Water Adjustments Question

I've been brewing for a long time, but I'm still trying to get my head around water adjustments. Tomorrow I'm planning to brew a 5 gallon batch of my favourite pale ale recipe which includes:

Grain Bill
10 lbs Maris Otter
2.5 lbs Light Munich
1 lb Crystal 60

Here are my hop additions
60 min - 1 oz challenger
30 min - 1 oz Cascade
15 min - 1 oz Cascade
5 min - 1 oz Cascade

Yeast is Wyeast 1272 American Ale II with a nice 1/2 litre starter currently on the stir-plate.

I'm fairly happy with the results of previous batches using this recipe but I would like to see if I could improve it by making some water adjustments. Unfortunately I don't know what I'm doing in spite of doing research and running numbers through various spreadsheets.

I agree with comments in other posts that just throwing some 5.2 stabilizer in my batch is not necessarily the right approach. I've taken my existing water profile and run it through the Brun Water spreadsheet. I see the results but it is still not clear to me what to do. It isn't that I don't understand the spreadsheet itself. I can see the numbers change when I update various quantities. I still maintain that in spite of this, I don't know what I'm doing or why.

If you don't mind, I would like some opinions on how to proceed given the recipe above and the water profile below. My goal is to have a dry beer with lots of nice hop flavour. Less Malt and More Hop . I use the BIAB technique and typically mash with 7.5 gallons of water for a 60 minute boil. If I should mash with different water than the rest of the boil, I would really like to hear that.

What kind of water adjustments would you make?


Existing Water
Calcium (Ca): 35
Magnesium (Mg): 9
Sodium (Na): 15
Bicarbonate (HCO3): 104.4
Sulfate (SO4): 30
Chloride (CI): 28
pH: 7.7
Alkalinity: 86

Thanks in advance,

John

It's impossible to say what to do because I don't understand what your goal is. I do water adjustments to match as close as possible to the type of water in the location where the beer comes from, such as. If I do a Bitters I would create a London water profile. If I'm doing a Stout a Dublin profile. Your on a Beersmith Forum to I would assume you are using Beersmith. Check out the Water Tool. You can enter your base profile and calculate the additions for the target location. You'll need Gypsum, Salt, Epsom Salt, Calcium Chloride, Baking Soda, and Chalk. You can use the Salt and Baking Soda you have in your kitchen and a good Home Brew Store should have the others. You will also need a good scale the measures in grams. My best tasting beer I made using the Water Tool was a Burton-On-Trent Ale and I had 77.2 g of additions. I attached a screen shot of the Water Tool and a image of working on a water profile.

Thanks for your very thourogh answer. A follow up question though.  When you adjust the water, do you adjust the full volume of the boil or just the mash? This is something that has always confused me. Also, the water profile you indicated does not have a PH anywhere near 5.2, which I understood to be desirable for the mash. Is there an assumption that if you are going to brew with Burton on Trent water, you ignore the mash PH? This is part of what I find confusing in most of the discussions about water adjustments. Is there a difference between the water used for the mash and that used for the sparge?

Again thanks in advance for your answers. Maybe I'm the only one confused on this point.

I do all the water. I started by doing two gallon water jugs and pouring it into the pot. Then I used a 15 gallon pot added the additions and pumped to the strike. Now I do an addition for the strike and another for the sparge. When I start to heat them I add the addition and stir. Good luck with your water profiling.

Most water is going to have a standing pH of 7.5 to 8.5. That pH isn't relevant to brewing. What matters is the buffering capability of the water, which is represented in several ways as alkalinity. Higher buffering capability means the mash has to have more protons to give up in order to lower the pH to 5.x.

Just to keep you from worrying, there is a range available. You don't have to be super accurate, but as you learn, accuracy will come. You'll measure pH about 10 to 15 minutes into the mash, at room temperature. Measuring hot will skew the result.  The range is 5.2 to 5.6 pH.

Without any adjustment, malt will naturally lower pH. Darker malts like crystal, munich and roast all have acidic properties that help lower pH.

Did that water profile come from a lab report? Or is it from the numbers in the water quality report? If the latter, it is a WAG as to what you actually have.

The water report and grain bill you provided should push the mash to 5.6 and possibly lower. In Bru'n Water, you enter the recipe and the generalized malt type (light Munich is a Base Malt, Dark is better calculated as a crystal), then look at the pH prediction near the bottom.

The numbers came form a city water quality report. A non-brewing friend of mine suggested that I take a water sample to a lab nearby that he uses for Real Estate assessments. Apparently they occasionally provide water reports for houses they are selling. That sounds like the best way to determine what I actually have short of purchasing a water testing kit.

I now understand that the grains themselves bring down the PH. It sounds like until I get a good baseline from the lab or do my own analysis, I'm only guessing anyway.

Until I get around to that, I'm going to just through in a packet of Burton Water Salts in the mash and compare the results to my other batches with non-treated water and to batches treated with 5.2 stabilizer.

Thanks for your advice though. I'm looking forward to learning more about water chemistry.

Cheers

Ward Labs does a brewing water analysis.

https://producers.wardlab.com/BrewersKitOrder.php

http://www.beersmith.com/forum/index.php/topic,5909.msg50624.html#msg50624

slightly cheaper approach for same info...