Testing Mash pH

[Aleman]

Thanks Graham, Thought something was off with the figures I was getting . . . all sorted now . . . and I'm ready to brew my stout . . . just waiting on my Barley Bottom Hops, . .. will be interesting to see what this does to my pH . . . Hopefully hitting 75mg/l carbonate will give me a pH of around 5.3 with all the other stuff . . . and being a stout the sour notes from the sodium (allegedly) should be masked.

[Graham]

Of course, there is a considerable amount of confusion over the terminology "alkalinity" because of the various ways of expressing it. Three or four different numbers to express exactly the same thing. Carbonate is what alkalinity really is, but British water companies (and Brupaks) have the habit of expressing it as calcium carbonate, which is nonsense and misleading. If alkalinity was always expressed as carbonate or even bicarbonate, rather than calcium carbonate, the confusion between alkalinity and hardness would be greatly reduced.

To express 50mg/l of carbonate (which is 1.67 millequivalents as above): 1.67 * 50 = 83.5mg/l CaCO3
Where 50 is the equivalent weight of calcium carbonate.

[harry_mac]

This is very topical at the moment because I am pulling my hair out over a better version of the water calculator for incorporation into BeerEngine. I am toying with the idea of ditching the calcium carbonate row and replacing it with sodium bicarbonate. I have always said that chalk has no business being added to beer, and I am now beginning to believe my own statements.

I'd just like to add my support for this inclusion of sodium bicarbonate for the water calculations.

I got a new toy yesterday in the form of a Salifert alkalinity test kit which shows that my water has low alkalinity at 25 CaC03 (or 20 after a pinch of sodium metabisulphite). For a stout this needs to be raised a bit, and I reckon from some of the tests I did, and the calculations in this thread (unless I've misinterpreted them), I'll need about 1/4 tsp of sodium bicarb in 10 litres of mash water to get the right mash pH. The water analysis from Northumbria Water shows low sodium anyway (8 mg/l), so a bit extra wouldn't be out of place.

After reading other posts on the forum, I gather thay my 20 year old+ litmus papers are out of date and I'll have to splash out on new ones. It probably explains why they always showed pH under 5.0