Jim's Beer Kit

My tap water has 100ppm Calcium. Analysis by Wallybrew. Enough to control the mash pH and allow the enzymes to do their stuff. This means I don't add any salts to the HLT or the grain. The salts I add all go onto the grain, in two lots, at the end of the mash and are washed through by the sparge. M...

I usually buy my pale malt in uncrushed 25kg sacks. I have tried all my usual suppliers and they are all out of stock though I can get 5kg bags. Anyone else come across this or am I just unfortunate? Surely not panic buying! Try this at £21.77 for 25 kilos https://www.braumarkt.com/en/swaen-dutch-p...

I usually buy my pale malt in uncrushed 25kg sacks. I have tried all my usual suppliers and they are all out of stock though I can get 5kg bags. Anyone else come across this or am I just unfortunate? Surely not panic buying! Try this at £21.77 for 25 kilos https://www.braumarkt.com/en/swaen-dutch-p...

Thanks. Is there a rough guide for different styles of beer as to the ammount of CaC03 for say a Belgian Blonde? I'm sure there are lots of mineral profiles for particular styles, but which are of merit is another question. Different breweries use their own water profile, historically restricted to...

Roasting barley for about 40 mins at typically 230C should produce a usable product. It won't be exactly like the commercial version and the beer produced will taste different. More frequently I will use torrified barley, up to 10% of the grist. For this the barley is first washed and drained, then ...

How would a good way to reduce the calcium content, hardness? I seem to alter one parameter and it thrown another one out 🥴 Yes, you can't just remove calcium from water without also removing something else. Calcium is never in water in isolation, it goes into solution a compound, like gypsum. In t...

Does something like this look right, or at least on the right track. 24 litre water Pale ale 26.4ml crs 0.96g gypsum 1.35g calcium chloride 3.07g Epsom salt 1.45g sodium chloride. Looks like a Sweet Pale Ale profile from Graham's calculator. Worth a try. The calcium content would appear to be about...

Like mine, your water is pretty typical for SE England. It’s hard, but fairly low in everything else that you might want to change for brewing. A brita filter might remove chlorine/chloramine and make it more pleasant to drink, but it won’t reduce the level of hardness in your water that causes sca...

Let's be fair, the overwhelming majority of lagers drank today are, at best, moderate. Most are worse, but that does not mean that good lagers don't exist or cannot be made, just that good lagers takes a greater amount of effort than most are able or willing to make and I'll bet IPA will not disagre...

Just wanted to leave some feedback: so the last 5 beers I brewed, were brewed using a different approach, and I did like the results very much. So this year I will be continuing with the same. One of the 6 beers I will soon brew will be a sort of a hoppy saison: 90% Bestmalz Pilsner + 10% Bestmalz ...

… Brews with 400ppm sulphate take a while to reach their best. Those with 300ppm suphate are not generally a first preference of mine, probably because it can mean the chloride level will be too low. In my book beers need an absolute minimum of 100ppm chloride and preferably a lot more. Martin's "p...

Unfortunately I didnt have a ph probe then so I am unsure on the ph. I am probably draining the sparge too quickly, maybe only leaving it for 10mins? That would be it. Slow this down, taking more like 45 minutes to an hour would improve extraction, regaining the 9 points you lost from your target p...

I think you now have a very heavy workload to complete. 'Mash Made Easy' version 8.45 has just been published to my website. The spreadsheet is free and complete. There is no pay version. Available in both US and Metric versions. Change made: Reduces the downward pH shift impact of calcium and magn...

I had some problems with the brew, for some reason my pre boil gravity was very low, I dont have my notes with me but think it was around 1032 instead of 1041), I am guessing I had a problem with the ph. To get around it I sparged more than I was planning, I didnt have a ph probe so I just kept an ...

Sorry for the late reply. Thank you, that's interesting to know. What can you tell me about your local geology. Your water profile is reasonably balanced which confirms it is possible and therefore probably correct, but it's certainly outside my experience. I am in Bohuslän area of Sweden (west coa...