] whatever I just said get it out of your head Men In Black life would have been easier if we just worked backwards what is gypsum it's a beer salt what is a beer salt it's a salt what's a salt it's a compound of two elements one positive one negative why do we put elements or salts into our beer the reason why we are here it's because different salts alter the pH of our beer whether the beer is going to come out more acidic or more alkaline and also because these salts help us determine the softness or hardness of our beer we're going to talk more about that at the end in part three what we're adding and why to different beer Styles but that's what beer salts are two elements positive negative that affect our pH and affect our softness and hardness tune in to next week's video where we play 7 Minutes in [Music] Hell water the redheaded stepchild of beer when things of beer more particularly craft beer what gets the most love hops without question everybody knows the high alpha acid hops Simco amario Galaxy and then what gets the next most love probably grain then yeast and lastly water which is kind of ironic since 90 95% of beer is water there's a lot of waters out there bottled water alkaline water Spring Water tonic water maybe I'm just playing too many video games mineral water well water but when it comes down to brewing there's only three types of water that I use reverse osmosis water distilled water and city water or tap water all right snack crackle and barrage from these three Waters let's go from the toughest to easiest on how to control what's in our water City water is the toughest I live in carlbad California where City water is super hard what does hard and soft water mean in short how much dissolved calcium and magnesium is in the water and it's measured in milligrams to liters or more commonly PPM parts per million under 60 PPM is considered on the softer side and over and over 60 up into 180 is considered hard but it's still a wide range hard water is great for hoppy beers like ipas so what's the problem with it yeah it's got calcium and magnesium in it but it's also got a bunch of toxins and [ __ ] in it like chlorine and lead and Mercury and Arsenic and pesticides herbicides and that all depends on how well your water is treated which is all City regulated and EPA approved in America unless you live on a well which is a different story but I don't use well water but I'll tell you right now if I go and drink my tap water it tastes metallic to me here's a little life hack brush I've worked in restaurants bars tasting rooms speak EES Etc want to make shitty tap water taste good just make sure it's chilled the colder the water the more it's going to hide that shitty tap water metallic taste the nicest restaurants in the world serve tap water as drinking water but let's stay focused the other thing about City water which I actually haven't brewed with in at least over a year is just the report you can Google your city's water report but it's going to be from the previous year at least the previous year but most importantly they are testing it from their treatment plan they're not testing it from our Faucets in our kitchen where did that water pick up coming from the treatment facility to our faet it through those 100-year-old copper pipes and magnesium and calcium both cause corrosion which means it's going to eat away at that metal that means we're going to have copper that's coming through so what's the best way to get the most accurate report for City Water fill up a bottle from your faucet and then send it in to your local water treatment plant or an EPA plant and they will send you the water report for your tap water and then you would make your adjustments from there but that's way too much work and it still could have toxins in our water once elements are in the water you can't take them out you can always add but you can't subtract you could I mean you could dilute the water to make it less parts per million but that's just going to throw off your whole 5 gallon brude Mash scale a much better course of action than tap water is RO water or reverse osmosis that's what ro means reverse osmosis when in doubt just use RO water what is RO what is reverse osmosis in a nutshell it's filtered water that gets filtered multiple times through different filters think of a false bottom or a wall that has the tiniest holes in it and microscopic holes that only water can get through and then it keeps the sediment away and not all sediment can get away unless you distill your water here's the problem though we trying to build a water profile with r water these companies filter their water multiple times to get all the bad stuff out but it takes the good stuff out too and then they add calcium and magnesium and other minerals back to it to make it hard but it's almost impossible to get a water report I've called them multiple times I've waed on hold to to talk to a representative that tells me what's in their water and they will not tell me it's weird it weirds me out and I don't know why other than maybe I'm a future competitor and I'm trying to steal what they do but I don't know why they wouldn't tell me about that you'd have to do it the same way you'd have to take your glacier water or your Primo water send in a bottle to your local treatment plant and then they're going to send you an analysis but there's even more factors they clean their systems and they change out their filters every so often so your water report can vary from month to month if it's new filters and new membranes and UV stuff at the start of everything your water's probably going to be more filtered and at the end it's probably going to be not as filtered so here's the best course of action by far when you're building a water profile distilled water distilled water what is distilled water it's exactly what it says it is it's distilled water the same way they make Moonshine Whiskey rum and all that fun stuff boil up some water the vapors go through a chamber or a column and it gets condensed back into liquid and it leaves everything else behind all the good stuff and all the bad stuff distilled water is the softest water you will ever get it's got no good things in it it's got no bad things in it zero PPM all across the board calcium lead magnesium Mercury arsenic turkey ju and then we take the distilled water and we build it back up using gypsum or um epom salt or table salt or uh food grade chalk to get where we want that to be distilled water will always be like your blank canvas your blankest canvas starting from scratch your safest bet when building a water profile and as home Brewers we have an advantage over commercial Brewers they can't use distilled water it'd be way too expensive way too expensive commercial brewes just go off city water then they add a carbon filter charcoal and then they add water adjustments according L it if they use distilled water their bills would be through the roof Brewers use so much water if you're Brewing 5 or 10 gallon batches use distilled water if you're trying to build a water profile every single time what does it cost five bucks 10 bucks and I'm probably only going to use distilled water from here on out after like the fifth time I made my hard Seltzer uh click on that link in the bio right there click on that the link to this video will be right there and when I was using RO water I would get like this yellowy Hue that would come out a few days in the fermentation and I never got that with distilled water I don't know if that rolls over to beer but it gives me peace of mind $10 ain't bad for water if you're really worried about money $10 isn't bad buy pounds buy hops by the pound and get your base malt in bulk it if you're at least bring once a month so let's plug it in let's actually see what these beer salts do all right we are back in the Beat Lab and there's a bunch of different softwares out there some are free some aren't free but this will be good enough this is a great website right here uh Brewer's Friend I'm always still using this whether you're extract Brewer or you're doing water stuff like this check it out it's uh it's great and it's free um we'll look at this and we'll study this a little bit Let's uh this is just what I would do this is a very weird video for me to make but cuz we could honestly this could be a six-hour video but we're not going to do it we're going to do it the home for Life Away here's how I do it so uh um here's our water here's our chemistry here's our parts per million and let's add everything accordingly let's uh reload this and from the top total water volume I'm going to do probably eight cuz we're going to do we'll just call it three and a half for strike and three and a half for sparge that's seven why eight so we can drink a gallon of water the next day when we're explosively hung over um what are we going to brew today let's do a a West Coast IPA so let's have it light colored and hoppy I like it and let's update Target and it shows you what we're going for here's our source minerals here we're using distilled water so it's zero all across the board generally okay I'm jumping the gun a little bit you got to know your symbols calcium magnesium sulfate sodium um chloride uh bicarbonate alkalinity these this is pretty much why we're here this goes hand in hand some of these bring the mash pH lower some of them makes it higher generally you're shooting for a mash pH of about 5.2 to 5.5 and that's kind of a wide range that covers pretty much every style of beard that I've ever done and when you're using uh we'll do we'll do a couple beer Styles really quick but if we're doing like a porter or something we're going to have a bunch of roasted you know chocolate malts and with that it's going to make the mash way more acid so we'd have to use food grade shock to bring it back uh ipas are the exact opposite we're trying to bring it down generally we're bringing the pH Down um and it puts it in tablespoons over here but I just stick with the grams that's how i' I've always weighed everything out chalk we're definitely not going to have Chalk in a West Coast IPA baking soda no they kind of do the same thing gypsum I generally do the 6 3 2 uh ratio for um Epsom salt calcium chloride and calcium sulfate gypsum and we could go on forever and talk about the sulfate to Chloride ratio and this is just what I do and this is what with my distilled water this is how I add beer salts to my Westco ipas 73 parts per million uh calcium and if it's green right here I think that means you're within like a 20 parts per million range if you if you just type in something ridiculous it's going to show up in red yeah so that's generally what I do for West Coast ipas and then it's got add teaspoons over here I never do it I just weigh everything out on a super small little Anvil scale in grams and it's good to go and if it's not it's going to let you know it's going to have the red flag um canning salt I honestly never put salt in beer uh table salt in beer unless I'm doing a goza or something and then let's do a uh pilsner and we're probably not going to add much let's give rid all this let's reset and update and um where's our pills there [Music] pilson maybe one gram a [Music] chalk cool works for me this is what I do I start with distilled water and this is whatever I'm brewing I pull this up I look at the forms online it checks out and uh there's a lot of debate we could talk about some people want to have 350 parts per million in their ipas for sulfates and uh that's going to dry that's going to be a pretty dry dry hoppy beer cuz what that's going to do is going to dry your hops out and ultimately it's going to make your hop stand out more and it's um I think it's going to create more of a pine taste um now let's look at probably the exact opposite of this let's do like a Porter Let's update This Clean Slate yeah so Porter is going to be a little bit different let's probably we talked about this last night on the broadcast I think that um Stouts and porters go bad the fastest like canning beers and stuff like that because their their grains are so damn acidic and after like six months you crack a beer open and sometimes it tastes so acidic it's like peppery um so how do we prevent that I don't know if you can just pack it with a ton of chalk we'll start with we'll do five chalk we'll do five grams baking soda good thing about beer salts they're cheap you can buy a pound of food grade chalk it's gonna be five bucks it's going to last you a lifetime um gypsum um calcium chloride calcium s sulfate ratio I I it doesn't have to be two to one for a multi beer uh let's do three and let's do three and that works for me then I would take this information and I would plug it into Bruce Smith and I add it during my strike you can add your salts uh add it during your strike or to your Mash I don't like putting it in the sparge a lot of times I don't use all my sparge water once I get to six gallons we stop sparging sometimes there's still like a gallon left in there so to get your most accur accurate reading put it in your strike or your Mash ton and uh this is what I do this is how I add beer salt to my mash and that's it guys uh a couple things couple things when you're testing your Mash as don't do those little tabs they never work just drop the money on the Milwaukee pH tester we've already made videos on that we've got uh the Viva Sun one the $20 one versus like the $150 Milwaukee one if you're serious about beer have to invest in the Milwaukee um you guys have any questions there's probably going to be a lot of questions we'll we'll definitely talk about this on next Wednesday's barage cast but that's how I do it I go off this and it's easy to have control over when you're using distilled water and uh let me know if you guys uh like this video or troll this video live your lives man smash this uh thumbs up this video if you liked it thumbs down it if you hated it and uh we'll see you guys on the broadcast next Wednesday and we'll just talk about water because there's a lot of subjective stuff there's a lot a lot it water is all about pH for the most part but there's so much stuff on the internet where you use one of these beer salts and it caters to a certain beer style I don't think you can really prove whether that's how much if that is or not if that isn't true or how much truth there is to that but let's talk about it on Wednesday that's the video we're out of here um and then just take this information and go I go back into beersmith and I just put whatever recipe is five grams chock five grams baking soda 3 G gypsum and 3 G calcium chloride that's it we're out of here cheers eating good and drinking good

Channel: HOMEBREW 4 LIFE

Views: 38,914

Keywords: beers salts, water profile, brewers friend, gypsum, homebrew water chemisty, Water profile, Build, Reverse osmosis, Distilled water, build make, how to

Id: OZZqcJccDYw

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021