Brewing at home in the 1830's

I don’t know if it’s just me, but when I have a question about brewing and rely on google for an answer, I normally scan past a few forum topics if more than a few years old in the hope of finding something a little more recent. Silly really as brewing has been practised for millennia that my instincts take me away from a post just because it was created in 2012! That said, brewing has come a long way in a short space of time.

It got me thinking about brewing from years passed so I got hold of a book from 1830 – surely they didn’t really know what they were doing by our picky standards? Surely the lack of knowledge about cleaning meant that most beers turned out with what we would regard as off-flavours? Surely they could make a decent pint without knowing what yeast is?

The book I got hold of was snappily titled sixth edition of “A practical treatise on breeding, rearing, and fattening, all kinds of domestic poultry ... and instructions for the private brewery” by Bonington Moubray Esq. so it wasn’t really a brewing book as such, but I chose it because it thought it would give a more interesting insight into brewing at home, which is of course where my curiosity lies. 

George IV King of England in 1830

Firstly, think about this for a minute - This book was written in 1830! In 1830, the King of England was George IV, Slavery had yet to be abolished, almost everyone walked or travel by horse and cart because rail travel was in its infancy, the mean life expectancy in London was 37 and really crucial to brewing, this was years before people had running water in their homes. Having a communal water pump between 20 or 30 families was about as much as you could hope for unless you were of the upper classes – Imagine brewing now and not having access to running water. Not only that, but imagine brewing in massive quantities (by our standards) and having to pump it all by hand!  A “middling family who have room” brewed 44 gallons of “good beer” and 27 gallons of “small beer” at a time! In 1830, pretty much everyone drank beer. It was beer, tea or milk really – you wouldn’t want to trust the water too much – Cholera was still a big, big killer back then.

Tax was horrifically high and was calculated from the amount of malt used in a beer. For years breweries had looked for ways to reduce the malt content and substituted it with anything from potatoes to coriander. An observation made in Parliament was that the malt consumption was two thirds less than in 1773, despite a large boom in population! Along the way, chemists became more influential in beers composition and as well as using fermentable ingredients to boost the alcohol content, all kinds of herbs and chemicals were put into the concoction. It is suspected that Coculus Indicus (Indian Berry – described as a poisonous climbing plant and now used as an ointment for killing lice) was commonly used and there are several references of opium being used. I know from other sources that beer was marketed as “home brewed” by big breweries many years later, which seems absurd now, given the poor reputation that mass home brewing picked up in the 70’s and 80’s which is still not quite shaken off with the general public, but given the adulteration of beers from this time, you can see why it would be desirable to drink home brew for many.

Now; the author was without doubt a beer nut! It was clear he held these adulteration's in great disdain, more so that because they had long been practiced and it had captured the taste of the nation to the point where beers made from only malt hops and water were scoffed at, despite their being “most nutritious and wholesome”. He would almost certainly have a CAMRA membership if he was alive today. These days, of course, we don’t have heroin derivatives in our beer, but there are some similarities with many inferior quality beers (subjective, I know) commanding the bulk of the market to the bemusement of the enthusiast. So brewing at home was clearly a big passion for some. Not only was it half the price, but the brewer could be sure he avoided ingesting noxious chemicals – what a motivation! Of course, it’s a big job without gas or electric and as getting the water was tough employment too, it was far from commonplace.

Ingredients;

This section will command a much lesser space than the equivalent list from today. The book lacks recipes, because there are so few options presumably. There’s malt – white, pale, amber and brown (but the use of white has declined significantly by that time) but no mention of varieties other than a commendation for malt produced in Hertfordshire. Wheat and oats are referred to favourably but are seldom used. Here, the author describes beers made from wheat and oats;

 “Wheat malt produces a strong-bodied, fine, and high-flavoured liquor; oats, a light, mild, and pleasant beverage. I have heard much commendations of oat-ale, as a summer drink, but have never tasted it.”

The days of gruit had passed so hops had long been in use although there were still substitutions like “Wormwood, sweet flag (calamus aromaticus}, horehound, green broom, marsh trefoil, buckbean,

succotrine aloes, quassia, the Indian bitter bean.” Like malt, they are referred to mainly generically as “hops”; the exception being Farnham Hops, an ancestor of the Golding family. Hops were recognised for their medical benefits as well as the more obvious preservative and flavouring ones. There is mention of the notion of hops causing kidney stones, but disregarded in place of hard water being the culprit and in fact praised for diuretic properties. The bittering power of the hop was known to come from an acid and hop oils were mentioned - of course this was well before alpha or beta acids and oils such as lupulin were talked about.  I’m not sure why but I was surprised to hear of the use of dry hops, though not using this term and only really in beers brewed for keeping rather than being drank young.

Water is talked about with the preferred type to bring out the taste in hops as pale. London Porter was very much in vogue at the time and the suitability of the water is in the metropolis was mentioned as favourable.

Knowing that Louis Pasteur “discovered” yeast much later in the century, I was surprised to read so much about yeast in this book. Although it’s not referred to in any scientific detail, it was known that yeast is the life of the fermentation how to propagate it for the next batch. Encouraging spontaneous fermentation is described below;

“It is recommended to remove the beer, hops and all, immediately from the copper, and, as I understand, hot as it may be, to the casks, which are left open to produce the spontaneous fermentation, no yeast being used.”

It’s interesting that it was best practise to transfer to open casks just after boiling as we know now that it would sanitise the fermenting vessel. I wonder whether this was the suspicion then, or if it was just that trial and error showed them it’s less likely to go bad if it goes in hot – maybe it was just the most convenient way of working. The book doesn’t detail yeast as a product, or say specifically in what form yeast is pitched but later in the book top cropping is described although it doesn’t specify this is the source of the yeast for future batches I think it is likely.

Process;

Heating water to a boil and allowed to cool to strike temperature was recommended. At this time, a thermometer was rarely seen in the brewhouse so “the rule of LOOKING-GLASS or FINGER” was employed. This is where the brewer waits until the water has cooled sufficiently to see their reflection in the water (apparently the heat and steam prevents this at higher temperatures) or until it has cooled enough for it not to scold your finger when dipped into the liquor. Hardly scientific but it must have worked okay!

So with the strike water heated, the malt is added and thoroughly mixed. What we would refer to today as a batch sparge is described, but creating a Parti-gyle brew. The first running’s to create a “Good Ale” and second a “small beer”. It is mentioned that you can make a full batch of small beer using much less malt and the quality will be much greater than using the second running’s of a typical batch. The first running’s are left to mash for two to two and a half hours, then vorlaufing before being drawn of from a false bottom or filter and filled up again. This time it’s left for ninety minutes before being collected with a little more liquor added just before running dry. Something didn’t quite stack up with the numbers described – the good beer commanding many more gallons than the small beer but the liquor used being more even. I suspect that some of the second running’s are blended with the first to reach the desired strength and volume of each.

Hops are either added before or as boiling commences (interesting that first wort hopping was

copper of the link used in this time

employed 187 years ago) and the following interesting premise is one of those observed for economising hop usage;

“Some persons are curious enough to make a previous infusion of the hops for an hour or two, in boiling water, pouring the infusion into the first wort, and leaving the residue to be boiled in the second.”

Once boiled for an hour or until a break is achieved, the wort is either transferred hot in to barrels for spontaneous fermentation (as descri

bed above) or moved into a vessel to cool to “blood temperature” before pitching about 4ml of yeast per gallon (by today’s measurements) presumably of slurry or top cropped from a previous batch. Less yeast is used in the summer. It’s kept there for just 24-48 hours before being moved to casks, along with a handful of hops for “keeping beers” where secondary fermentation takes place for 3 or 4 days before knocking in the bung and storing until served.

It’s an interesting idea, filling the cask gradually. Presumably it’s an alternative to today’s method of racking a couple of points above final gravity in order to condition naturally. You would know more accurately when the fermentation has almost ceased and the seal the cask. The good ale is stored for a few months before serving and the small beer can be consumed after just a few days in the cask.

A Saccharometer is referred to which I believe is just another name for hydrometer but presumably the author did not have access to one due to the omission of any details regarding gravity. For the author of a book which reached 8 editions not to have access to what we regard as basic equipment is surprising. Interestingly, the difference in weight between wort and water is quoted – It had never occurred to me that you could measure the weight of a pint to indicate sugar content.

We hear so often that cleanliness is next to godliness when it comes to brewing beer which is where I imagined brewing from this time would fall down. Not so – there are many references to thoroughly cleaning all equipment, particularly the fermentation gear. This paragraph was a really insightful method of cleaning a cask that had turned musty;

Stone bottles were
occasionally used

“fill the cask with boiling water, not quite to the brim, put in some pieces of unslacked stone-lime, which will immediately cause an effervescence, like the boiling of a copper; but this must not be continued more than half an hour, or the lime may prove as bad as the must. The effervescence over, bung down, but wash out before the liquor be quite cold.”

So not only was the cleaning well observed by Mr Moubray’s suggestion, but he even used “unslacked stone-lime” in boiling water, which an online search tells me is referred to as calcium hydroxide, used today as a disinfectant. Using slaked lime is of course a common way of increasing alkalinity in brewing water.

There was even a troubleshooting section in the book and if it works, perhaps an ingenious way of rescuing a bad batch. He refers to a “pricked or acid” spoilt beer, which presumably is one which has caught a wild yeast or bacterial infection souring the beer.  His suggestion is to waiting until the mash tun (he actually uses the term “mash tub”) of a fresh batch has been fully drained after the second running’s and mixing the spoiled beer with the now spent grains and drain straight away into a fresh cask along with the spent hops and perhaps some fresh ones. Apparently the sourness is left behind in the spent grains and the batch is rescued. The small amount of sugar picked up along the way should allow some co2 to be produced in the cask, one would imagine.

So in conclusion – I’m really amazed at how little things have really changed in the last 187 years. Obviously technology and science have allowed us to be more exact, efficient, consistent and less likely to get infections, but they definitely knew what they were doing in 1830, even if the scientific data wasn’t there to quantify it as readily as we can today. I’ll think twice next time I skip past a helpful post from 2012.

What's yours old chap?

 In 1915, a year after the outbreak of the Great War, the Government had a tight grip around the throat of pubs and brewery's. Drinking was deemed derogatory to the productivity of the war machine, so pubs were told they could only open their doors for a few hours in the afternoon for lunch, then for a further 3 hours from 6pm until 9pm.

It didn't stop there though. Last orders was called an hour earlier on Saturdays, and Sundays were already a dry day throughout the most of Great Britain. Bizarrely though, there was a clamp down on getting a round in. “Treating” was barred! You couldn't even lend your mate the money to get his own beer. Barmen and women put less in the till, but went there a lot more often. Within the hustle and bustle of a crowded pub, the familiar boom of "What's your's old chap?" faded to a whisper. 

 

Sunday drinking died a slow death from 1828 after a temperance movement and the Church put pressure on the Government to keep the Sabbath Holy. At the time, there were many more villages and fewer big towns and cities. Very often would a Church and a pub be neighbours, which led to complications. A temperance movement had started in the preceding years and as ale now had a safe drinking alternative in tea and coffee, many people wanted to end the drunken debauchery that had plagued the streets.

First the Alehouse Act of 1828 decreed that licensed premises should not trade during the hours of holy service, then the Forbes-Mackenzie Act closed the doors all day in Scotland in 1848. This soon spread to Ireland in 1878 and to Wales in 1881.  This of course led to a huge increase of sales of smaller casks which were sold in underground, unlicensed ale houses. The Cardiff Old Brewery recorded 872 sales of 9 and 4 and a half gallon casks in 1880-81 and 39055 in 1888-89, almost a 45 fold increase. Boarder pubs in England became very popular. Folk walked or cycled for miles in to get a pint. Dry Sundays weren't completely abolished until 1996! One wonders if Jesus had turned water in to the most consumed beverage in the country at the time - ale instead of wine, if this would have happened at all. 

Somewhat ironically, the Great War probably saved the brewing industry in the UK. Before the war, the original gravity of beer was much higher than after. This in part, was due to the general scrutiny of brewers and drinkers of the time, and of course the lack of resources to make the product. In 1914 the average gravity was 1.052, by 1919 it was 1.039. To none brewers, this equated to the average beer being about 5.2% at the outbreak of war and 3.5% ABV after. It's only in very recent years that it's started to climb. This had an effect on the behaviour of drinkers and in turn to the attitude towards drinking. In Cardiff in 1932, Convictions for drunkenness were about 10% of those recorded in 1897. 

In the states, Prohibition was introduced. Back in Blighty, the stranglehold was relaxed somewhat. By the time War once again consumed our nation, it was out of the question to introduce such measures again. It would affect morale… You know?

My Ghetto Mini Brewday

I'm moving house soon, so i've not brewed in a while. I quite miss having a fermenter bubbling away in 'Breezer' (brew freezer) and had a few hours to spare so I decided to make a beer.

Time and space were constraints, so I went for a mini batch that I could make on the hob with normal pans. It would be improvised to say the least. So here's what I came up with;

Malt Bill

900g pale malt

150g amber malt

50g Cara-Hell malt

40g Torrified wheat

7g Challenger hops @ 60 mins

5g Amarillo hops @ 10 mins

5g Cascade hops @ 5 mins

5g Amarillo hops @ 0 mins

Wilko Gervin yeast

I started by heating up 4L to strike temperature (76c) and laced the pan with a square of polyester voile (the type you can make a net curtain out of). I then doughed in my malt, tied the tops of the bag together with a strip of the same material and put in the oven, preheated at about 60-70c. I did this because I knew being such a small volume, it would loose heat really quickly and mightn't totally convert the starches in the malt to sugar. It started at 67c and actually rose a little to 69c after an hour in the oven. 

I then sparged, which was a bit of a challenge without my usual sparge arm. I improvised by sitting a pizza tray on top of the pot, with a colander containing the malt bag on top of that. I slowly poured another 2l of warm water over the top of the grains, which trickled through the now compact grain bed, rinsed the extra sugars and drained into the pot. When the pot was full I put the heat on and brought it to a boil.

Ghetto sparge

When the rolling boil started, I added my first hop addition. After half an hour or so, a fair bit of the wort had evapourated, so I topped up with boiled water from the kettle. Probably another litre or so. The next addition was a pinch of irish moss, then the remaining hops.

After the hours boil, I put the pan in a sink of ice water to chill to pitching temperatures, then syphoned into an empty 5l water bottle. I had earlier added some Starsan to the water and used it to sanitise my equipment and drilled a hole in the lid for an airlock, flanked on each side by a rubber seal. I gave it a good shake to add some oxygen and sprinkled half a

packet of yeast I bought from Wilkos earlier that day on top.

And there we have it, a couple of hours in the kitchen, making beer with no brewing equipment used at all, except the syphon.

Ice bath cooling

Morrisons fermenter

If I did it again, I would adjust the recipe to liquor back to 4.5L in the bottle. I halved the amount of water I started with by the end of it. I must have lost best part of a litre to the grain, some to the hops, plenty to evaporation and a little spilt on the floor when I was putting it in the bottle. I probably only got 3.5L or wort over all, which will probably only make 6 or 7 bottles of beer after the trub in the 'fermenter'. Admittedly, I was never going to get too much out of it, and it's not an economical way of brewing in terms of cost or time spent per pint, but it was good fun, a good challenge of my improvisational skills and a good way of soothing the brewing blues after a while out of the game.

Cheers!

Getting to know your ingredients - Yeast

Picture the scene; A Scandinavian farm house stands close to a small, Viking village, with a fresh stream feeding a nearby well.

Barley, the staple grain harvested during the Viking Age in Scandinavia, has been soaked in the stream to start the germination process. It is kilned at a fairly low temperature for the time in the local sauna producing a paler than average malt, and mixed into water in a large vessel. The starches convert to sugars before the spent grain is used as feed for the village’s livestock.

A log fire burns underneath the kettle, boiling the wort. Juniper berries and herbs are added for flavour before being fed in to a large vat. The concoction cools overnight and in the morning, the Clans Jarl stirs the wort with his staff and gives it life. Because of the Jarls intervention, in the following few days, the wort transforms to beer and sustains every man, woman and child in the village. 

The staff is a treasured family heirloom, providing beer for the clan for generations, but why? As well as life, the stir gave the beer a unique taste, a taste that the villagers had been accustomed to for many years. The staff must have been revered as magical, or Godly, but in fact it was not the staff that turned wort in to beer. It was microorganisms living within the knots and grain of the wood. It would be another thousand years before science could prove that it was no magic or work of God that nourished this village, but that it was in fact Yeast.

What is yeast?

Yeast is the living component of our beers. It consumes the sugars from our wort, resulting in the creation of by-products including alcohol and carbon dioxide. Most commercial breweries filter the yeast out of the finished product before bottling or kegging the beer, but those brewed at home retain a small amount of yeast which allows the beer to carbonate naturally and mature in the bottle. Yeast also contributes to the taste of a beer. Some brews call for clean, neutral yeast to allow the malt or hop characters to shine through. In others, like German Weissbier’s, the yeast is the focal point, making banana and clove flavours amongst others.

What does yeast need to successfully ferment our wort?

Beer at high krausen 

The right environment is critical for yeast to reproduce and prosper. They need food which is provided in the form of sugars from our malts. They also need a clean, sanitary environment with little competition from other bacteria and oxygen is required to give them a good start. The number of viable yeast cells relative to the volume of the brew is important too. The optimal amount required differs between styles and higher alcohol beers generally require a higher pitching rate than lower ones.

Another very important aspect to fermentation is temperature. Too hot and the yeast will die, too cold and they will hibernate. Generally speaking, for ale yeast, a steady temperature between 17-21 degrees C is a good range, personally for most beers; I ferment at 18 degrees C.

Which type can I use?

Yeast is either sold in liquid form, or dry, in small packets with granular looking contents. Dry yeast has been dehydrated in order to increase the shelf life. You can either rehydrate the dry yeast in a little warm water before pitching, or just sprinkle the contents on top of the wort after transferring to the fermenter. Rehydrating will increase the amount of viable, healthy yeast cells, but it does come with an additional risk of contamination. Some argue that the risk outweighs the benefits, and personally I have done both, with little difference in the end product.

A Yeast Starter

Liquid yeast is normally packaged in a vial which contains a lower cell count than a dry yeast packet. If you are brewing a low ABV beer then you may just want to empty the vial directly into the wort. For most beers however, it is best practice to make a yeast starter. This, in short is a process where you would make a mini brew with malt extract and water. You would boil this for 15 minutes to sanitise, allow to cool to room temperature and then pitch the yeast. In the following few days, the yeast will ferment the mini brew and grow their numbers to a level adequate for pitching in to your wort.

Although the yeast is filtered out of most kegged and bottled beers, cask conditioned ale still contains live yeast. The cask is often filled just before the yeast finishes consuming the sugars, meaning that it finishes the job in the cask. The carbon dioxide produced by this secondary fermentation is now sealed in the keg and is absorbed back into the beer to produce a naturally gentle carbonation. When arriving at the pub, the beer is ‘green’ but matures and conditions over the following few days or weeks before the finished product is poured in to your glass.

I hope this post has helped you understanding of one of the most vital ingredients of beer. Of course there are many in depth works on the subject, this just being a short introduction.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. It concludes my series on 'Getting to know your ingredients' and if you've missed them, here is Hops, Malt and Water.

Getting to know your ingredients - Water (part two)

You can make good beers without knowing anything about brewing water.If you are lucky, you might choose an ideal grist for your water profile and things click into place by accident, resulting in the best beer you've ever drank. In general, if it's good enough to drink, it's good enough to make beer from. If you have high chlorine/chloramine levels in your water, you may want to just add half a crushed campden tablet to your brewing liquor to dispel them. Many brewers do this just in case. I'm not aware of any damage it can do if not entirely necessary, and they cost next to nothing. If you're happy to change a little more, please read on;

Water typically composes around 95% of our beer, so it’s very helpful when we start off with the right profile. It is often seen as an advanced topic, and it certainly can be, as can almost every other aspect of brewing when you go into enough detail, but it doesn’t need to be too complicated. 

There is plenty of software and many online applications to help us, so if we’re happy learning ‘how’ and willing to put the ‘why’ on the back seat for a while, you should be able to improve your beers quite easily.

It’s worth noting that brewing is a natural process, not a linear one, so the calculations made on our behalf by the software can’t be 100% accurate, but they should give us a very good indication of what can be changed to adapt our water profile to certain beer types.

I will be using my own water as an example for this post, looking at alkalinity, pH and the ratio between sulphate and chloride.

In order to examine this, I gathered some information from my local water supplier’s website and used a Salifert kH/Alk pack to test my waters alkalinity. This is what I found;

I was unable to obtain the Magnesium and pH, so have estimated them. Fortunately, they aren’t crucial to this exercise. 

The calculator on brewersfriend.com found here is an excellent resource for evaluating and adjusting our water chemistry.

I will concentrate particularly on the water used in the mash. It is important to get the pH here to a suitable range, most often quoted between 5.2 and 5.5 at room temperature. Getting it wrong may result in undesirable tannin extraction, lower efficiency, haze or just a generally lousy beer.
You may notice above, my estimated water pH is 8. This will naturally reduce when adding malt due to its acidity; darker grains imparting more acidity than lighter base malts.

Alkalinity & pH

It took me a while to ‘get’ Alkalinity, and if like me you find practical examples helpful, this video compares alkalinity to pH and assisted my understanding. Alkalinity is basically the buffering capacity in our water. It is the ‘bouncer’ on the door of the ideal pH club. The bigger the bouncer (the higher the alkalinity) the less our malt is able to naturally reduce the pH. For example, with my alkalinity of 28ppm CaCO3, when using 5kg of a 3 Lovibond base malt, my mash pH is estimated at 5.67. If Alkalinity is increased to 150ppm; the malt only brings it down to 5.84.

We can reduce our alkalinity by adding Gypsum (calcium sulphate) or Calcium Chloride (as well as other salts, but let’s keep it straight forward). In this example, it would take a fair amount of salt additions to reduce the alkalinity enough to get down to the ideal pH, which is not ideal. Another option is increasing the acidity. This can be achieved by adding darker malts or acids. Let’s suppose we want to make a pale beer, and are happy to increase the colour to 6 SRM. The calculator shows the acidity of the extra dark malts brings the mash pH down to 5.63 from 5.84. We can then add 150g of acidulated malt to nudge the pH down to 5.41 which is within the ideal range.

Calcium & Sulphate/Chloride Ratio

Returning to my own water profile, I notice my Calcium and Sulphate levels are low. I am reliably informed that the low level of Calcium could be a contributor to hazy beers which I have suffered with. I want to increase the levels of this from 36 to above 50, or preferably around 100ppm. I have a few options here – I could use Gypsum, Calcium Chloride, Chalk, Baking soda etc… etc…
As my Sulphate is also low, I will opt for Gypsum (Calcium Sulphate). A teaspoon (4g) of Gypsum bring my levels up to “normal”.

Another thing to consider is the balance between Sulphates and Chloride. If I wanted a hoppy beer, I would want a ratio favouring Sulphates and the opposite if a more malty beer is desired. After the addition of Gypsum, I now have 21 mg/l if Chloride and 95 mg/l of Sulphate, so the ratio between them is 4.5-1 in favour of sulphate. This is classed as “extra bitter”. 

Let’s suppose I’m making a beer that is only moderately hoppy. I could either add table salt to increase the chloride, or reduce the gypsum addition to half a teaspoon and make up the calcium deficit with half a teaspoon of calcium chloride. I would opt for the latter to keep additions to a minimum. This would bring the Sulphate to 70 mg/l and the Chloride to 42 – the balance now considered appropriate for slightly bitter beers.

To illustrate further, I will show my process of designing a water profile for a stout. The colour is 40 SRM and the grist contains 10% roasted colour, the total weight is 5kg. I will be using 35L of water in total, 12.5 of which in the mash.

After this information is added, because my water is naturally very low in alkalinity, the acidic malt has pushed the pH down to 4.94, so here we actually need to increase the pH. We will do this by increasing the Alkalinity, but I also want to increase the calcium and sulphate whilst attempting to balance the sulphate/chloride ratio towards chloride to help the malt character shine through.

If I add 3g of chalk (calcium carbonate) and 3g of bicarbonate of soda to the mash, this increases my calcium to 50 mg/l, the alkalinity to 105 and crucially, the mash pH to 5.2. I will address the other issues in the boil.

I would like to increase sulphates whilst balancing the ratio with chloride to favour a malty beer. To do this I can add 8g of salt and 4g of gypsum to the boil. The resulting water report looks like this;

The additions I have made give me what I wanted. A pH of 5.2, a suitable amount of calcium and a balance of sulphates & chloride favouring a malty beer.

This way of tackling water using a water calculator is very much trial and error, experimenting with additions and checking levels along the way, always mindful that each salt or acid addition will generally make more than just the desired change to your profile. If you can kill two birds with one stone, you should. Once you’ve played around with the calculator, you become more accustomed to its functions and it starts to look much more straight forward.

I can’t stress enough though, the theory isn’t going to be 100% accurate, but the alternatives are to either ignore the water and hope for the best, or spend huge amounts of time and resources testing and evaluating practical experiments.

I hope you have found this helpful, if you are interested in reading further, I highly recommend John Palmer's How to Brew. This is a comprehensive book detailing all aspects of brewing from beginner to advanced. I have a copy on hand on brew day and have found it helpful on many occasions. 

If you have made it this far, thank you for your efforts.The topic can be daunting and many brewers never get this far. I realise water isn't the most fascinating part to brewing, but it can make the world of difference. To quote John Palmer himself, "with a little knowledge about water, you can turn a good beer into a great one".

Please take the time to read my posts about hops, malt and water part one.