Liquor - Salt Addition Calculator

Different historic styles of beer are associated with different cities and regions throughout Europe. This is because different places traditionally would have most likely used local ingredients such as hops but would also have been constrained to a certain extent by the profile of the water supply available to them. The water of Pilsen and Munich is soft and low in salts making it ideal for brewing pale crisp lagers. Dortmund has a lot of minerals in its water and so beers made here tend to be sweeter, malty ales, whilst the water of Burton is very hard and lends itself to the strong, dry, hoppier ales traditionally produced there. The table below shows the main ionic components in the water supply of different historic European brewing centres.

Ions (ppm)	Burton	Pilsen	Munich	Dortmund	London	Köln
Ca2+	268	7	76	260	90	105
Mg2+	62	2	18	23	4	15
Na+	30	3.2		69	24	50
CO32-	280	14	152	270	123	150
SO42-	638	5	10	283	58	85
Cl-	36	5	2	106	18	100

Nowadays a lot more is understood about the ionic chemistry of water and the way liquor composition affects the brewing process than when these cities first rose as great beer producers. Such as the effect calcium has on reducing mash pH by liberating phosphate ions to the way sulphate ions increase hop utilisation during wort boiling. Depending on the raw supply used different water profiles can be mimicked by adding treatment salts such as gypsum to the brewing liquor allowing different styles of beer to be brewed almost anywhere.

Below is a calculator you can use to determine the salt additions you require in your brew to copy different historic styles or tailor your liquor to your brewing needs. Simply enter the volume of your brewlength and ion concentrations of your water supply then change the amounts of the various common treatment salts to determine what your resultant liquor composition will be.

August - IPA

August is here and it's IPA time! With the demand being so high last year a few changes to the recipe have had to be made in order to allow double the volume to be brewed. Firstly our mash tun isn't big enough to cram the necessary amount of malt in for 3000L of a 6.5% beer to be brewed in one go so the same sort of syrup that was used to extend the brewlength of the Grand Cru back in April was employed again. This helps to increase the sugar content of the unfermented wort, however you don't want to be greedy as too much can have a negative impact on the final product.

The second alteration to the original recipe is that it was now going into a cylindroconical fermenter with a very small top hatch and so the use of whole hops was not going to be a possibility and so instead pelletised hops had to be used. This does have its benefits in that they are much less messy when you are cleaning up and there is lot less wastage from the hops soaking up beer.

Finally the hop bill has been cut from 7 varieties down to 5. This years brew includes the following; Amarillo (pine), Bobek (floral), Chinook (grapefruit) and Summit (orange). Hopefully it will be as well received as last time, especially given that we have a small quantity earmarked for the final limited edition bottling run of the year.

Elderweiss - Hefeweissen

Elderweiss was conceived as a bit of a rebellion form the norm. I wanted to brew a foreign style of beer with specialist yeast and do something that was a bit different to what had been done before in terms of monthly specials as well as our core range. So a cloudy 5% wheat beer then!

Along with the mix of Styrian hops at the end of the boil I also opted to go for hefty dose of elderflower (also known as holunderblüten) syrup too to give it a more floral character. This really did help balance out the archetypal wheat beer flavours of banana and cloves formed during fermentation by the special hefeweissen yeast that we propagated up from a small vial in the pictured vessel.

Despite the stress of step mashing on our kit to help break down the proteins and beta-glucans from the large amount of wheat in the grist this really was an enjoyable beer to brew. The end result was also pretty decent especially given the only other time I had made a weissbier was in my Parent's kitchen whilst still at university!