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HOMEBREW Digest #5661
HOMEBREW Digest #5661 Sun 21 February 2010
FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
Digest Janitor: pbabcock at hbd.org
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Contents:
RE: Water (donniestyle)
Hardness ("A. J. deLange")
temporary hardness ("Darrell G. Leavitt")
Re: water (M Lewandowski)
RE: Water (Kieran Short)
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Date: Fri, 19 Feb 2010 23:26:54 -0600 (CST)
From: donniestyle at directlink.net
Subject: RE: Water
"Will boiling remove some of the hardness?
Isn't the white stuff you find on the bottom of the kettle the calcium from
the hardness?
It was to my understanding that you have to dilute the hardness out, does
boiling actually work?"
You can remove the temporary hardness. Acidify the water, boil it, let it
cool, than rack off the sediment. You cannot remove it all.
You can use a Reverse Osmosis system, and remove most of the minerals
also. Some RO systems remove over 95% of the minerals. A friend sent his
Dallas store's RO system water to a lab and got these results.
Calcium: 4.0 ppm
Sulfate: 2.0 ppm
Magnesium: 0.0 ppm
Chloride: 4.0 ppm
Sodium: 2.0 ppm
Bicarbonate: 6.0 ppm
PH: 7.0
I used my municipal water supply, run through a whole house carbon filter
for years. It makes good beer, but there are other things in water
sources that can affect your beer flavor. Phenols from decaying
vegetation can be nasty. The Iron content may be off the chart. You get
the idea.
I decided last year that the next step for me to make better beer is to
start with quality water. I started going to the store with 4 clean corny
kegs and fill them with RO water for $0.39 per gallon. I've since
gathered 4 plastic 5 gallon jugs. It's been working well. I usually do
not add very much brewing salts either, and often none unless I am making
certain styles like Bitters, Dry Stout, and such. I made "Irish Lager"
last week and did add quite a bit, but not as much as the "Dublin"
profile, Ca=107, Mg=0, Na=2, SO4=50, Cl=18. HCO3=118.
Saude,
Don
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Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 08:28:55 -0500
From: "A. J. deLange" <ajdel at cox.net>
Subject: Hardness
Yes, boiling will remove some hardness from water but, and this is why
it is done, it also removes carbonate (alkalinity). Typically,
hadness/alkalinity can be lowered to about 1 mval (50 ppm as CaCO3) by
this technique but the water must have fairly high temporary (carbonate)
hardness to start with. If it doesn't you can still decarbonate to some
extent by 1)adding additional calcium in the form of the chloride or
sulfate 2)adding some finely divided calcium carbonate (chalk) to serve
as nucleation sites. After decarbonation by this method you would
probably want to supplement the calcium anyway so as to make up for the
calcium lost in the precipitate so the point really is to do this before
the boil rather than after as the additional calcium will enhance
carbonate removal by LeChateliers principle.
Ca++ + 2HCO3- ---> CaCO3 + CO2 + H2O
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Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 09:06:57 -0500 (EST)
From: "Darrell G. Leavitt" <leavitdg at plattsburgh.edu>
Subject: temporary hardness
Yes, you can pre-boil your water the night before brewing, then decant/
siphon off the water, leaving the white stuff (calcium, and more I
believe) behind and your water is softer. This works, I believe, only for
temporary hardness.
Have you seen John Palmers HowtoBrew.com ? He goes into this, as do
several other good authors. Also, I am sure the archives, here, have a
good deal of info on this.
Darrell
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Date: Sun, 21 Feb 2010 11:39:23 -0500
From: M Lewandowski <m-lew at comcast.net>
Subject: Re: water
Will boiling remove some of the hardness?
It depends on your water. Boiling will remove "temporary" hardness.
Practically speaking, hardness is from dissolved calcium and magnesium
ions. These ions have a positive charge. The positive ions have to be
balanced with a negative charge. When negatively-charged bicarbonate ions
provide the balance, this is called temporary hardness. Boiling will cause
the hardness plus the bicarbonate (which changes form to carbonate during
boiling) to precipiate out. Boiling won't reemove all of the temporary
harndress, but it will reduce it significantly.
Isn't the white stuff you find on the bottom of the kettle the calcium from
the hardness?
Exactly. When this white precipitate forms, you reduced your water's hardness.
It was to my understanding that you have to dilute the hardness out, does
boiling actually work?
It depends on yoru water. If the bicarbonate concentration is reasonably
high, it'll work pretty well.
I hope this helped. Feel free to ask follow-up questions.
Mike L.
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Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:50:57 +1100
From: Kieran Short <kieran.short at gmail.com>
Subject: RE: Water
"I can more easily brew red ales, and darker ales, but have to use some
distilled
water, or pre-boil some of my water, so as to get rid of some of the
temporary hardness."
Minerals are non-volatile. They will not boil off. They will not be
removed from the water that comes out of the kettle at the end of the
boil. Because you lose some water vapour/steam while it boils, you'll
actually be concentrating them just a tiny bit. When these
concentrations get appreciably high, that's when dissolved minerals
react with the kettle element and form a precipitate on the bottom of
your kettle - as Mike says).
The only way to do what you're saying, is to distil your water, which
uses the process of boiling, but is not simply boiling.
The purpose of distillation is to leave those minerals and other
contaminants in the boiling mineralised water below. Distillation
captures the vapour/steam that comes off the water, and separates it
from the boiling liquid which keeps the minerals.
If you were to take some Glad/Saran wrap, and make some sort of tent
above a pot with a marble in the middle to make a collection point with
a pan below it, you could make up a clandestine distillation system. It
would take a hell of a lot of boiling though to make enough for a brew.
Not to mention it would be completely devoid of all minerals, which
would require the addition of minerals in order to make it usable.
Of course you could also try a reverse-osmosis system which is quite
expensive to set up.
anyway, I hope this helps,
all the best,
Kieran
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End of HOMEBREW Digest #5661, 02/21/10
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