 "You have to be in the ballpark if you want a chance to hit a home run."
Bru'n Water gets you in the ballpark every time.
Introduction
Bru'n Water offers Homebrewers and Craftbrewers a tool to quickly and accurately assess and modify their brewing water to fit their current mash grist. This program provides Brewers with the ability to check and evaluate:
There are plenty of brewing water programs that calculate what quantity of brewing minerals to add to produce a desired ion concentration in water, but few tell you: Is it the right thing to do?
Bru'n Water gives a Brewer the ability to assess what minerals, acid, or dilution should be incorporated into their brewing water. It also tells the Brewer what the effect of those adjustments will be. Bru'n Water is also unique in its ability to assess what effect the Brewer's actual mash grist will have on the mash pH. Mash pH plays an important part in the fermentability and character of the Brewer's wort and the taste and perceptions of the finished beer.
Why do you need to adjust your brewing water?
Water varies from place to place. Along with hardness, important variation in alkalinity and mineral content affects how a Brewer in one location can brew a particular beer style successfully, while a brewer in another location may not. There is no water that is ideal for brewing all beer styles. To brew a wide variety of styles, a Brewer has to learn to adjust their water or their brewing practices to create great beer. Understanding these factors is an important step in producing great beer. The old advice of "add a teaspoon of gypsum to your brewing water" is not always good advice. Understanding why that is poor advice and how to do it right is the goal of Bru'n Water.
Brewers should know hardness and alkalinity are not necessarily bad for brewing. Understanding how they interact to create the conditions needed for good mashing performance is an aspect of brewing water knowledge that Bru'n Water helps present and explain.
To help develop the understanding and appreciation of brewing water chemistry, a comprehensive introduction to brewing water chemistry is presented on the web page accessed by the link below. Enjoy the knowledge!
Go to Bru'n Water's: Water Knowledge page
Although simple concepts like Residual Alkalinity help a Brewer grasp the need to adjust their brewing water, the processes that occur in a mash are more complicated than suggested above. All the malt and grain added to a mash contribute varying degrees of acidity to the mash. Generally, the amount of acidity contributed by a malt or grain increases as the color increases. Darker kilned malts contribute more acidity than paler malts. And even though the figure above indicates that darker beers need higher RA and paler beers need low RA, beer color alone is not an accurate indicator of what hardness and alkalinity the Brewer's water should contain to produce a desirable mash pH.
Figure 1 below provides examples of how widely the total amount of malt acidity can vary while producing the same beer color. All the results were simulated using Bru'n Water using identical malt quantity and water to grist ratio. The impact of Crystal Malts on the overall acidity of the mash is apparent. As seen in the figure, Crystal Malt has a higher acidity per color unit than Roast Malts such as roast barley, chocolate malt, or black patent. A grist with only base malt and a portion of roast malt has a relatively linear increase in total malt acidity with increasing color (lowest line in graph). Adding a portion of crystal malt tends to bump the malt acidity up without an increase in color. The line extending through the top of the graph represents how the malt acidity would rise if a brewer added only 150L Crystal to a base malt to create more color (you wouldn't do this in practice since the percentage of crystal malt in a grist should generally be kept under 20 percent). This 150L Crystal line represents a worst-case example of what the total malt acidity could be. Fortunately, most brewers use darker, roasted malt and grain to produce the deeper color they desire in their beer. The results for the 10 and 20 percent Crystal content grists show that there is a definite increase in total malt acidity as the crystal percentage increases. Interestingly, the total malt acidity for these Crystal malt percentages tend to parallel the roast malt line as the color exceeds 20 SRM. This is because roast malt is added to the grist to achieve the darker color.
Figure 1 - Beer Color vs Malt Acidity
An explanation follows as to how the various results in Figure 1 were calculated. For the Base Malt with Roast and the Base malt with 150L Crystal malt, the color of the grist was increased by increasing the percentage of the colored malt while keeping the overall weight of the grist constant (in this case, 8 lbs total for a 5 gal batch).
In the case of the 10 and 20 percent Crystal malt grists, the weight of crystal malt was held constant at either 10 or 20 percent, respectively. The color rating (L) of the crystal malt was increased to produce the increased beer color. As evidenced by the 150L crystal line, it becomes infeasible to increase the beer color with only crystal malts (line becomes vertical) at higher beer color. Therefore, roast malt (500L) was added to the grist to produce the beer color greater than 20 SRM. That is why the 10 and 20 percent crystal lines become parallel to the roast line when the beer color exceeds 20 SRM.
So as exhibited in Figure 1, the acidity of mashes that produce the same color beer can vary significantly. To neutralize the malt acidity and produce the desired mash pH, the mashing water must have the proper alkalinity. Basing the mashing water alkalinity (or Residual Alkalinity) on only beer color will not always produce a desirable mash pH.
These are reasons why Bru'n Water includes advanced analytical measures to help the brewer get their mash pH right, the first time.
Bru'n Water v. 1.12 now available in US and SI unit versions
Go to: File Download page
Go to the: Water Knowledge page
Link to Bru'n Water's Donation page: Support Bru'n Water
Bru'n Water is an Excel application. If you don't have Excel installed on your computer, LibreOffice software is a freeware program that will allow you to run Bru'n Water.
You can download LibreOffice from the following website: http://www.libreoffice.org/
Bru'n Water can also be opened using Google Docs, but the formatting of the program is affected and some display information is lost. Although Bru'n Water does appear to operate in Google Docs, LibreOffice is recommended over Google Docs for operating Bru'n Water. Of course, a recent version of Excel is the preferred program for Bru'n Water operation.
Learn, Create, Enjoy
     The Brewing Process in Pictorial
Better Beer starts with your Water!
Snap Shots of Bru'n Water
In addition to a useful water tool, Bru'n Water provides a substantial tutorial on brewing water chemistry and treatment. This program helps Brewers to not only adjust their brewing water, but to understand why they're doing it.
Download the Excel spreadsheet, Bru'n Water, from the Files section shown at the left side of this sheet. The program uses Macros to power the drop-down lists. A standard MS Excel warning regarding macros may pop-up when trying to select the drop down boxes if the macros have not been enabled. The user can review the spreadsheet to assure themselves that the program will be useful before enabling the macros, but to enjoy the full utility of the program, utilities will have to be enabled. Mac computers don't use macros and Excel for Macs invites the user to remove the macros. The program will still work properly on the Mac but probably can't be shared with a PC after that. The program has been reviewed on Open Office software and seems to work acceptably. The formatting of text and layout may be altered when using Open Office, but the functionality should be maintained.
Users should first adjust the ZOOM setting under the View Tab of either Excel, Open Office. or LibreOffice so that the size of the work area is maximized to the User's computer screen. Text in some of the cells within the program may be improperly displayed if the ZOOM setting is too small.
Bru'n Water helps decipher what characteristics the brewing water should have and how the Brewer can create it. The program is set up with multiple calculation sheets that help organize the Brewer's progress through the water analysis and adjustment.
The first step is to evaluate the Brewer's water supply. The screen shot shown below is the Water Report Input where the Brewer enters their water quality data. The Blue fields are where data are entered and the Yellow fields are where results are reported. The Water Report Input sheet helps the Brewer analyze their water report and evaluate if the reported results have errors. Basic results such as the ion balance, hardness, and alkalinity are also presented. To aid the Brewer, some cells throughout the program change their color to help indicate when good or bad results are calculated.
After entering their water supply data, the Brewer can then calculate the amount of acid needed to bring their sparging water down to a proper pH. The calculator includes the ability to utilize a variety of acids and strengths so that the proper acid quantity can be estimated. The screen shot below shows the input and output format. Drop-down boxes provide easy selection of acid type and strength. If the Brewer's water supply is fairly consistent, the Brewer should not have to revisit these first 2 sheets for subsequent brewing sessions.
The Water Profile Adjustment Calculator provides a comprehensive analysis and adjustment tool that is useful for determining the mineral and acid additions needed to produce a targeted brewing water profile. This sheet includes a comprehensive listing of accurate water profiles from historic brewing centers around the world as well as recommended water profiles that are generally based on beer color or style. A variety of mineral and acid additions and water dilution tools are available on the sheet to enable fine tuning of the Brewer's water source to a desired water profile.
Many brewing water calculators provide the utility of the Water Profile Adjustment Calculator above, but few offer the ability to evaluate the performance of that adjusted water with the Brewer's actual mashing grist. The Mash Acidification Calculator allows the Brewer to assess their proposed brewing grist along with important mashing parameters to more accurately predict the total acidity produced by the mash grist and contrast it with the brewing water's alkalinity to more accurately estimate the mash pH. When the predicted mash pH falls outside the Brewer's desired range, the brewing water can be readjusted using the Water Profile Adjustment Calculator to bring the pH into the desired range prior to brewing. While the pH prediction is not perfect, it does produce results that are within 0.2 units of the actual mash pH (@ room-temperature). With the developer's ongoing calibration program and assistance from brewers around the world, the pH prediction should be within 0.1 units soon.
To provide a sheet that the Brewer can print for handy reference of water additions for brewing, an Adjustment Summary sheet is now included to bring together all the information developed in the rest of the program. The sheet also includes a chart showing how their adjusted brewing water compares to historic brewing water profiles. A screen shot of that Summary sheet is presented below.
The development of Bru'n Water has included hundreds of hours of work by the Author and Brewers around the world. We hope you will enjoy the fruits of this labor and use the program to help you create better beer. Your comments and recommendations for improvements are welcome.
Although Bru'n Water is freeware, to assist the team in continuing the improvement of this program and to indicate your approval and support, donations through PayPal are welcome. A couple of dollars are truely welcome from those that find this program and water knowledge useful. Use the email address mabrungard@hotmail.com to forward comments about the program and to direct donations to the development team. For those with a PayPal account, a link to PayPal is provided at the Support Bru'n Water link below. Use the SEND MONEY tool and select the PERSONAL tab to direct a GIFT amount to the developers. The size of your gift is truely at your discretion.
Go to: File Download page
Enjoy and Prost!
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About the Author: Martin Brungard is a civil and environmental engineer with over 25 years of professional experience. His practice area focuses on water resources engineering and he has been named a Diplomate of Water Resources Engineering by the American Academy of Water Resources Engineers. His engineering practice includes providing engineering consulting services to municipalities and industry including major and craft brewers across the United States. He has been homebrewing since 1999, is a member of the American Homebrewers Association, and has attained the rank of National Judge from the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP). Comments and concerns regarding this program may be sent to the author at mabrungard@hotmail.com