BEERSMITH WATER PROFILE SOFTWARE
BEERSMITH WATER PROFILE PLUS

You’d be forgiven for thinking an IPA needs more, but it doesn’t, as it is one of the contributing factors to an IPA’s bitterness sticking to your tongue. The only time I would go over the 250ppm limit is if I’m looking to do a “to style” Dortmund export or something similar. It’s a combination of either sharpness, bitterness or dryness in the flavor perception, as well as increasing the hop character in beers.

BEERSMITH WATER PROFILE SOFTWARE

The first major flavor component, many brewing software types will tell you this increases “bitter” in a beer, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Sulphate – 50 to 400ppm (Added through Gypsum or Magnesium Sulphate). The minimum amount is zero in the mash water because all barley wort contains loads of this stuff, but I can tell you from experience that adding even a small amount of magnesium (in the form of Epsom salts or MgSO4) to your mash does great things for the flavor of your beer. This is another element that is one of the primary contributors to lowering mash pH, although not as well as calcium. Magnesium – 0 to 30ppm (Added through Magnesium Sulphate). It is also essential for enzymatic processes in the mash.

The higher the amount, the more easily the yeast flocculates. It’s also crucial for yeast health and a clear beer. This element is responsible for actually lowering mash pH in the first place. This is the most important item on the list. This is the bit about the different elements in brewing water – I’m going to keep this as simple as absolutely possible.Ĭalcium – 50 to 200ppm (Added generally through Gypsum or Calcium chloride). The sound engineer shifts the hundreds of keys, ensuring each note is either amplified or muted so that the overall composition is a marvelous piece of art – the difference between a platinum selling artist and your pot-head buddy in his garage! The Aspects to Consider in Water Chemistry What are you doing? When you balance your water chemistry vs your recipe, you are performing a similar function of a sound engineer at a sound board. Don’t believe me? Take an imperial stout water recipe and try to brew a pilsner with it – you’ll end up drinking a pale beer with the mineral profile of a granite quarry. This is the same beer recipe with the wrong water chemistry – and yes the results are just as dramatic between the two. The muddy lenses won’t allow you to see the beauty for what it actually is. All the colors are wrong, the artwork distorted and bent beyond recognition and you actually can’t make out what it originally was. Now you put these on and you look at the aforementioned painting. Now, you take a pair of those John Lennon-type round glasses with bright red lenses and – for dramatic effect – you take a stick of butter and rub them on the lenses. Pretty with all its masterful brushstrokes and swirl techniques…this is your beer’s flavor in all its perfection, with all the right highlights and hues and a perfect arrangement of water chemistry. Say you have a beautiful painting of a ship on the sea, lots of beautiful blue hues, brown and beige from the ship and oranges and pinks from the sunset in the sky. So, I’ve come up with the following analogy to explain this – What is the Importance of Brewing Water Anyway?

One last note would be that this is a beginner guide to brewing water, I have left out much information, but it is by design… I don’t want newbie’s to get put off and I don’t want to get stuck writing a thesis either. You will most likely be shocked at the quality of even your first attempts.

BEERSMITH WATER PROFILE PLUS

The plus side is that you will get your beers to the level where they don’t taste like homebrew anymore and will taste like commercial examples of the style – this is the final frontier after you have mastered the rest, including yeast control. This is seriously hard to get your head around in the beginning, I do understand, but ,similarly, you need to realize that while I am going to be giving water profiles for many styles, they may never be optimal for your particular recipe, so keep playing with it until you get it right – it takes on average 2 or 3 brews of the same recipe with different profiles to get it right in a commercial setup where we know our stuff – home brewers may take longer, but don’t get disheartened. There is a good reason for this…Īll pro-brewers will tell you that each recipe should have its own water profile, each construction of malt, hops and yeast needs its profile fine-tuned to be perfect. So, I searched and searched and saw that there is a site or two that does discuss generalized water profiles, but not a “catch all” type of formula. There are many books on the subject, but they are so in-depth usually that most home brewers either lose interest or mental capacity in the attempt. You may have noticed by now, that beer is over 90% water, so saying that brewing water is important is an understatement of galactic proportions. (Originally written for under the heading “ the importance of brewing water“)

Beersmith water profile