Cedar Rapids Brewing Society

During a brew session, I sparge with RO water and add nothing to it. I only add stuff to the mash.

Ditto.

Calcium carbonate is near worthless. It's hard to get it to dissolve completely so it's unreliable. You can use pickling Lime to raise pH while adding calcium. It's just not necessary though unless you're doing a dark style and want more authentic water hardness. Just be careful as it's caustic.

One thing I've learned about playing with pH is that you really want to work out your profile ahead of time and adjust your strike water accordingly. Trying to adjust it during the mash is difficult and of dubious value. Record your results to help dial things in for next time. Measure with accuracy or don't bother at all IMHO.

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DrPaulsen wrote:One caveat - be careful with the phosphoric acid if you're using RO water in your HLT. I did that one time and it made my HLT very shiny.

I think you found a good way to clean your stainless!

I was just looking this up the other day and found that Stout recommends perodically passivating with citric acid.

As far as other mineral additions I'm in the less is better catagory. I think this is brewing lore dating back to working with hard water.
If I want a mild roast flavor I put roasted grains in at the end of the mash, but sometimes this is too mild for a stout.

I have a couple accumash samples if you want to try them. I ran into the owners somewhere and he gave me some samples. I never used them.

whitedj wrote:

DrPaulsen wrote:One caveat - be careful with the phosphoric acid if you're using RO water in your HLT. I did that one time and it made my HLT very shiny.

I think you found a good way to clean your stainless!
I was just looking this up the other day and found that Stout recommends perodically passivating with citric acid.

Yes, and in fact, StarSan is phosphoric acid + some other stuff, and is also called out as a useful common SS passivating agent. Note that these acids won't necessarily clean, you want it cleaned (PBW, etc) before you passivate.

Yeah, I use phosphoric acid for passivization. But like Andrew said, do a caustic cleaning before passivization or its basically worthless.