26 replies to this topic

[Steve Urquell]

68 could easily be neutralized with acid.

[Big Nake]

68 could easily be neutralized with acid.

Right. If I can make a nice soft helles with 138ppm, 68 is no reason to consider distilled.

[HVB]

Right. If I can make a nice soft helles with 138ppm, 68 is no reason to consider distilled.

 

68 could easily be neutralized with acid.

 

Sometimes I just need to double check.  I have been using acid (malt and lactic) and felt it was fine but my view on what fine is could be tainted

[Steve Urquell]

Sometimes I just need to double check.  I have been using acid (malt and lactic) and felt it was fine but my view on what fine is could be tainted

You know nothing in brewing is carved in stone. I imagine there would be a threshold where a 1.036 light lager would not taste right if enough acid were needed to get pH in line. Since I havent done it I don't know where that line is--100ppm bicarb etc.

[HVB]

You know nothing in brewing is carved in stone. I imagine there would be a threshold where a 1.036 light lager would not taste right if enough acid were needed to get pH in line. Since I havent done it I don't know where that line is--100ppm bicarb etc.

Oh I know.  When I get to making something that low of an OG I will have to think about it.  I try and keep most in the 1.048 range.

[Big Nake]

One concern I always had was "does high/higher bicarb cause any other issues other than futzing with your pH?". Like, is there a flavor component to it? Does it mess with your ability to get the beer clear, etc? Also, when you "neutralize" bicarb with acid, is that it? Is the bicarb "gone" or is its ability to buffer the pH just gone but something else remains? I'm not sure that I ever got answers to those questions but it does appear that once you neutralize the bicarb with acid, you can forget about it and just brew. I still do have 27ppm of sulfate in my source water which some (Chils) may consider high for some of these beers like helles or Czech Lagers, etc. so distilled could always be employed and I always have a few gallons of it. The other part is that when one of these brewers with super-high bicarb wants to make a softer beer, they have no choice but to do something else because the amount of acid you might need to neutralize 250ppm if bicarb (I made that number up) might come through as a flavor component now. As it is, I might start with 8 gallons of water for a 5 gallon batch and use 6ml of acid. Somewhere in there I heard that using 1ml per gallon of water in the batch is right around the threshold of being able to detect the acid in the final beer. Not sure how true that is.

[Steve Urquell]

Acid converts bicarb to CO2 if I remember correctly which can then off gas. So it goes bye bye.

Edited by Steve Urquell, 25 May 2017 - 06:24 AM.