Water Chemistry Adjustments using Brewfather

In our previous blog post, we gave an introduction into the world brewing water chemistry and how some of the key elements can impact on your brewing and final beer product. In this post, we'll be covering how to take the information you already have about your brewing water, and enter it into Brewfather to get the details on how to adjust your water profile for your desired beer style.

What Are We Adjusting?

The key ingredients that we'll use to adjust our water profile are;

• Calcium Chloride

• Magnesium Sulphate (Epsom Salts)

• Calcium Sulphate (Gypsum)

• Phosphoric (or lactic) acid

1. Adding your Water Profile to Brewfather

The first thing we need to do is add our base water profile into Brewfather. This will be the starting point that Brewfather uses as the baseline to which adjustments will be made.

1. Login to Brewfather.
2. Select Profiles from the left hand menu.
3. Select Water.
   
   

   

   Brewfather menu options

   
   
4. Click + Add Profile (lower right corner) to add a new water profile.
5. Enter the name for your water profile and enter the values into the respective fields.
6. If you have a number range for a particular value then take the average of the values and enter that.
   For example, our pH is  given as a range of 7.64 - 7.96. So we add 7.64 + 7.96 then divide it by 2 which gives 7.8 which is the value we would enter into Brewfather.
   
   Note: If values are in ppm, this is the same as mg/L.
   
   Note 2: If your Bicarbonate is given as a HCO3 value, then multiply it by 1.22 to get the HCO3 value.
   
   
7. Click Save to save your water profile.
   
   

Brewfather Edit Water Profile screen

2. Apply your Water Profile to a Recipe

1. Assuming you're still logged into Brewfather - select Recipes from the left menu and open the recipe you wish to apply water adjustments to.
2. Scroll down to the Water section towards the bottom of the page and click the Calc button
   
   

   

   Select the Calc button within a Brewfather recipe to open the water calculator

   
   
3.  Click the gear icon in the top right corner to open Settings
   
   
   
   
   
4. Check the boxes for Mash, Sparge and Auto for the ingredients Gypsum (Calcium Sulphate), Calcium Chloride and Epsom Salt (Magnesium Sulphate)
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. Click the green gear icon in the top right corner to close the Settings window
6. Scroll down to the Source section then click the button to change the water source
   
   
   
   
   
7. Select the Water Profile you setup previously then click the Save button
8. Scroll down to the Target Profile section and click the change target water profile button then select the target water profile you wish to use. There is a decent range of default target profiles such as Balanced, Hoppy, Lager, Pale Ale etc. 
   
   In this example I'm going to use the Pale Ale profile. Click Save once you've selected it
9. Click the Auto button to have the adjustments automatically calculated and added to your recipe
   
   
   
   
   
   
10. Click the button to Save Adjustments to Recipe
11. Under the Misc section of your recipe you should now see values added for water chemistry (as per the options we set in point 4 above)
    
    

    

Conclusion

Brewfather is our go to software application for homebrewing, and as you can see from the instructions above, using it to make adjustments to your water profile is very straight forward. Modifying your water profile can give you some huge benefits in the overall flavour profile and mouthfeel of your beer, so it's definitely worthwhile investing some time and effort into this aspect of your homebrewing.

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