sodium carbonate or bicarbonate of soda

[HebridesRob]

Ok myQ it's defo gona be a stout I do next I'm currently drinking my bulldog chocolate stout I did from a kit, I didn't touch the water at all with this and it's rather good. But the bulldog double IPA I did before it (first attempt at homebrew)wasn't great. Any recipe suggestions for a nice strong stout would be appreciated.
Oh and where's this bloody paperclip attachment thing can't see it?

here it is....

 

[stigman]

Ok I've had to load up the desktop version to find the paperclip thing but it still won't let me look at my photo album. Grrr!

 

[stigman]

hope this works

 

[stigman]

yay got there eventually:thumb: had to email it to myself from my phone then jump on a computer while at work. surely someone can tell me how to do this straight from a phone

 

[Simonh82]

You have very soft water which has low alkalinity. This is much easier to work with as a brewer than hard water with high alkalinity so you are lucky there. Clearly your local brewery are working with much higher quantities that a home brewer so they are using barrel measurements instead of litres. If you need to raise the alkalinity then sodium bicarbonate would probably be better and it is safer to handle than sodium carbonate.

You can use the water calculators i mentioned earlier or the old forum calculator but i found that a bit restrictive as it only suggested using CRS for acid additions and whilst that is a useful acid it is quite expensive if you need to use a lot of it. For you this is likely to be an issue as you are not often going to need to acidify your water due to the low alkalinity.

You will need to add some form of calcium to raise the calcium level to at least 50ppm. For stouts and other malty brews that is likely to be Calcium Chloride. for pale ales some Calcium Sulphate (gypsom) would do the job. With a stout the dark grains would likely make th mash pH too low, which is why they are suggesting adding an alkali such as Sodium Carbonate.

 

[stigman]

Thanks Simon. I know I'm blessed living in a soft water area, I can always tell the difference when on holidays, make a cup of tea and it's horrible so end up drinking coffee instead.
I know what you mean by barrels to litres for the pale ale I did recently I scaled down the dwb addition suit my brew length, gona be bottling it soon so not long till I can sample my first AG brew.
If I was to use bicarbonate instead do I need to use more of it

 

[MyQul]

I think Murphy's are more used analysing the water for breweries rather than HBers. I have a Muphy's water report for Bermondsey which was passed on to me from a forumite, who in turn had it passed on to him by a micro brewery. The figures are in barrels too

 

[Simonh82]

If I was to use bicarbonate instead do I need to use more of it

You would need to use one of the brewing calculators to work out how much bicarbonate to use.

 

[Simonh82]

I think Murphy's are more used analysing the water for breweries rather than HBers. I have a Muphy's water report for Bermondsey which was passed on to me from a forumite, who in turn had it passed on to him by a micro brewery. The figures are in barrels too

I got a water report from Murphy's. You can order them through brewUK. It looks very similar to the one posted above but the quantities are per 25L.

 

[Simonh82]

Thanks Simon. I know I'm blessed living in a soft water area, I can always tell the difference when on holidays, make a cup of tea and it's horrible so end up drinking coffee instead.
I know what you mean by barrels to litres for the pale ale I did recently I scaled down the dwb addition suit my brew length, gona be bottling it soon so not long till I can sample my first AG brew.
If I was to use bicarbonate instead do I need to use more of it

I just ran the numbers from your Murphy's report through Bru'N Water. I made up a stout recipe of 4KG Marris Otter and 200g each of crystal 60, black patent malt and roasted barley. If you do absolutely nothing at all you come out with a mash pH of 5.4 which is pretty much bang on. The only issue with this is that you have calcium levels so low it may affect they yeast health so you could chuck in a teaspoon of DBS and then 2g of bicarbonate of soda.

This is is assuming you are mashing in 14L of water. If you are doing a BIAB with something like 24L of mash water (which is what I use) then you would use something like 2 small tsp of DWB but stick to 2g of bicarb.

I can't promise that will work but it will probably be in the ballpark.

 

[stigman]

Thanks for doing that for me Simon, I will have a play around with bru n water (is it free?) when get a minute. I presume if I was to alter the grain bill additions would be altered to suit, I fancy doing something high abv. Just found a recipe yet. Oh and yeah I do 23l biab although my first attempt came out at21 in my fv. I think the scale is out on my boiler as others have said on here with the same hbc biab kit.

 

[Simonh82]

Yes, there is a free version or you can pay $10 for the latest version which has a few more bells and whistles. That probably isn't necessarily as your soft water won't need multiple acid additions.

Bru N Water doesn't have a setting for DBS, so I just added roughly equal measures of calcium chloride and calcium sulphate which a slightly bias to calcium sulphate. Then a very small amount of magnesium sulphate and salt. This is not going to be 100% accurate but will be a reasonable approximation based on the description of the product, what I've read on other forums and what the numbers look like in the output for bitters and pale ales in the Murphy's report.

If you up the grain bill you might need to make minor adjustments but as that would mostly be base malt it won't do very much.