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Water Profile Salt Additions

sni

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Dec 25, 2016
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Location
Vienna, Austria
Hi and merry Christmas!

I am currently reading Water by Palmer and Kaminsky and it had me revisiting all of my water profiles. While updating I was wondering which hydration of the salts were used in the Water Profile tool in Beersmith, so I did the math. While doing so I figured out that CaSO4 additions are calculated as the dihydrate, the MgSO4 as the heptahydrate, CaCl2 as the dihydrate and the other three salts as the anhydrous form.

It would be great if this information was readily available somewhere or if you could even choose your own molecular weight base for calculations. For example, I am using a 33% solution of CaCl2 for additions, since the crystalline forms are all extremely hygroscopic and impossible to weigh in accurately. But since Beersmith assumes the dihydrate I have to use the conversion factor of 2.26 to adjust all of my CaCl2 additions. If Beersmith gave me the option to select 33% solution instead of dihydrate, that would make everything a lot easier.

I also noticed a discrepancy in the Chloride calculation for NaCl additions. Beersmith uses 624.6 ppm for 1 g/L solution, when it should be 606.6, so there seems to be a bug in the calculation. The Bicarbonate additions for baking soda I can't really figure out, since my calculations give me 726.3 ppm, Palmer and Kaminsky write 710.5 ppm and Beersmith calculates 719.2 ppm for 1 g/L.

Thanks in advance!
 
Thanks,
  I would certainly be willing to consider this - do you have a good reference for the additional solutions?

Brad
 
BeerSmith said:
Thanks,
  I would certainly be willing to consider this - do you have a good reference for the additional solutions?

Brad

Hi Brad,
Sorry for the late reply, I didn't get a notification :(
I used the Brewing Elements book on Water as a source. Page 152, table 17 has salt additions. Sadly it doesn't list a 33% CaCl2 solution, but it's common here in Europe.
 
sni said:
It would be great if this information was readily available somewhere or if you could even choose your own molecular weight base for calculations.

I think is indispensable that we can select our salt form, It doesn?t make sense to have a tool in Beersmith if we have to calculate which form does it use and them adapt the results to our salts.
 
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