First steps towards water treatment.

[BrewerBen]

So after 46 all grain brews i figured its about time i paid a bit more attention to water. My usual steps are to add half a Camden tablet and sometimes a teaspoon of gypsum to the mash and boil as thats what i read in a book once so its certainly not been a measured approach to water treatment.
I thought i'd start with a small change to the brewing liquor by blending tap water with some Tesco Ashbeck water and measure the waters alkalinity of both the tap water and Ashbeck water seperately and then of it blended before i start brewing.

I've bought the Salifert test kit and got testing. The tap water came out at a rather hard 256.5mg/l. I was a little surprised as for pale ales its recommended the alkalinity should be around 25mg/l and i brew mostly pale ales. The ales have been good but i've noticed they always turn out pretty dry.
The Tesco Ashbeck water came out at 16.5mg/L. I have 25L of the Ashbeck water and need 37.75L of liquor for the next brew so if my sums are correct i should end up with a Alkalinity of 98.2mg/L. I will measure it once the water is mixed and ready to go tomorrow though.
This figure is still a fair bit higher than the recommended 25Mg/L so will i still notice any difference in the beer? the breer this water is for is the Galaxy Delight kit from the malt miller so is all pale but seeing as i would normally brew with the 256.5mg/l water i figure i cant do any harm.

I will get some CRS for the following brew but for now this is more of an exercise to get used to using the Salifert test kit

[Eric]

Almost certainly you will notice differences when you get the alkalinity into the right region. How much difference there might be with the blend is a difficult call as much else will change besides the level of alkalinity.
Looking forward to reading your findings.

[orlando]

much else will change besides the level of alkalinity.

Such as the "flavour" affecting anions. Principally sulphate and chloride, the ratio of which is usually what brewers are looking to influence after dealing with alkalinity. Sulphate dominant for hoppy beers, chloride for darker sweeter beers. I think you're approach so far is spot on, you have brewed with your water as is now you are changing your approach but keeping it simple at each stage, this will give you a better insight to those changes rather than the wholesale approach I took. One tip I would suggest though is to have a proper analysis of your water done, relatively inexpensive but vital if you are going to avoid the equivalent of Witchcraft, you know a spoonful of this and half a spoonful of that, fingers crossed behind your back (the last part apparently is very important) .

[BrewerBen]

Thanks chaps, it's good to hear I'm not doing anything disastrous. I've blended the water and measured it at 96.5mg/L so pretty close to what I expected.

[Charles1968]

If you look through the water profiles on Brewersfriend you might find your own, which means you may not need a report from Murphys:

http://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/water-profiles/

Ashbeck is on there twice (one based on the label, the other checked after a salifert test).

If your tapwater is covered (and don't use the london profile from howtobrew - it's wrong), you can set up a blend with ashbeck and you'll see all the resulting ion levels:

http://www.brewersfriend.com/mash-chemi ... alculator/

Set your target profile to either "light coloured and malty" or "light coloured and hoppy" (your preference) and you'll see how close you are. Scroll down to check calculated mash pH.

Then try getting closer to mash pH of 5.5 and your target ion levels (less important than mash pH) by making SMALL additions of gypsum, CRS and calcium chloride.

The galaxy delight recipe has Vienna malt and aromatic malt in, which are great for keeping mash pH down, so you won't really need to hit 5.5 and you'll probably get a very good beer with an untreated blend of ashbeck and tap water.