Water treatment and its effects on taste perception

Anything and everything about beer and brewing it.
Post Reply
User avatar
EckersKlein
Posts: 122
Joined: Thu Sep 27, 2012 11:42 pm

Water treatment and its effects on taste perception

Post by EckersKlein »

Heya all,
As part of my daily dose of work procrastination, I've been reading a bit about how various ions can affect the taste of beer. The main points I read about seem to be:
  • Sodium (Na+) and chloride (Cl-) ions give an impression of malty full-bodiedness.
  • Sulphate (SO4 2-) ions give an impression of crispness, and accentuate hop bitterness.
Here's a writeup done by someone who actually knows what they're talking about (unlike me)

I think it would be neat to see the effects of these ions tested side-by-side. Doing two brews back-to-back with different water treatments isn't really practical for me. Even if I could be bothered, I'm not sure if I could get two identical recipes to taste the same anyway, so it doesn't make sense to use a "control" brew when I don't even know if it's well-controlled to begin with.

So here's the proposal I'd like to hear feedback on: Take a few bottles from one ready-to-drink brew, preferably a simple pale ale. One bottle is a control. Other bottles get "reasonable" additions of table salt (NaCl), gypsum salt (CaSO4), or whatever mineral one could use to deliver sodium, chloride, or sulphate ions to solution. Then taste-test the bottles side-by-side.

What this really comes down to is whether one can reliably add salts at the bottle level. Measuring out what will inevitably be mg weights of salts could be tricky without a lab scale, for example.

Ultimately, water treatment is really just a subject I'm curious about. What have you guys learned about it?
PMowdes
Posts: 489
Joined: Wed Nov 28, 2012 4:29 pm
Location: Bristol

Re: Water treatment and its effects on taste perception

Post by PMowdes »

EckersKlein wrote:Heya all,
As part of my daily dose of work procrastination, I've been reading a bit about how various ions can affect the taste of beer. The main points I read about seem to be:
  • Sodium (Na+) and chloride (Cl-) ions give an impression of malty full-bodiedness.
  • Sulphate (SO4 2-) ions give an impression of crispness, and accentuate hop bitterness.
Here's a writeup done by someone who actually knows what they're talking about (unlike me)

I think it would be neat to see the effects of these ions tested side-by-side. Doing two brews back-to-back with different water treatments isn't really practical for me. Even if I could be bothered, I'm not sure if I could get two identical recipes to taste the same anyway, so it doesn't make sense to use a "control" brew when I don't even know if it's well-controlled to begin with.

So here's the proposal I'd like to hear feedback on: Take a few bottles from one ready-to-drink brew, preferably a simple pale ale. One bottle is a control. Other bottles get "reasonable" additions of table salt (NaCl), gypsum salt (CaSO4), or whatever mineral one could use to deliver sodium, chloride, or sulphate ions to solution. Then taste-test the bottles side-by-side.

What this really comes down to is whether one can reliably add salts at the bottle level. Measuring out what will inevitably be mg weights of salts could be tricky without a lab scale, for example.

Ultimately, water treatment is really just a subject I'm curious about. What have you guys learned about it?

Dude, i like you thinking but i'm not sure that it is quite as easy as that.

Water chemistry is a bit of a juggling act. i.e you cant add sulphate without adding Magnesium or calcium, and you can't add chloride without adding calcium or sodium.

The most important thing is to get your mash and sparge pH correct, for which you need to know your water alkalinity and what contributions your malt make to the pH.

Remember that whatever acid you use to modify your pH also adds other ions to you liquor. HCl adds Chloride, H2SO4 adds sulphate etc etc.

It's worth having a fiddle with Bru'n water software to try to get your head around it but you'll find that you might have to compromise on "taste" ions in order to get the pH right in relation to your municipal water chemistry.

On a more positive note, i know how well Rich P understands water chemistry and how much he advocates getting your water right. I defo think it makes a difference if it's done properly with understanding. If you just chuck stuff in ad hoc chances are you'll do more harm than good.
60 percent of the time it works every time.
User avatar
steve crawshaw
Posts: 856
Joined: Thu Apr 22, 2010 8:49 pm
Contact:

Re: Water treatment and its effects on taste perception

Post by steve crawshaw »

this is worth a read:

http://brulosophy.com/2015/05/18/water- ... t-results/

The salt addition to the bottle experiment might be an interesting activity for a BCB session. I accept phil's point that it has limited application to actual brewing though.

cheers
steve
I like to keep a bottle of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.
User avatar
EckersKlein
Posts: 122
Joined: Thu Sep 27, 2012 11:42 pm

Re: Water treatment and its effects on taste perception

Post by EckersKlein »

Aww yeah, and exbeeriment! That was a good read, thanks for mentioning it as I hadn't seen it before.

And good point about acids also contributing ions. Ariel and I use AMS (aka CRS) in our paler ales, which is apparently a mix of hydrochloric acid (HCl) and sulphuric acid (H2SO4). I suppose we're already adding chloride and sulphate ions.

What one could do is just add a tiny pinch of salt at a time (not necessarily NaCl table salt). Even if you don't know exactly how much of a salt you're adding, at least you can gauge whether you like the effects.

In fact, here's an idea for our next meeting. If anyone has any gypsum (CaSO4) or calcium chloride (CaCl2) on hand, they could bring that in and we could put a pinch of it into 1/3 pints of something we order from the bar. Table salt (NaCl) shouldn't be hard to find in a pub, so we can test that too. I'll bring a dry erase marker so we can put temporary labels on the glasses. Thoughts?
User avatar
steve crawshaw
Posts: 856
Joined: Thu Apr 22, 2010 8:49 pm
Contact:

Re: Water treatment and its effects on taste perception

Post by steve crawshaw »

EckersKlein wrote: What one could do is just add a tiny pinch of salt at a time (not necessarily NaCl table salt). Even if you don't know exactly how much of a salt you're adding, at least you can gauge whether you like the effects.

In fact, here's an idea for our next meeting. If anyone has any gypsum (CaSO4) or calcium chloride (CaCl2) on hand, they could bring that in and we could put a pinch of it into 1/3 pints of something we order from the bar. Table salt (NaCl) shouldn't be hard to find in a pub, so we can test that too. I'll bring a dry erase marker so we can put temporary labels on the glasses. Thoughts?
It's an interesting idea. I would propose a simple trial of something like porter with salt. It's ofter stated that dark beers benefit from additions of NaCl. We could test this in varying degrees with beer from the bar. I think the issue with gypsum is that it is quite insoluble in water so would be difficult to get any effect in a trial with beer additions in short time frame..
If we're going to get useful data from it, it needs to designed as a proper experiment, with triangle testing and maths and stuff like the brulosopher..
cheers
steve
I like to keep a bottle of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.
User avatar
I_used_to_brew
Posts: 2356
Joined: Sat Nov 20, 2010 1:06 pm

Re: Water treatment and its effects on taste perception

Post by I_used_to_brew »

I would think that the various ions might affect flavour due to numerous subtle chemical processes ocurring in the mash, boil and ferment. To simply add some ions in the finished beer may well be total bollocks. For more total bollocks, that we could actually try at a meeting, how about http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/victori ... 47967.html ?

Or as mentioned in another thread we could compare beers at different temperatures.
Post Reply