In the past, I have used Bru'n Water to get my water right, and have liked it. BeerSmith certainly makes things easier since it's all under one roof, and I'd like to just use it. However, I'm struggling with the mineral additions vs pH. I've read several posts on this across the web, but still can't get my mind around it.
So, you have a water profile of your local water. Mine is 8.6 pH and lacks in Ca, Mg and SO4.
Then you have a profile that you want to match. Let's use Yellow Full as an example.
I can use the Water Profile Tool to match it and it tells me for each 10 gallons to add .4g of Table Salt, 3.3g of Epsom Salt and 4.1g of Calcium Chloride. That's awesome. However, what did that do to my pH? PH isn't listed anywhere there. When I save this as a profile, it just puts 8.0 in as the pH. That's not correct. It's not always 8.0 after every addition to every style with my city water.
So, let's take that to a recipe. It pulls the water into the recipe, which also has the grains entered. The mash tab shows "Estimated Mash pH". Water pH is 8.0, which can't be right at this point. Then Est Mash pH is 5.65, which apparently takes the grain into account. However, that's not taking the minerals/salts into account which absolutely impact pH.
So how do BeerSmith2 people handle this? Do I need to continue using Bru'n Water to get a reliable pH estimate so I can do an acid addition?
Thanks,
-jsbull
So, you have a water profile of your local water. Mine is 8.6 pH and lacks in Ca, Mg and SO4.
Then you have a profile that you want to match. Let's use Yellow Full as an example.
I can use the Water Profile Tool to match it and it tells me for each 10 gallons to add .4g of Table Salt, 3.3g of Epsom Salt and 4.1g of Calcium Chloride. That's awesome. However, what did that do to my pH? PH isn't listed anywhere there. When I save this as a profile, it just puts 8.0 in as the pH. That's not correct. It's not always 8.0 after every addition to every style with my city water.
So, let's take that to a recipe. It pulls the water into the recipe, which also has the grains entered. The mash tab shows "Estimated Mash pH". Water pH is 8.0, which can't be right at this point. Then Est Mash pH is 5.65, which apparently takes the grain into account. However, that's not taking the minerals/salts into account which absolutely impact pH.
So how do BeerSmith2 people handle this? Do I need to continue using Bru'n Water to get a reliable pH estimate so I can do an acid addition?
Thanks,
-jsbull