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mash pH and salt additions

danbrews

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Hi, do I add my salts(cacl and gypsum ) and acid(phosphoric) to the mash water only for a light American pale ale? Does the pH function actually work? just to test this I added 2 kilo of acid malt to the grist and the projected mash ph hardly changed???it went from 5.65 to 5.60. thanks!
 
Are you using BS2 or BS3?  In BS2, acid malt, acids, and water salts added directly to the recipe were not included in the pH calculation.  For BS3, this was changed.

Note also that the pH model being used in BeerSmith was developed by Mark Riffe and he recently came out on HBT stating that his model overestimates the buffering capacity contribution of the malt.  This basically results in the model estimating an acid or acid malt contribution about 60% higher than it really needs to be.  Reversing that, it underestimates the acidifying contribution of those materials by the same factor.  Edit your acid malt to increase the acid content to about 3% to 3.2% (from the 2% as specified by Weyermann). 

Next, 2 kg of acid malt in what grain bill?  If I added 2 kg of acidulated malt to my 2.5 to 3 kg average grist bill it would certainly have a large impact.  Conversely, If I were brewing 10 HL, it might hardly make a budge in the pH. 
 
Thanks Oginme for the excellent info! I was just making a grist for the purpose of seeing how it affects the mash pH in the software, it was a 5kg grist with 2 kg acid malt . Im brewing a 3.5 gal American pale ale,using ro water with salt additions to match the yellow balanced profile in bru n water.

I will try 3% acidulated malt in the grist :) oh im using beersmith 2
 
Your acidulated malt is either garbage, or your PH measuring method is garbage. There is literally no way that you could've added 2K of a 5K grist and only had .05 change in PH.

FWIW i just brewed yesterday using the yellow balanced profile, using RO/DI water, NO acid addition and had a mash PH of 5.33 grist was 13.5k mixture of pilsner, maris otter, vienna, and corn.

using a Hanna PH meter model 98128 that is always kept in storage solution and calibrated at the start of the brew day.
 
dtapke said:
Your acidulated malt is either garbage, or your PH measuring method is garbage. There is literally no way that you could've added 2K of a 5K grist and only had .05 change in PH.

I think the OP was just playing with the recipe to determine what affect the acid malt will have on the estimated pH.

 
sorry I should have made myself a bit more clear :( I was just playing with grists on the program to see the effects on estimated pH, I didn't actually mash the grist.
 
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