Bru’n Water Is Not Scary
The bowls of the internet howl with the news that Bru’n Water is hard to use…too intimidating…too scary. Users that have taken a few minutes to read the Bru’n Water instruction page and played with it for a few minutes know that Bru’n Water is actually easy to use!
Bru’n Water was purposely set up with several pages so that users would know where various inputs and outputs were. No searching across a busy and crowded page to find a tiny input cell. Separating the program into pages with logical division makes it easy to know where to look and the larger presentation that fits on your screen makes it quicker to find.
Many users get frustrated with the Water Report Input page since it actually checks your inputs to see if they are making sense and producing a ‘balanced’ concentration of anions and cations. While it would be easy to skip this check and allow the user to blindly assume that their inputs were fine…the beer would likely suffer. Using a program that helps you get your water report data input CORRECTLY is a real asset!
Brewers that use purified water such as RO or distilled water have it even easier since all they have to do is dial up the Dilution Percentage on the Sparging Water and Mashing Water pages to 100%. No water report to input at all. Distilled water has all zero concentrations and there is a stock estimate for RO water concentrations too. Of course, if you have test data on your RO water, you can update the stock data.
Once that water data is resolved, there are only a couple of Bru’n Water pages that you’ll deal with regularly. Those are the Grain Bill Input page and the Water Adjustment page. Since every batch is different, there is no getting around entering your grain bill. Enter type of grain (base, crystal, roast, acid), amount, and color. That’s it!
For water adjustments, select a stock water profile target and your amounts of mashing and sparging water and then start adding quantities of the minerals you have on hand. Check if that addition brings certain concentrations up to levels close to your targeted water profile and alter that initial guess until its close. Of course, monitoring and targeting your mashing pH is your most important duty. Adding an acid or base is probably required to get pH where it should be (between 5.2 and 5.6).
Don’t worry about getting concentrations exactly per the water profile. Plus or minus 10 ppm is often close enough. And remember: THE BICARBONATE CONTENT PRESENTED IN THE WATER PROFILE IS NOT YOUR TARGET, ADJUST BICARBONATE UNTIL YOUR pH is CORRECT.
So, there you go. Pretty simple stuff. More importantly, water adjustment is an important aspect to making great beer. The team at Brulosophy found that water adjustment is one of the most important and recognizable changes to beer quality.
Don’t be afraid!
