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Des Moines Water Reports

Created this as a place to put water report from Des Moines Water Works.

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Permalink Reply by Jeremy Sievers on March 24, 2011 at 3:38pm

Averages for the Month of Feb 2011

 

 

Please check my math if you want...conversions from: http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter15-1.html

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Permalink Reply by Jeremy Sievers on May 5, 2011 at 10:47am

March water report just in for DMWW...


City Calcium Magnesium Bicarbonate Sulfate Sodium Chloride
Des Moines (Fleur) 39 13 85 44 14 29
Des Moines (Maffitt) 29 14 87 35 10 23
Des Moines (Saylorville) 37 12 181 25 28 9

 



Please check my math if you want...conversions from: http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter15-1.html

 

For a stupid water fact of the month, Des Moines water is pretty close to London water, 


City

Calcium
(Ca+2)

Magnesium
(Mg+2)

Bicarbonate
(HCO3-1)

SO4-2

Na+1

Cl-1

Beer Style

London

52

32

104

32

86

34

British Bitter

 

Take this with a grain of salt, literally...many of the brewers in London, don't use their water straight up. Pre-world war, they used to use wells that had the high levels of Calcium, Bicarbonate and Sulfates of the famous "Burtonized" water of Burton on Trent. Post WW, all the bombing and industrialization in england have caused the wells to get polluted from river thames. Fuller's brewery does a "Standard Burtonization" with Gypsum.

 

Why bother?

 

1) If you are doing a full mash, the extra Calcium help to buffer the mash and hit PH levels better...in a large scale brewery this would be very important in nailing the PH and getting good efficiency.

 

2) Flavor, the additional salt will add a little more body, but the extra sulfate will add more sharpness to the bitterness.

 

Most english beers are known for being malt bombs, they shouldn't. They should have nice "english" hop flavor and bitterness, fruity english yeast, balanced by a toasty malt backbone.

 

All-Grain, if you adjust your PH or pay any attention to your PH, burtonizing the mash can still be little crazy. I have put 5.2 stabilizer in mash and then focus on the flavor side and add your extra salts to the boil. More then one way to skin a cat.

 

Extract, be very light on your burtonization of the boil if at all, your extract already has an unknown amount of water salts in their from the dehydration process.

 

Few good threads on Burtonizing water:

BJCP info on Bitters:

Otherwise, water is still a crazy topic, more you try to learn, the more confusing it all it. Anyway leave your comments below and especially what you do to "Burtonize"

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Permalink Reply by Matt Humphrey on May 6, 2011 at 8:36am

If you want my thoughts on this...

Don't Burtonize your water. At least, not fully. That's way overboard. Even traditional English type breweries like Firestone Walker with the Burton barrel system don't push the water up much above 100ppm.

Permalink Reply by Torrey Johnson on May 6, 2011 at 10:44am

I agree with Matt to an extent. I Burtonize my water, but not the levels that they actually did back in the day. Agreed, way overboard. You just need a higher SO4 content to bring out the hops flavor and bitterness. I'd say around a Cl:SO4 ratio of 1:10 is all you need. But, the best thing you can do before you even add your brewing salts is to take out the high level of Carbonates, and Des Moines and Ames have higher levels it.

If you can get an activated Carbon filter, that will reduce you chlorine and choramines, some nitrates, and organic compounds. With water with high Alkalinity like in Salorville, boil it before using. This also keeps the O2 levels low in the water. But the main reason, it precipitates off the HCO3 (bicarboates... aka Temp Hardness) and turns it into Perm Hardness. In Ames, the alkalinity is the biggest issue for me, along with the pH. Way too high!  Anyways, this is all null if you have a reverse osmoisis water filter, which I assume most homebrewers do not. If you did, you can just start from scratch with your brewing salts.

Once you add your salts, the first thing is to match the level of Ca. Remember, 1/2 of the Ca content gets reduced off during the mashing process. You should end up with 40-60 ppm when beer is done. The malt also adds around 30ppm of Ca to the mash. Anyways, Ca is the major player in lowing the pH level, but if that alkalinity is still high, it won't do much. Anyways, here's the level for Pale Ales (Burtonizing) you should go for:

Ca:100-250ppm, Mg:20ppm, SO4:300-425ppm, and Cl:30-50ppm.

One you get your water close to the levels, starting with Calcium first IMO, I'd try to figure out the Residual Alkalinity with your salt treatments, then from there... see if you need to add any acids to get the pH down to the 5.4-5.6 range for your mash. I've done this to my last batch of IPA and I've noticed just in the wort tea itself a major difference, not only in taste, but in the quality of fermentation.

 

Permalink Reply by Jeremy Sievers on May 6, 2011 at 12:38pm

Good points, Sulfate doesn't need to get nearly up to the 800ppm levels. Even if you just go with pre-mixed Burton Salts, their addition is in the 350 range. I don't have any specifics on what a "standard burtonization" for a brewery. I assume Torry is pretty close considering he is doing/has done brew school.

 

With too much Sulfate you can get a minearl flavor, which is gross...plus a laxative effect, double gross.

Permalink Reply by Jeremy Sievers on October 14, 2011 at 2:45pm

Here is the September 2011 numbers...

 

Permalink Reply by Torrey Johnson on October 14, 2011 at 4:57pm
I posted the entire report on the Notes section as well. I'll plan on doing that every month until I forget.

Jeremy Sievers said:

Here is the September 2011 numbers...

 

Permalink Reply by Matt Melcher on October 14, 2011 at 7:07pm

Thanks for posting - I just can't wrap my head around water chemistry. 

What kinds of treatments do you make? What do you add? How much? When? And why?

Permalink Reply by Aaron Reif on April 3, 2012 at 9:14pm

I'm wondering if we need to worry about chloramine with Des Moines water, or is there main source of disinfectant chlorine?

I'm trying to design a water filter and deciding what I really need.

Permalink Reply by Lyle Erickson on April 6, 2012 at 4:24pm
I believe DMMW still uses only chlorine.

I know this was true some years ago when I looked into it for treating the water for my aquariums.  For brewing I use an activated charcoal filter, which would work for both chlorine and chloramine, so I've never re-checked.

DMWW has always been quick to respond to emailed questions, in my experience, so I wouldn't hesitate to drop them a line to be 100% sure.

Aaron Reif said:

I'm wondering if we need to worry about chloramine with Des Moines water, or is there main source of disinfectant chlorine?

I'm trying to design a water filter and deciding what I really need.

Permalink Reply by John Paszek on April 8, 2012 at 11:24am

Found a great website on brewing water published by a water resources engineer (and a homebrewer) that I found very helpful.  Just wanted to pass it along:  http://sites.google.com/site/brunwater/

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