Water Chemistry Kit
Over 90% of your beer is water, and the mineral composition of your water has a surprisingly large impact on the flavor of your finished beer. Brewing water has been treated by breweries for hundreds of years by doing things like pre-boiling to reduce hardness or digging wells to access water of a different mineral composition.
With the BEERMKR Water Chemistry Kit, we can alter the mineral composition of the brewing water to yield specific flavor results in your beer or match the exact water profile of a famous brewing region like Munich Germany or Burton on Trent England.
The water kit comes with a fine gram scale, a measuring scoop, a few weighing trays, and 6 salts and minerals: Calcium Chloride, Calcium Carbonate, Baking Soda, Canning Salt, Epsom Salt, and Gypsum.
These salts and minerals can be combined to replicate any water profile from any region in the world. Now let's build the water profile from Munich Germany so we can brew an authentic Bavarian Oktoberfest.
We'll first start with reverse osmosis or RO water, distilled water, or deionized water. If you don't have a reverse osmosis water filter at home, you can find any of these water types at your local grocery store. We highly recommend an at-home RO filter.
Open your scale and place a weighing tray on it. The munich water profile calls for 0.31g of Chalk, 0.93g of Calcium Chloride, 0.87g Epson Salt, and 0.07g of Canning Salt.
We weigh them out one at a time and place them into an empty water pitcher. Next we'll add a liter RO water to the pitcher and stir to dissolve the minerals. Now we'll top it off for my first water addition and pour it into the BEERMKR. Don't connect the bag to the brewtub yet. We're going to put the full amount of water into the brewtub so the minerals can mix properly.
There will be some left over minerals on the bottom of the pitcher, so fill up the second water addition and be sure to mix up the remaining minerals.
Now pour this into your BEERMKR and connect your bag. Now we add our grains and brew like normal.