This was a great video! This probably solved my issues with crispness in my home brew IPA's! I always felt they were dull and lacking that nice crisp taste in the mouthfeel and it might be due to the fact I never acidify my sparge water! I realize now how testing ph along the entire brew day is super important! Good stuff!
Old school homebrewer here, back then (90's) never worried about PH, especially sparge water. It is really important, especially the part about getting off flavors! Thanks for another awesome video.
I would love it if you did a simple water chemistry video based on styles. IPA's vs a stout for example? I've been trying to get into it but there's a lot of conflicting statements out there. Would much rather listen to a brewer explaining!! Great video as usual!
Do some experimenting brother, and don't be afraid to use the "scary" hydroxides to dial in exactly what you want for minerals (you can always correct high pH with acids -lactic, citric, tartaric, phosphoric, etc). Water mineral profile is much more about feel than following prescribed ppm for a style, and this means it really comes from experience. Also, don't be dismayed when your water or mineral profile taste like crap before you make it into beer; the beer will change what the water tastes like as much as the water changes the beer. Can you tell I've spent the last year diving into water mineral profiles? Happy Brewing!
Awesome video. Thanks for spending so much time explaining a not-so-sexy subject. I love the details. The calcium precipitation thing at 5.5 versus 6 blew my mind. It's something I've never heard but will start paying more attention too. 🍻
Appreciate it! That is a mind bending fact for sure. It does change with the original waters residual alkalinity but I didnt want to get overly complicated so I feel that's a good rule of thumb. Cheers!
Awesome video, your doing great things for the community! I do have have a question about your HL. I see that sometimes I am recommend to use Epsom salts to match a certain style profile although I know some folks say it has laxitive properties so I never use it. Do you guys run into having to add these salts to help the your water chemistry or do you more focus on the pH?
CaSO4 and CaCl are my 2 most commonly used salts. Every brewery will have a different water profile that needs to be consided. Pretty complicated stuff if you start digging deep. Best of luck man!
Don't worry about that Epsom, the PPM you use are so much lower than needed for a laxative effect, that someone would have to drink an entire keg for it to have any effect.
How are people measuring pH and gravity of the sparge run-off? I am transferring to the kettle with a pump. Do I install a 3-way valve along the way to the kettle and pull some off?
Thank you so much for this video. I am currently in the process of buying a new brewhouse and was looking for a way to adjust the pH of my sparing water. The supplier has great experience and has made A LOT of brewhouses, but he never got the question of adding lactic acid in a HLT. What to do? It turns out that every questions is allready been answered by Jasper. Even if you don't knwo you got them. You help me a lot to go from a 50 liter Speidel into designing my own 10 hl 3 vessel brewhouse. Thank you for that!
Great video, Jasper. Do you think there much difference in acidifying your sparge liquor vs acidifying your wort directly in the kettle assuming you obey the 6/2 or 5.7/2.5 rules?
Steve great question. Acidifying the kettle is a common place for pH adjustment. I would say hardly any difference would be noticed by sensory panel. I do think if you can keep last runnings at 5.5 with sparge adjustment and this leads to a good kettle pH, this would be slightly better on a chemical level. However some HLT are alot harder to dose than mine and the kettle is the practical place for adjustment. Great beer can come from either. Just my 2 cents. Thanks for watching, cheers!
This is incredibly interesting!! Do you have any inexpensive, reliable recommendations for homebrewers to check PH? Or do inexpensive and reliable contradict when we're talking about PH testing? Really enjoyed this one, keep up the super informative videos!
Some brewers use a small inline dosing pump to dose the water while it's on the way to sparge. If you have last runnings under 5.8 I'd just do any final pH adjustments in kettle. Cheers!
Can't stand when a brewery releases a NEIPA and states fruity/juicy on the can and it tastes just of pure woody tannins because they don't acidify their sparge water. Why is it not done by so many commercial breweries? Seems to me some brewers just cannot taste the problem.
I could be off base here, but if you are into last runnings so concentrated that it is altering PH so much isn't that miss calculation of sparge water volumes?
Some time back, my LHBS was running occasional brewing contests. I decided to enter the one for dark beer. It could be any style of beer as long as it was dark. I was more interested in getting an honest appraisal of the beer than anything else. My friends always seem to love my beer but I think that they love the “free” part best. Getting an honest and informed appraisal from them is tough. After the contest, I got the score sheet for my pseudo Murphy Stout. The sheet listed a flaw - astringency. The judge had suggested: “mashed too long?, over sparged?” I went back to my brew sheet and found that I had only mashed for an hour so I conceded to myself that the problem must have come from over sparging. I knew I had a little problem with astringency in some beers but it wasn’t noticeable in others. Color didn’t seem to be a factor with this occasional flaw as these beers were all over the map as far as style. The problem would come up from time to time and I had no idea when it would happen. I seemed to be at the mercy of some mystical force. I checked the books to learn how to keep those pesky tannins out of my beer. Some texts said to stop collecting wort during the lauter at a SG of 1.008. Others said 1.010 or 1.012. That’s really a fairly wide spread. What are the measurement parameters for this? Are these cut-off gravities based on a ratio of the OG? Are they based on color? Is this just a matter of hocus pocus and “feel”, or is it based on some scientific principle? I put this problem on my “things to figure out” list. For a few batches, I started checking the SG toward the end of the lauter and stopped collecting at the suggested gravity. I still wondered why the tannins don’t leach out during the entire lauter. I found my answer in reading more technical publications. They seemed to lay it out in a way my puny brain could understand although I would have expected this explanation from basic brewing texts. As the sugars are being rinsed from the mash, so are the buffers which keep the pH down in the 5.1 to 5.5 range. As the sparge water, with a higher pH, rinses these buffers out, the pH of the grain bed starts to rise. Once the grain bed rises to about pH 5.9, the tannins start to leach out of the hulls. The pH of the mash will continue to rise and eventually would match the pH of your sparge water, if you were to lauter that long. Raising the temp of the grain bed by using sparge water over 172 oF just exacerbates the problem. I read that many brewers acidify their sparge water to alleviate this condition. Sulfuric, lactic, and phosphoric acids were mentioned. I really didn’t have a clue as to which kind or even how much to use but this mystery seemed to be unravelling. I found John Palmer’s RA worksheet on the web and downloaded it. One part of this worksheet is a calculator for acidifying the sparge water. I used lactic acid in the amount set by the calculator on my next batch of beer. Toward the end of the collection, I checked gravity as well as pH which stayed low so I collected until I had enough for the boil. Neither the collected wort nor the finished beer had any perceivable astringency. I tried it again on subsequent batches and still found no astringency. The gravity of the final runnings seems to be of lesser concern if that wort doesn’t climb above pH 5.8. Keep this in mind if you are making a double batch from a single mash such as a Wee Heavy and a small beer or a DIPA and a bitter. However, there is little to gain by rinsing the grain bed until there is zero sugar left! The mystical force of “hocus pocus” has now been replaced by honest-to-goodness science. It has provided me with a technique which seems to have corrected the problem and is keeping astringency at bay in my brewing.
Hey jasper. From this am I correct in assuming that you treat your mash water directly when you mash in? By this I mean you add the required phos acid, calc chloride, gypsum into the mash tun with the grist when you mash in. Rather than treating all of the volume in your HLT before you mash in? Thanks.
So, how about some of the math for this? One of the best beers I ever made was an accident. I was short 3/4 of a gallon in my final volume and I topped with 9.8% alkaline water (Small batch, 2 3/4 gallon - I had 2 gallons of wort at end of boil). The beer was fantastic, but I had no way to know what I started with - I used bottled water (Spring Water) from SAMS Club and not RO water - so I doubt it was stripped and my thought are the beer was somewhere north of 7 pH. The beer was a Cream Ale. I'd really like an empirical method for learning how to reproduce my brew. Also, any recommendations for what to look for in a homebrewer quality pH meter? Many thanks - I always look for your videos and I enjoy the content. Thanks!
I put 210ml in this video... do titration test. Test on small amount of water like 5gallons and scale up dosage. Get a good pH meter and test offen. It's better to put too little in than too much, cheers
Jasper hi and thank you for your videos. I'm writing you from Mexico so, I want to know if you could shear with us the ”rule of thumbs ” that you talk about at the beginning of the video, I'm having a hard time getting it, since my English is not that good. 😅
You need to monitor the ph and gravity at the end of your sparge in order to not extract tannins. A PH above 6 and a gravity below 2 plato will start to extract tannins.
I am a professional brewer from Sweden, these are the best videos I have ever seen on UA-cam on the subjects. 10/10.
Thanks man, cheers!
This was a great video! This probably solved my issues with crispness in my home brew IPA's! I always felt they were dull and lacking that nice crisp taste in the mouthfeel and it might be due to the fact I never acidify my sparge water! I realize now how testing ph along the entire brew day is super important! Good stuff!
Thanks glad you like it! pH is definitely a major player to be aware about.
Thanks for the video man! I would love to see a video on Mash water adjustments ( i.e. water salts, pH adjustment ).
Cheers, thanks for watching!
I really like this guy's videos because he gets into the areas which are so important but are seldom addressed. Great job!
Thanks man, I try. Cheers!
Thanks jasper for excellent video. keep them coming.
Thanks for the kind words!
Old school homebrewer here, back then (90's) never worried about PH, especially sparge water. It is really important, especially the part about getting off flavors! Thanks for another awesome video.
Thanks for all the videos. your a great host. cheers
Thanks Shaun! I'm not the best talker more of a do'er. Glad you liked it, cheers!
Only just now discovered this, subscribed and I will be watching all your videos.
Awesome to hear Scott! Hope you find something useful or at least entertaining, cheers
Fantastic video, lots of great info condensed in there. Thanks!
Glad you liked it, cheers!
Answered a lot of questions...thanks!
It was a tough vid to put together, glad it helped. Thanks for watching!
These videos are excellent.
Thanks!
Love it, consider a keg washing video in the future
Thanks for the suggestion, cheers!
I would love it if you did a simple water chemistry video based on styles. IPA's vs a stout for example? I've been trying to get into it but there's a lot of conflicting statements out there. Would much rather listen to a brewer explaining!! Great video as usual!
Sweet, thanks for the comment! You can spend a lifetime just studing water chemistry.
+1 keep the water videos coming!
Do some experimenting brother, and don't be afraid to use the "scary" hydroxides to dial in exactly what you want for minerals (you can always correct high pH with acids -lactic, citric, tartaric, phosphoric, etc). Water mineral profile is much more about feel than following prescribed ppm for a style, and this means it really comes from experience. Also, don't be dismayed when your water or mineral profile taste like crap before you make it into beer; the beer will change what the water tastes like as much as the water changes the beer. Can you tell I've spent the last year diving into water mineral profiles? Happy Brewing!
Great video Jasper!
Thanks for watching, cheers Tom
Brewery Life any recommendations for a good quality pH meter? Been struggling to find one that’s reliable
High end lab equipment companies are great. My go to is Metler Toledo, anything they do will be great.
Jasper you are a credit to your folks. Thanks for all the information.
Awesome video. Thanks for spending so much time explaining a not-so-sexy subject. I love the details. The calcium precipitation thing at 5.5 versus 6 blew my mind. It's something I've never heard but will start paying more attention too. 🍻
Appreciate it! That is a mind bending fact for sure. It does change with the original waters residual alkalinity but I didnt want to get overly complicated so I feel that's a good rule of thumb. Cheers!
Where is your brewery located? Would love to visit and check out the beer!
Awesome video, your doing great things for the community! I do have have a question about your HL. I see that sometimes I am recommend to use Epsom salts to match a certain style profile although I know some folks say it has laxitive properties so I never use it. Do you guys run into having to add these salts to help the your water chemistry or do you more focus on the pH?
CaSO4 and CaCl are my 2 most commonly used salts. Every brewery will have a different water profile that needs to be consided. Pretty complicated stuff if you start digging deep. Best of luck man!
Don't worry about that Epsom, the PPM you use are so much lower than needed for a laxative effect, that someone would have to drink an entire keg for it to have any effect.
How are people measuring pH and gravity of the sparge run-off? I am transferring to the kettle with a pump. Do I install a 3-way valve along the way to the kettle and pull some off?
Thank you Jasper, really enjoying these vids heaps of great content and explanation of what you are doing, awesome! Cheers 🍻🍻🍻
Thanks guys, glad you liked it!
Do you consider acidification of RO water a need? I reader from some that it's not totally necessary. Great videos BTW
Thank you so much for this video. I am currently in the process of buying a new brewhouse and was looking for a way to adjust the pH of my sparing water. The supplier has great experience and has made A LOT of brewhouses, but he never got the question of adding lactic acid in a HLT. What to do? It turns out that every questions is allready been answered by Jasper. Even if you don't knwo you got them. You help me a lot to go from a 50 liter Speidel into designing my own 10 hl 3 vessel brewhouse. Thank you for that!
Awesome man congrats!
Nice info, thanks. How about the strike water before you mash in? My water is a little alkaline. Should I worry about that as well?
Great video, Jasper. Do you think there much difference in acidifying your sparge liquor vs acidifying your wort directly in the kettle assuming you obey the 6/2 or 5.7/2.5 rules?
Steve great question. Acidifying the kettle is a common place for pH adjustment. I would say hardly any difference would be noticed by sensory panel. I do think if you can keep last runnings at 5.5 with sparge adjustment and this leads to a good kettle pH, this would be slightly better on a chemical level. However some HLT are alot harder to dose than mine and the kettle is the practical place for adjustment. Great beer can come from either. Just my 2 cents. Thanks for watching, cheers!
Jasper, what is better for small breweries: Keg, Bottle or Can? Thanks for the video, and nice machine you have there.
Thanks, kegs have best shelf life, bottles are fancy, cans are hip for the outdoors. Your call, cheers
Of course there are regional and style differences but for now here in New England cans are king.
This is incredibly interesting!! Do you have any inexpensive, reliable recommendations for homebrewers to check PH? Or do inexpensive and reliable contradict when we're talking about PH testing? Really enjoyed this one, keep up the super informative videos!
Any tips for someone using a large HLT that provides hot liquor to everything else in the brewery, not just the brewhouse?
Some brewers use a small inline dosing pump to dose the water while it's on the way to sparge. If you have last runnings under 5.8 I'd just do any final pH adjustments in kettle. Cheers!
I want to learn Brewing from you, how to get in touch with you
brewerylife@gmail.com but I'm not currently hiring right now, sorry.
Awesome thanks a lot mate
Can't stand when a brewery releases a NEIPA and states fruity/juicy on the can and it tastes just of pure woody tannins because they don't acidify their sparge water. Why is it not done by so many commercial breweries? Seems to me some brewers just cannot taste the problem.
Nice dawg
Yee boi!
Could you please share calculations for amount of orthophosphoric acid needed to be added in sparge water in mashing . Formulas please
There are none...everyone's water is different. As I said in the video, you must do your own titration tests to figure out your dose rate.
I could be off base here, but if you are into last runnings so concentrated that it is altering PH so much isn't that miss calculation of sparge water volumes?
Over sparging can definitely cause a rise in pH. Thanks for watching, cheers
Some time back, my LHBS was running occasional brewing contests. I decided to enter the one for dark beer. It could be any style of beer as long as it was dark. I was more interested in getting an honest appraisal of the beer than anything else. My friends always seem to love my beer but I think that they love the “free” part best. Getting an honest and informed appraisal from them is tough.
After the contest, I got the score sheet for my pseudo Murphy Stout. The sheet listed a flaw - astringency. The judge had suggested: “mashed too long?, over sparged?” I went back to my brew sheet and found that I had only mashed for an hour so I conceded to myself that the problem must have come from over sparging. I knew I had a little problem with astringency in some beers but it wasn’t noticeable in others. Color didn’t seem to be a factor with this occasional flaw as these beers were all over the map as far as style. The problem would come up from time to time and I had no idea when it would happen. I seemed to be at the mercy of some mystical force.
I checked the books to learn how to keep those pesky tannins out of my beer. Some texts said to stop collecting wort during the lauter at a SG of 1.008. Others said 1.010 or 1.012. That’s really a fairly wide spread. What are the measurement parameters for this? Are these cut-off gravities based on a ratio of the OG? Are they based on color? Is this just a matter of hocus pocus and “feel”, or is it based on some scientific principle? I put this problem on my “things to figure out” list.
For a few batches, I started checking the SG toward the end of the lauter and stopped collecting at the suggested gravity. I still wondered why the tannins don’t leach out during the entire lauter. I found my answer in reading more technical publications. They seemed to lay it out in a way my puny brain could understand although I would have expected this explanation from basic brewing texts. As the sugars are being rinsed from the mash, so are the buffers which keep the pH down in the 5.1 to 5.5 range. As the sparge water, with a higher pH, rinses these buffers out, the pH of the grain bed starts to rise. Once the grain bed rises to about pH 5.9, the tannins start to leach out of the hulls. The pH of the mash will continue to rise and eventually would match the pH of your sparge water, if you were to lauter that long. Raising the temp of the grain bed by using sparge water over 172 oF just exacerbates the problem.
I read that many brewers acidify their sparge water to alleviate this condition. Sulfuric, lactic, and phosphoric acids were mentioned. I really didn’t have a clue as to which kind or even how much to use but this mystery seemed to be unravelling. I found John Palmer’s RA worksheet on the web and downloaded it. One part of this worksheet is a calculator for acidifying the sparge water. I used lactic acid in the amount set by the calculator on my next batch of beer. Toward the end of the collection, I checked gravity as well as pH which stayed low so I collected until I had enough for the boil. Neither the collected wort nor the finished beer had any perceivable astringency. I tried it again on subsequent batches and still found no astringency.
The gravity of the final runnings seems to be of lesser concern if that wort doesn’t climb above pH 5.8. Keep this in mind if you are making a double batch from a single mash such as a Wee Heavy and a small beer or a DIPA and a bitter. However, there is little to gain by rinsing the grain bed until there is zero sugar left!
The mystical force of “hocus pocus” has now been replaced by honest-to-goodness science. It has provided me with a technique which seems to have corrected the problem and is keeping astringency at bay in my brewing.
@@micromickey9887 nice explanation. Thanks a lot
Hey jasper. From this am I correct in assuming that you treat your mash water directly when you mash in? By this I mean you add the required phos acid, calc chloride, gypsum into the mash tun with the grist when you mash in. Rather than treating all of the volume in your HLT before you mash in? Thanks.
So, how about some of the math for this? One of the best beers I ever made was an accident. I was short 3/4 of a gallon in my final volume and I topped with 9.8% alkaline water (Small batch, 2 3/4 gallon - I had 2 gallons of wort at end of boil). The beer was fantastic, but I had no way to know what I started with - I used bottled water (Spring Water) from SAMS Club and not RO water - so I doubt it was stripped and my thought are the beer was somewhere north of 7 pH. The beer was a Cream Ale. I'd really like an empirical method for learning how to reproduce my brew. Also, any recommendations for what to look for in a homebrewer quality pH meter? Many thanks - I always look for your videos and I enjoy the content. Thanks!
The one that got away... thanks for the comment, cheers
Hi Jasper,how u know how much acid u put in hlt u have some calculator?? I saw u put 250ml
I put 210ml in this video... do titration test. Test on small amount of water like 5gallons and scale up dosage. Get a good pH meter and test offen. It's better to put too little in than too much, cheers
@@brewerylife3596 thanks man,i was thinking same. Cheers
Jasper hi and thank you for your videos. I'm writing you from Mexico so, I want to know if you could shear with us the ”rule of thumbs ” that you talk about at the beginning of the video, I'm having a hard time getting it, since my English is not that good. 😅
Ana Lagunas x2
You need to monitor the ph and gravity at the end of your sparge in order to not extract tannins. A PH above 6 and a gravity below 2 plato will start to extract tannins.
Jasper ...were is the pony Tail....LOL.