Welcome to another episode of Respecting the Beer.

My name is Gary Arndt and with me as usual, are Bobby

Fleshman and Allison McCoy.

And today we're going to talk about the other ingredient in beer that kind

of makes up most of beer, water, and also maybe the effects of land and,

terrain on going into the end product.

So obviously beer is a liquid liquid.

It's made up mostly of water.

How important is the water that goes into it?

And I have, that's kind of a leading question because I'm

sure the answer is quite a bit.

But what do you do?

I mean, I'm, I'm sure you guys aren't just taking tap water out of the city.

Are you, or do you filter it?

Do you.

How does that work?

Right.

in a modern setting most municipalities water tastes pretty good.

And the things you want to think about when you're homebrewing, you want

to filter out the chloramine and the chlorine that's there to keep it from.

Becoming contaminated.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: So, direct to Gary's question.

Yeah.

Yes.

We do filter.

Yes.

Oh yeah.

We don't use it as is.

Of course.

Yeah.

We run our water directly through, or, or through a, a carbon filter,

and we test that periodically.

It, it removes all of that chlorine, chlorine's a bad thing to put into beer.

It ends up in that Bandaid flavor downstream.

You wanna avoid that.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Mm, Bandaid

So what are you using to filter?

It's, it's, it's literally tap water that we're

running through a gigantic canister, a filter, carbon, carbon, carbon filter.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: So it's like your Brita filters, but large

scale and there's like infinite surface area in there.

So you, you can run a lot of water through that type of filter to huge effects.

The other...

some brewers will actually press all the ions out of the water.

So in water, you're going to get minerals, pure water wouldn't taste very good.

You're going to get some calcium, some magnesium, some carbonates, and

there's a measure of hardness and pH.

And there are things that your city does a good job at regulating,

keeping between the lines.

We'll see water drawn from surface or ground, and that's a seasonal variation

you might might pop up and no one gives a damn if you're just drinking it.

But if you're brewing, it matters because it affects pH and

various other things downstream.

So we're trying to respond to that.

And we know how in this modern setting to adjust the ions.

and adjust the pH

Allison McCoy Fleshman: pH is just a level of acidity.

I've come to believe that we talk about temperature and we

talk about various other parameters when brewing a lot more than we should.

I think that pH is where we should fixate because there's so much, Driven by that.

There's there's volumes that we could go on about there.

So, so what has happened in history is before the invention of pH meters, and

really any knowledge of water chemistry.

People have been making beer and they've been trying things out.

worldwide with their local ingredients, with their local water supply.

And they've, and they've landed on things that taste good.

They've seen, they've seen combinations that work well.

And, and this predates the renaissance and modern science really.

maybe dive right in and talk about some regions and how

water supplies led to styles.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Well, can I say one more thing about pH?

Yeah.

So we have, so if you think about the brewers as being yeast farmers, they want

to make sure that the yeast are fed, they give them sugars and then from that, or

I guess you're, you're a yeast herder.

I don't know.

Yeast herder.

Yeah.

We're not brewers.

so all we have to do is like the yeast make the beer, we

just make the yeast happy.

And so because yeast are a fungus, I believe, is that right?

Saccharomyces means.

Sugar fungus.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Oh, well there you go.

Anyway, so our sugar fungi we need to keep them happy, and so they only can

do their thing in a certain level of pH.

And so pH 7 is neutral.

And so blood that goes through you is a really good buffer.

And so what that means is it's going to maintain about a constant pH range.

And so it's not going to get too acidic or too basic.

And so yeast only really work in a good range of pH.

And so, one of the things that we have to do is just to make sure that

we add all of these different things to conform or to fit the liquid water

that the, or the liquid that the yeast are suspended in to be within that

pH range so that they can then eat.

Poop CO2, poop alcohol and do all of their other things that they need to do.

And when you read like in cosmetic products, it'll say like pH balance.

What that means is it's stuff that they've added such that if you get too acidic or

too basic, it's not going to go that far.

It's going to stay in that one pH range.

Water chemistry is a lot of.

There's a lot going on there.

Even Allison will tell you water chemistry is challenging.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Oh, it's ridiculous.

It is so far from the chemistry that I do because it's too hard.

Yeah.

Well, not too hard.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: It's just not that interesting.

And never mind that pH is a logarithmic scale.

And so it's kind of hard to get your head around.

We live in a linear, well, we think we can think logarithmically, but

generally we think linearly and it's kind of hard To get your head around.

I've always felt the pH scale was dumb.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: It is so dumb.

It is so dumb.

Oh,

I mean, why not zero as neutral?

You can move the scale and just call it zero.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: It's because of the auto ionization of water.

I'll stop.

Yeah.

I want to go back to just some briefly talked about filtering.

Someone's a home brewer and they're listening to this.

Their water is probably going to just be out of a tap, right?

Is that going to kill?

I mean, how important is filtering?

Is it just important at this scale?

Even a homebrewer be filtering their water?

All the different ways you can filter.

The one you're talking about is carbon filtering.

I think that's required on every scale.

Everyone needs to do that everywhere because every modern municipality

is using chlorine and chloramine.

And You've got to get that out of there because that recombines with esters

and produces these band aid flavors.

You can probably taste that if you ever had homebrew and they had zero idea of

what they were doing right off the bat.

It probably smells like, they think it's coming from the bucket that they

ferment it in, but it's coming from the water that they use generally.

So, that, that's easy.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Of course, and if it, if it is coming from the

bucket, then they have other problems.

Yeah.

I bet that beer's not going to taste good anyway.

They're a food grade bucket, it's fine, but, if they have a Brita

filter, this is how I started.

I, I had a Brita filter and it took me hours to filter

what I needed, but it worked.

You know, you don't need to spend any money to do that.

then I, then I started to use RO, reverse osmosis water from the

store and go buy, remember this?

We would wait down.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Oh, I do.

You would send me to the grocery store or I would go and you're

like, oh, hey, pick up some water.

It's like, how many?

10 or 20 gallons?

Yeah.

20 years ago, this was, You know RO systems at home, I think are kind of

off the shelf now, but back then that's where we go to the store to get it.

So with that, you can actually build with spreadsheets.

You can just go buy the salts you want, the calciums and

magnesiums and the bicarbonates.

You can just dump them in and get what you're looking for.

The calculator will tell you, but if you don't know what you're starting

with, as with CPC, City water.

You do have, you have to stay on top of your own testing.

You gotta taste, test that base water and then add those molecules

to get where you want to be.

And the things you're thinking about when you're, when you're building that is

you're thinking about what's my pH going to be when I combine this water with the

grain, that's going to become this beer.

Then you're thinking about, is there enough calcium?

for this yeast to survive, to do its job.

The calcium is important for their health, bubbles, structures, so on and so on.

And then ultimately, and then the third thing you're thinking about is flavor.

So those first two things are really process, but the

third one is about flavor.

And that's, that's generally when you're talking about, when

we say salt, we mean table salt.

We're really thinking about sodium when we start talking about flavor

or, or chlorides or, I guess I'm thinking of some other ones.

potassium.

There are other molecules that sneak in as far as flavor goes.

So those are the three things in that order of priority, pH, calcium, flavor.

You got to build each water recipe before you even begin to build your beer recipe.

And they are built in tandem and they're built.

Every recipe is built to mimic whatever style and or region

that you're looking to mimic.

And why do those, why do those water profiles work with those beers is

because people discovered that the water they have works well with this

ingredient that they evolved alongside with this one commercially sold.

So they kept brewing it.

So therefore they must have liked it.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Well, they weren't even necessarily thinking,

Oh, I need to have my water this way.

That's just, that's the water had

They had no idea.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: And then those particular beers just tasted better.

No, whether you're talking about Dublin or Munich or

Prague, London, they weren't checking each other's water to see if their

styles worked in each other's regions.

They had no idea.

So what is an example of A water profile from particular place

and a particular beer that evolved in that place because of the water,

let's maybe start from the back of the very Latin.

Most recent one would be Pilsner in Prague.

Their water is almost void of calcium.

It's almost void of everything.

There, there's maybe 10 parts per million of calcium, which is just

maybe by an eyelash sufficient to pull off fermentation, otherwise

equivalent to our reverse osmosis water.

And that's what you really need if you want to build something that is as clean

and naked to off flavors as is a Pilsner.

And it's why it worked.

It's why it was the right time, right place.

They had the right brewer from Germany.

They had technology that had been modified from England, from pale ales,

and ultimately they made this light lager that worked extraordinarily well with

their groundwater and made them the, made the Pilsner the style, even to this day,

that's number one consumed in the world.

So that one's, it's probably coming from, I can't speak to the ground formation or

the water formation, but it's probably coming from the ground and it's probably

some hard, Non like gypsum type rocks that they're drawing their water from.

I can't even speak to that.

Gary is,

I have no idea what's happening in Prague in terms of

water, but I do know, yeah, you're going to get different types

of water based on your place.

Yeah.

One, there's a sir.

Richard Branson has an Island in the Caribbean and 55 gallon drums of

New York city water to make pizza.

So they can create genuine New York pizza.

And I've had a lot of people that say that that's the water that

literally is what makes the dough pizza in New York different?

Allison McCoy Fleshman: It's, I'm sorry, forgive me for laughing, but

there's a, a picture we have on the wall that says Olympia beer, it's

in the water or it's the water.

And I can't imagine that being the same type of advertising for New York pizza.

It's the water that just seems so not connected at all.

Yeah.

But, but bagels, I think have, there's pH that makes the bagel.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: You have to have a very basic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you see this in baking all the time,

Water in Montreal.

Yeah.

That's why bagels in Montreal have, are such a thing.

And now we, we live in this modern time.

We can make this water anyway, anywhere.

But yeah, back in the day, we didn't know that.

So when you're making a pilsner, then is the first step then

to make the water that is somewhat.

Similar to what they're going to find in Prague.

We are very fortunate.

If I did have a reverse osmosis system, I would utilize it for the Pilsner, but

we are extremely fortunate in Appleton.

We have some really good base water here for brewing.

It has a sufficient like 25 parts per million calcium and just to give you

context, I said 10 was for Prague, but you might see up to levels of

200, you know, in various styles.

So we, we actually start with a pretty good canvas slate on which to build.

And then there are other, ions in our water here.

But generally speaking, Appleton's really good and it's and it's

fairly steady throughout the year.

So that's what we do.

We don't do anything to it.

We, we, we filter it and we just start brewing because the best

we can do is start with what we have since we don't have R.

O.

And we're just fortunate enough and somewhat By design, we don't

have RO because we knew we had good enough order to build a Pilsner on.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Is that one of the reasons that, Miller and

just down South in Milwaukee has the similar, I mean, it's a, it's a lager

yeah.

I bet they're using Lake.

I bet it's Michigan.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Yeah.

From 150 years ago.

Yeah, I'm sure that all the Germans settled here because of the water

they're I'm sure they were trying to to replicate What what they did in Germany?

Well

if you're gonna pick a place to live and you know move your entire culture

You might as well pick the place that you can brew the best beer.

Yeah, it's good

and and And even if, even if you don't know all the ins and outs of water

chemistry, the people have learned lime can be added to the water.

I am a chemist.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: I am paid to be a chemist and I do not know all

the ins and outs of water chemistry.

It's such a unique niche field.

And Germans anecdotally, they were able to put together process.

And, but you know, the Germans aren't going to allow you to use these

things to begin with because of this rule called the Reinheitsgebot.

But they, there are brewers everywhere that have just have learned before the

advent of water chemistry, how to get their water soft enough in order to brew

as in low enough in calcium and magnesium in order to brew something like a Pilsner.

The other extreme on that Gary would be like, in Dublin, you

find a lot of bicarbonates, sort of closer to the surface.

They are, they're dissolving, bicarbonate, which tends to, will,

will increase your pH of your water.

And in Dublin, they're famous nowadays for the, the roasted dry stouts.

And whenever you use grain that provides acidity.

So you see the two coming together, high pH.

Means basic and you add that to, an acid profile in your, in your

grist in your, in your grain and you, and you strike that balance.

You look for that pH that makes those yeast happy.

And then the other things you care about calcium and flavor,

but namely again, that pH.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Making yeast happy.

And all, and it goes through the list, you know, Burton

upon Trent in England had eight levels of, of gypsum and gypsum

makes your calcium extremely high and makes your salt, your, what is it?

Calcium sulfate.

So your sulfate levels go very, very high and it makes for a really good

IPA to sell around Africa to India.

It, it tends to be stable.

It tends to present as sharp.

It tends to be a good canvas for hops and then, and then you have London made

the best porters probably still do on earth for their, for their profile.

And then Munich makes the best dark lagers in the world.

So on and so on.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: I'm just going to throw out there.

Just reminded me.

We're familiar with this in terms of naming some of these

salts Bobby's talking about.

A lot of them have like common names, like Epsom salts.

I should have said chalk.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So chalk is what we're talking about when I say carbonate.

Yeah.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: But like Epsom, so it's from the Epsom salts discovered in

Epsom, England, a spa town in the 1600s.

But Epsom is magnesium sulfate Epsom salt.

And so most of these salts have normal

names.

The calcium sulfate gypsum.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

So one of them brings calcium.

Everyone brings magnesium to the table.

They're both important.

You just need them both.

I'd never thought what you said about the

Dublin water and putting a...

an acid

An acid into it.

It makes perfect sense.

I never would have thought of that,

but this is the aha moment.

I hope that everyone's having out there because for me, there are two

things I think a lot about bubbles.

We talked a lot about last episode, but this, this whole concept of why we

have beer styles and how it's connected to the water and the regions and all

of the evolution of these ingredients.

It's probably the most profound way to tell the story of beer.

So whenever I do beer classes, I always like to think that way,

even if I'm not, I'm not telling them I'm thinking that way.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Well, at least before it was, before we lived in a,

a truly connected global society where each of these individual cultures

were developing on their own kind of independently, I mean, that's where the

history of these beer, like beer styles came about with what water that they had.

So I think in terms of like telling the narrative of humans experience with beer,

I mean, we had to go where the water was.

So you, you mentioned that the water you use here is

conducive to making a pilsner.

So if you want to make an Irish stout, Do you then have to make

the water more basic in order to sort of replicate those conditions?

So I'll grab a scoop of, it's not just, there's a measured scoop.

It's a calculated scoop, but I'll, I'll grab a scoop of chalk and I will dump it

into the kettle and that chalk raises the pH where it otherwise would have been.

Calcium carbonate sounds a lot better than chalk.

I know.

I know.

Yeah.

It really sounds like you're just taking something off a chalkboard.

Yeah.

you've also, it's hard to dissolve chalk.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: It is hard to dissolve chalk.

That's a challenge.

When you take, you know, when you grab a Tums and you toss it in your mouth,

you're like, get in your calcium.

What you're really eating is chalk.

Yeah.

It's chalk.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: But well branded chalk.

There's a demonstration there that professors

could probably do by eating chalk.

Coral, limestone, seashell.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Yeah.

But it's, it's an antacid.

So it's anti acid.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yeah, getting it to dissolve is tricky business and, and you got to get

the, the temperature of the water, right.

And the pH, right.

And it's a lot of things were at play there.

And we, and with the, like an English IPA, we'll dump loads of

gypsum in there for the same reason.

And, and all in the middle of that spectrum, you, you see these dark

loggers and quarters and so on.

Is there any water that just.

Bad for brewing.

Like this is not a place you would want to create a place.

Well, I mean, other than, you know, contaminants and pollution, obviously,

but just like regular groundwater, spring water that just would not be suitable.

High magnesium will notoriously give you bad bowel problems.

So you want to keep that at a minimum.

And the other one is sulfur.

You want to avoid that rotten egg smell.

burnt match.

And these are things you know immediately from pasting the

water if you want to brew with it.

If you don't want to drink your water, don't brew with it.

I mean, that's pretty.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: For a while when I was growing up, we were in West

Texas in the Permian Basin and there, the water there was just so gross.

Oh my God, it was so gross.

It has so many nasty salts in it.

But I just, I can't imagine that you would ever want to start with

that sort of It's disgusting.

Yeah.

Groundwater.

You really have to get into a distilled slash RO slash membrane

filtered situation if you're in those kinds of regions for sure.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: This was back in the early 90s and the RO system that my

dad bought must have cost him an entire paycheck, but oh, it was so worth it.

But Wisconsin and I do praise Appleton in particular

has good water, believe it or not.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Does it fluctuate seasonally with the salt runoff?

We do.

You see seasonality.

Yeah.

I'm.

I've correlated it with what I think is the salt runoff, the salt from

the roads, making its way into a combination of surface and groundwater.

And so we, it's not like you're drinking, it's not the

anything you would taste, right?

But it's enough for me to pick up on the chloride level or whatever.

And I have to.

Remove where I would otherwise put calcium chloride in, I omit it and

put calcium sulfate instead in.

Yeah.

So there are some small changes.

And just, just to clarify for people, if you're not familiar with

this, we've been using the word salt interchangeably with different things.

Yes.

Yes.

There is table salt, table salt, which is the colloquial

term for salt, which is an ACL.

But then there are salts of which salt is a salt.

Yes.

Allison, take it.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: What is it?

Not so all whales are mammals, but not all mammals are whales.

Right.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: So.

NACL, table salt.

You didn't lead with life depends on.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Oh my god, that was the best one.

Life depends on salts and sunshine.

That's from a, a book that I absolutely love called Ionic liquids on all things.

Anyway, that's a scientific technical thing.

But salts, what is it?

So the chemical definition of a salt, two things ionically bonded together, which

is going to be a metal and a non metal.

And so if you have a metal, like sodium, lithium, potassium, any of those on the

left hand side of the periodic table, calcium, magnesium, strontium, francium

any sort bonded to a non metal, things on the right hand side of the periodic

table, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfurs, fluorines, other things,

chlorines Those two things bond together.

That's the technical definition of a salt.

And there are countless, and I mean, gazillions of salts.

However, as humans, we typically run into just a few of them.

And they're the ones that have the common names like Epsom salt

calcium carbonate chalk, gypsum.

And water has the nature of.

pulling them apart in solution, right?

Yes.

That's the whole idea behind ionic bond.

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Yes.

So this is, so if you were to have salt water, so you go and take table salt

water and you want to gurgle it because you have a sore throat or something,

you're going to throw some salt in.

What's going to happen is called dissociation, not dissolving.

So those ions are going to break apart because water is

really strong at doing so.

But if you throw in like sugar, sugar is an ionically bonded and

that's actually going to dissolve.

So you can't say that salt dissolves in water.

It actually dissociates in water.

And I'll stop there because that's too much.

Because water is a polar molecule?

Allison McCoy Fleshman: Yes.

Can I keep going?

Oh my gosh.

So water is a polar molecule.

And this goes back to when we were talking about bubbles.

So chemistry have this, this wonderful phrase called like dissolves

like, and I mentioned this before.

So oil and water don't mix because they're molecularly two separate things.

And so oil has a nonpolar character and water has a polar character.

And so a polar thing is going to interact with a polar thing.

Salts are like the epitome of polar.

And so they're going to interact.

Whereas you really can't dissolve a salt or dissociate a salt into an oil because

that would just be weird chemically and you wouldn't really want salt oil.

That's strange.

chemically, it wouldn't work either.

So a lot of big breweries, they'll often use their water

as a marketing, you know point.

So there's actually maybe something to it.

Can we kind of like, if we want it to encapsulate everything,

the water is really important.

If, if we were relying fully on a source

and at its mercy, then yes.

But in this modern setting, it's no longer that relevant.

We know how to make any water we want anywhere.

But at its core, my water is extremely important.

It's 95 percent of beer.

And it's amazing.

We overlook it when we talk about beer, but it's extremely important.

All right.

Well, that concludes another episode of respecting the beer.

Join us next week for another show.

And until then, please visit us on our Patreon page or on our

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