Since my second batch of all-grain, I've been adjusting my water with brewing salts to try to get the mash pH in an acceptable range (5.2-5.6ish). I had my water tested through
Ward Labs (Test W-5) so I knew what my existing water was (I take it from a spigot not connected to my water softener).
I've been lucky that up to this point only having to put in around 2 grams of CaCl2 (Calcium Chloride) in each mash. That's because I've used very little Crystal malts in "pale" ales. However, this weekend I'm going to brew a porter and my crystal malts (C-40) makes up around 9.5% of my grist. This causes a little trouble with my pH. I'm not going to go into why this is causes issues with my water chemistry. You can learn more about that
here. I do want to talk a little about some water chemistry tools that's I've used. I believe you want to do the least amount of adjustments as possible!!!! There are negatives to adding brewing salts as well.
From the beginning, I've used "
EZ Water Calculator" and its been great. Its very easy to use and gives a simple output. I highly recommend it if you are doing light colored pale ales.
I was not as comfortable with it however putting in my numbers for the Porter. The numbers just seemed too low and it seemed like I had to make some wild adjustments to get it within a good range. This could very well be the case, I'm not blaming the software for my pH, but it sent me to the message boards to get some answers to questions about what I should do. My post received a reply talking about "
Bru N' Water". I think I actually like this water chemistry tool better. It is definitely much more robust and one could easily get caught up in all the numbers if they have never done any water chemistry before, but I found that it does a great job in showing what it is doing. I like to see why, I can't just accept it.
Excluding the pH, all of the numbers match up pretty well between the two tool. The EZ Water Calculator had me almost 0.2 pH lower than the Bru N' Water. It did make me feel more comfortable on how much more information Bru N' Water asked me about my existing water. It helps as well that Gordon Strong mentions Martin Brungard as one of his go to water people in "Brewing Better Beer" (Read it! Was hoping to write a review but haven't got around to it yet).
Though I have not test the Bru N' Water estimates yet to see if it actually works better, we'll see on Sunday and I'll plan to give a report on that.
I recommend you give them both a shot. I'm not going to write some drawn out thing about how to use them, blah blah blah. But I wanted to at least give you some sources of where to get tools for water chemistry and I'll let you decide what you like best. Like I said, they are both good, I just prefer one over the other now.
John Palmer also has his own
here, but I seemed to like that one the least. Though he gives detailed instruction, I still am now on the Bru N' Water bandwagon.
What this whole thing did teach me is that I may not mash my crystal malts with my base malts anymore, especially if it will greatly impact my pH like my porter recipe seems to be. You don't really need to mash your crystal malts. Gordon Strong talks about that in "Brewing Better Beer". What you do it steep them like when you did extract batches with specialty grains and then add to the boil. By doing this, you don't run into as many pH issues by having only base or roasted grains in the mash. I've always had my LHBS mill all my grains together, this is likely the last time.
