Making Beer

What's Brewing

Recently Bottled

Fermenting

Planning

Add your name to the bottom to secure a spot in the brew queue. If you need to insert a priority batch, post to the mailing list & we'll hash it out.

  1. ClintonEbadi Pumpkin Brown Ale

  2. SteveKillen President's Honey Ale 10 gallons

  3. RachelBrown Maple Nut Brown Ale

  4. Luke's Ghost Pepper Porter

Competing

Piedmont Brewer's Cup, 2011-10-22

Natty Greene's Monthly Homebrew Contest, 2012-6-26

NC State Fair, Oct 2012

Piedmont Brewer's Cup, 2012-10-20

Useful Information

Required Reading

Read How to Brew. Do not continue, do not pass Go until you've at least made it through Chapter One.

Styles/Ingredients

General Brewing

Technique

Software

Online Calculators

Wine/Mead/Cider

Location Specific

Water

Cary and Raleigh use chloramines rather than chlorine for water purification. The homebrew shop was helpful and warned that this does not evolve out as gas during boiling like chlorine does, and results in band-aid like flavors in the final beer. To counteract this a quarter of a Campden tablet must be added for each five gallons of water used. This will react with the chloramines and cause them to evolve out as sulfur and chlorine gases within approximately fifteen minutes. The water may then be boiled as usual.

For extract brewing water adjustment is not essential, but water in the Raleigh region is soft enough that there will be issues with hop bitterness not being properly attenuated. The LHBS provided Water Crystals (8:1 CaSO4:MgSO4) with a recommended rate of one or two tsp per five gallons. A teaspoon has a mass of 4g (3.55...g:0.44...g).

Another thing to be wary of is steeping roasted grains in soft water:

Raleigh

Important Water Ion Levels for Raleigh NC Water (mg/L)3

Date

Ca+2

Mg+2

SO4-2

Na+

Cl-

HCO3-

2010

6.49

1.90

52

30.5

12.9

34.28 4

Jan 2012

8.5

4.0

47

34

15.9

43.55 4

palmerwaterionchart-raleigh2010.png

The water ion nomograph is pulled from Palmer's How To Brew. Looks like our water profile in Raleigh is good for pale, bitter beers; it's got a sulfate:chloride ratio of 3:1 (maybe -- it also has very little of either). To make darker, maltier beers, some additions will be required. SteveKillen estimates that for our 8ish-gallon water volume, a total of 3.6g chalk, 3.6g baking soda, and 4g of non-iodized salt will provide a better water profile for malty beers like the Bubonic Porter.3 Further tweaking may be required, but a good goal is to test several styles of beer and come up with a handful of good generic numbers.

Cary

Important Water Ion Levels for Cary NC Water (mg/L)3

Ca+2

Mg+2

SO4-2

Na+

Cl-

HCO3-

9.60

2.90

38

32.1

21.3

50.4 4

With 2g of Water Crystals

25

4

78

32

21

50

With 4g of Water Crystals

41

5

119

32

21

50

With 8g of Water Crystals

72

6

201

32

21

50

Sulfate:Chloride ratio of raw water = (approximately) 1.2:1.0 which is not particularly good for anything. This should be closer to 2:1 for bitter ales, 1:3 for stouts and porters, and 1:2 for milder ales (e.g. Justin's Brown Ale). Some minor adjustment with NaCl will be needed; since extract is being used and the NaCl content is unknown a conservative approach is best. ClintonEbadi suspects aiming for a ratio of 2:1 for bitter beers, 1:2 for more malt dominated beers, and leaving it alone for the others is the best approach for now.

According to BeerSmith our Magnesium levels are insufficient for yeast nutrition, and the sulfate levels are too low for bitter beers (like ClintonEbadi's Pale Ale recipe).

Based upon this information it appears that a good approach will be to add 2g of Water Crystals to all batches with an appropriate amount of NaCl to balance the additional Sulfate.

Future Ideas

General Beer

Available Equipment

Most owned by ClintonEbadi; all available for shared use.

Wort Production

Fermentation

Siphoning &c

Bottling

Science!

Books

&c

Things That Don't Actually Work

Obsoleted By the Ever-Forward March of Progress

Expendables

That you can't eat at least.

NEEDED

More gadgets.

  1. From http://hopunion.com/hopeducation.html (1)

  2. http://howtobrew.com/section2/chapter13-2.html (2)

  3. Additions calculated using http://www.brewersfriend.com/water-chemistry/ which rounds to the nearest number... not so scientific, but good enough for our uses (3 4 5)

  4. Extrapolated by multiplying CaCO3 level by 1.22 (6 7 8)

HomeBrewing (last edited 2014-04-11 13:56:20 by ClintonEbadi)