EPISODE S.4, E.15

Cheyenne (00:09):
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of The BrewDeck Podcast. My name is Cheyenne, and I’m your host for today, and we actually have a brand new face joining the podcast team. Adam Wilson is a CMG Ontario and Manitoba territory manager. Adam, how’s it going?

Adam (00:25):
Fantastic, thanks. And am I a new face or am I a new voice?

Cheyenne (00:31):
I guess new voice, yeah. It’s not much of a face game, is it?

Adam (00:36):
Which is totally for the best, it truly is.

Cheyenne (00:40):
Well, you are not completely new to the podcast because you were a guest last season on episode 11, the Ultimate Summer Beer episode, and I think that you said that your favorite summer beer was a wheat beer. Is that still the case?

Adam (00:53):
It is, but I’ve also expanded. I’m really drinking a lot of lagers these days.

Cheyenne (01:00):
Oh, nice.

Adam (01:00):
Yeah. Give me a nice pilsner on a hot summer’s day. And up here in Canada, we are starting to see some of that summer weather, so I’m enjoying something on the lighter side these days.

Cheyenne (01:14):
I like it. I love a good pilsner, so you can’t really go wrong with that.

Adam (01:17):
Absolutely not.

Cheyenne (01:18):
Awesome.

Adam (01:19):
Yeah, so it’s super awesome to be on here. I’m excited to be part of the team.

Cheyenne (01:24):
Yeah, we’re happy to have you.

Adam (01:27):
All right, enough about me. Now we need to just get some housekeeping stuff. For all of those that get excited every year about our Vets Blend, pre-order is now open, so reach out to your territory managers and your customer service reps, and we will get you sorted out on that front.

Cheyenne (01:44):
Yeah, the Vets Blend this year is going to be a really exciting blend. It looks awesome. And we have another upcoming episode about the Vets Blend where we’re interviewing a bunch of really cool people who’ve used the Vets Blend and the organization that the proceeds are getting donated to, so stick around for that one. And yeah, let’s get to it. On today’s episode, we are chatting with Aaron Justice from East Village Brewing Company about water chemistry. Let’s take a listen.

Heather (02:08):
And we are now joined by Aaron Justice, owner and Brewer of East Village Brewing Company in San Diego, California. Welcome, Aaron.

Aaron (02:16):
Hello. Great to be here.

Heather (02:19):
Well, welcome back to the podcast, because we have been lucky enough to have you on before in our episode, Dude, Let’s Start a Brewery, which is, as I mentioned, one of our highest played episodes. I think people really, really want to know what you have to say, so we wrangled you back to see if we can get some more listens. That’s pretty much what we’re doing here.

Aaron (02:40):
Hey, I’m a regular listener. I like the podcast. It’s great.

Heather (02:45):
Well, we appreciate that. I mean, we are award-winning now, so we did get that Crushy at the Beer Marketing Awards.

Aaron (02:52):
Sneak that in there. Get that in there one more time.

Heather (02:56):
Hey, it’s a big achievement in my life. Last time we talked to you, you were just opening up East Village Brewing Company. Can you tell us how it’s been for the first few years?

Aaron (03:08):
Oh, boy. Yeah, when we last talked, I was in the middle of the chaos of construction, which it’s fun, but it’s obviously very stressful just trying to manage multiple projects all at once. But yeah, we opened the last August right at the tail end of the baseball season, but then the Padres made it to the playoffs and almost made it to the World Series. So it was kind of busy there for the tail end for our opening, so that was pretty awesome. And things are going well. The Padres are back playing. We’re two blocks from the stadium, maybe a block and a half. You can see it from our front patio. And yeah, things are going well. The weather here in San Diego has been really weird. It’s been extremely cloudy and cool. We’ve been kind of stuck in the low sixties for the past two months, so I’m looking out my window right now, though. It’s nice and sunny, and people love drinking beer when it’s warm. But yeah, things are going well, though. It’s been fun.

Heather (04:24):
That’s awesome. Before we dive into brewing water chemistry and how heavy that’s about to get-

Aaron (04:33):
Oh, yeah.

Heather (04:34):
Can you introduce yourself to everybody that might not know who you are? You might not need any introduction, but give us a little bit about your history in the brewing industry.

Aaron (04:43):
Absolutely. So my previous career or my previous life I studied meteorology, which was in the Department of Physics at the University of Kansas. So that’s my background, is science and math. That’s why I can get a little nerdy about brewing and brewing process. But that’s my background. And I was a TV meteorologist for 13 years, moved around the country working at TV stations. And during that time I was home brewing and I thought, “Well, I have no future in television. It’s time to change careers and get serious about what I want to do with my life.” And decided to go to school. I did the American Brewers Guild, and also studied at the IBD for my Master Brewers diploma. And while I was doing all that, I was washing kegs at Ballast Point here in Southern California, San Diego, and working for minimum wage. Back then, it was $8 an hour and just washing kegs, studying, and eventually worked my way through the ranks at Ballast Point from brewer to specialty brewer to specialty brewer manager, director of brewing. I kind of just went through the whole-

Heather (06:11):
Every job title change that you possibly could.

Aaron (06:13):
Every job title, yeah. It was a blast. I saw just extreme growth at Ballast Point. It was early enough on, I was employee number 30, and saw just growth doubling every year and the insanity that is involved with that. And then settled down into R&D for the final three years and did a lot of research, and that was really fun. And that was it. Then my business partner, Brandon Green, who was at the main production facility there in Miramar, here in San Diego, and also the one on the East Coast in Daleville, Virginia. We had known each other for 10 years while working at Ballast Point, and during that time we always just imagined opening up our own brewery, something small, something that is very ingredient-focused and sustainability-focused, and opened up East Village Brewing in downtown San Diego. That’s the short version.

Heather (07:22):
The CliffsNotes version.

Aaron (07:24):
Yeah, my life is kind of weird. I’ve got a lot of stories.

Heather (07:31):
So we should have you come back on again next season and we’ll just do tales from Aaron.

Aaron (07:35):
Oh, yeah. It was crazy. Crazy times. Changing careers in your mid thirties is not easy.

Heather (07:45):
I feel bad.

Aaron (07:45):
My advice to people when you do that is just, I just say, “Just be comfortable with being broke.” If you’re comfortable with being broke, you’ll be okay.

Heather (07:53):
Yeah. So a topic of-

Adam (07:57):
That’s relatable.

Heather (07:58):
Yeah, I was going to say, I think I’ve been asked, I’ve had a lot of people in my life and okay, I want to get into craft brewing, and I was like, “Okay, be prepared. You’re never going to have any money. You don’t get into it for the money.”

Aaron (08:11):
Nope. It’s a passion.

Heather (08:12):
It is definitely a passion job. So today’s topic is water chemistry in the brew house. We did mention that. Again, this is definitely not my expertise, so I’m going to lean on you a lot, and that’s actually why we brought you on. So I want to start from the very, very beginning. You just opened a brewery. When you’re opening a new brewery, what are your first steps to understanding your water chemistry at your new location?

Aaron (08:42):
Yeah, I think the first thing you want to do is get a water report. Just know where your water is coming from. Most cities will give you a water report. Here in San Diego, it’s very detailed. And also here in San Diego, because it’s a large county, we have three major water treatment facilities. So just developing a relationship with your local city and water treatment plant and being able to get reports goes a long way. Then beyond that, I would also then take that water because the report is only so good because it changes throughout the year. So what you also want to do is take a sample and send into the lab and just know what you’re dealing with. There are many labs around, just you can Google it, that specializes in water analytics, and also maybe do a lab that also can measure wort so that you can also just see and verify that what you’re trying to achieve is actually happening.

(09:56)
And not to get too far into it, but there are two different ways to measure water. You can do the titration or you can do something that’s a little bit more sophisticated called ICP, and I can’t remember what ICP stands for, but that’s a little bit more accurate, from what I’ve learned through all the R&D, and we send in tons of samples to just kind of analyze stuff. ICP is way more sophisticated and the data is solid. So yeah, there are a couple labs. There’s one in LA and there’s another one in Michigan. I think it’s Ward Labs and the other one’s Biochem, and they will do ICP analysis of water and wort and beer, both reliable labs, and you don’t really have to send in a lot. I think you only need a hundred, maybe 50 mils. That’s just one vial or maybe two vials.

(10:57)
So it’s not a lot of shipping, and the analytics cost, well, it depends how much you want, but it could be anywhere from 50 bucks to like $150. And in the grand scheme of things, it’s worth it. So highly recommended. So that would be step one, is just to know what you’re dealing with. And beyond that, I would say don’t over-complicate it, and we’ll drive this home probably near the end of the talk, but I would say don’t over-complicate it. All you really need to do as a brewer is a couple things. De-chlorinate your water, so carbon filter your water. That will also remove a little bit of odor and color and flavor from your water as well, and of course, remove the chlorine, which can be very reactive and create these chlorophenols. So carbon filter and hit your target mash pH, and that’s it.

(12:04)
Really, I think people think of water chemistry and you see all these water calculators and your head explodes, and that’s totally understandable. And I’ve given some water talks for the Master Brewers Association, and I look out into that audience and people’s eyes just glaze over, and I get it. I used to be that way, and I took this deep dive into water, and I just say, “Just carbon filter your water and hit your target mash pH, and all is good.” If you really want to dive further in, you can absolutely do that, but that’s my first advice. Those two things, analyze your water and then de-chlorinate, and of course, hit your target mash pH, and we can talk more about that later.

Heather (12:57):
So when you’re doing the testing you get from the city or wherever you’re getting it done and you get your report back, what are the main aspects that you want to look, what are the elements that you were looking for?

Aaron (13:10):
You want to see alkalinity because you, for the most part, are going to be trying to overcome alkalinity in your water, so you want to see a total alkalinity that’s usually measured as calcium carbonate or as calcium carbonate. I will not get into that. So you want to look at that. And then you’re going to look at, I really just focus on five ions. You have your calcium, your magnesium, which can affect pH and mash pH. And then you have your seasoning, your salts that can really affect flavor of beer. So that will be your sulfate, chloride, and sodium. So really five things there, six things, your alkalinity, and there’s five other ions. Really, that’s all I look at.

(14:12)
There are other things that are important. You want to make sure that the heavy metals, like iron and some of those others, are low because you don’t want that. Well, first off, you don’t even want to drink that water. And there’s organics, your nitrates and stuff like that, or inorganics, and you want those to be as low as possible as well. So really, the other thing is just simply just tasting the water. Just drink it. And if it has a flavor that you don’t like, you’re going to have to treat that. I can’t remember your question. Did I just answer your question?

Heather (14:54):
You did, yeah.

Aaron (14:57):
I get sometimes into tangents after tangents. And so yeah, feel free to interrupt me if I just keep rambling.

Adam (15:05):
I have a question that’s kind of a follow-up question on that. You were talking about pH and alkalinity, you’ve got a target for your pH. What is that target for most brewers?

Aaron (15:17):
Well, I would say for mash pH, and this is when you take… I would say once you collect all the wort into the kettle pre boil, you probably want that wort to be sitting at about 5.4 or below that, and there’s so many reasons for that. Low pH, you have to think about so many facets. I guess the first thing is the higher pH, if it’s too out of control, you’re going to extract tannins silicates, and those can really contribute to haze. And we kind of ran into that with our first brews at East Village because, I’ll be honest, a full disclosure, we wanted an RO system and we simply ran out of money during construction because we were building up during and after COVID, and construction costs doubled. So guess what? Our budget got destroyed very quickly.

(16:29)
So we’re brewing with city water, and we have to treat that city water, and it’s a battle here in San Diego because the overall total dissolved solids, the TDS, which is the overall just hardness of water, is just through the roof. So it’s really a challenge to deal with San Diego water, but we deal with it. And early on, our beers, we weren’t treating it enough, and the alkalinity was too high, the pH was high, and some of the early beers had haze in it. And we quickly got that into control and lowered that mash pH. And lo and behold, the beers stabilized, you start getting better, more clear wort and better, more stable, clear beer.

(17:27)
Yeah, so you have that, and also hitting your target pH helps yeast health. Having a good amount of calcium. Calcium is probably the most important of all the ions that are in water. And so hitting that target pH allows the yeast to reabsorb diacetyl. The rate of reabsorbing diacetyl is increased when the pH is lower, so there’s that. Calcium also helps with yeast flocculation. Really, when you think about yeast flocculation, it’s in the presence of calcium, so if you’re deficient in calcium, the yeast just really won’t want to flocculate and help to clarify your beer. So there’s that element, also having a good amount of calcium helps to precipitate oxalates during the wort boil. That helps with beer clarification. We ran into that when I was working at Ballast Point. One of our beers was precipitating calcium oxalate in the bottle post package. It settles to the bottom, and you see this kind of precipitate, and you put it under a microscope and it looks like diamonds.

(18:55)
It’s really shiny, and you’ve got a calcium oxalate problem. And so you’re deficient in calcium, and all we did was just boost our calcium and precipitate disappeared. So yeah, mash pH is just the most important thing. Also, even just flavor, you’re talking about flavor of your beer. If the pH is too high, it comes off as flabby, just too rounded and it sits on your palette and it’s unpleasant. You think about… I had John Palmer teaching my class, he lives up north, so he would drive down and he would teach the class, and he always used the spaghetti sauce analogy, and if your spaghetti sauce is not acidic enough, it’s lousy, it’s not a good sauce. So you really have to hit a certain acidity to allow all the flavors to express in your beer. So yeah, just mash pH, there’s so many things that are so important from just stability, flavor, enzymes.

(20:15)
Enzymes, that’s a chemical reaction, and they have their maximum where they’re the most efficient, and it’s optimal at a specific pH. And that’s usually, you have that brewer’s window of temperature, but it’s also pH. That’s about 5.2 to 5.4 in the mash time. So that’s kind of what we target. And when we knock out, we would like our knockout wort to be at the 5.2 to 5.3 range. Never higher than that. And that’s it. Honestly, if you’re achieving that as a brewer, it’s job well done, and you don’t really need to think about anything beyond that, and we’ll talk more about how to achieve that. But don’t over-complicate it, just hit those targets, and you’re going to make a better beer. That’s just the facts.

Cheyenne (21:17):
I think that we could talk forever about mash pH, and I definitely want to. But before we get into that, I kind of want to back up just a little bit and I want to talk more about some water sources. So you had mentioned that you were interested in getting an RO system when you first were opening up your brewery. Can you tell us a little bit about what an RO system is and what that does?

Aaron (21:37):
Yes. So RO, without getting overly complicated, it’s just filtration. It’s a very fine filtration, so fine that it actually filters out bacteria and even maybe some viruses. It’s that small.

Cheyenne (22:00):
Oh, wow.

Aaron (22:00):
Yeah. So it filters out everything, all ions. By the time you’ve filtered out, the IDS is going to be so low that you have a complete blank slate. It does not completely remove all odors, but it is pretty darn good at doing that as well. But it completely deionizes your water. So yeah, it’s good. It’s probably the best thing you can do. It does produce some highly saline waste, so you have to be careful that if you’re putting that back into your brewery effluent. If you’re large facility, that will affect your effluent that’s going back to the city, so just be aware of that. But if you’re a small brewery, it’s small potatoes. But yeah, it’s just filtration.

(23:02)
And so then you just have this completely blank slate and you can just build your water back up. I would always recommend that. If you can’t get an RO system, the next thing you can also do is deionize, so you can get this exchange bed, and usually if you have a water treatment company, there’re a couple here in San Diego where you can just rent one of those units and just plug it into your water system and it will deionize your water. So if you’re trying to brew something like a pilsner and you want soft water, you can just get a deionize tank and deionize your water and you can usually probably get a couple brews before it’s exhausted and then you can just return it back to that company.

(23:53)
That’s what I would recommend to people as water treatment beyond just obviously carbon filtration. And like I say, those are two ways to just create this blank slate, so you can just do whatever you want. I would also recommend, though, that if you do that, do not use 100% RO, because once you remove all those ions, that water becomes highly reactive. So if you put it into your hot liq tank, at some point you’re going to cause corrosion.

Cheyenne (24:38):
Oh, interesting.

Aaron (24:39):
Yeah, and if you’re going to pump it around your plumbing and it’s in whatever you have for plumbing, whether it be copper or whatever, it can just be a little corrosive. If you’re putting it through, let’s say, an instant water heater, you could really mess that instant water heater up, so I’d just be careful with that. Usually what we did at Ballast was just to cut the water in half, so half of it was RO, then the rest was city, and we would measure what was coming in from the city and then we would use our brewing salts to build from there. So that would be my recommendation, is just to cut it in half. Even if you cut it in half, that is very soft water. That’s a really good starting point for making a great beer.

Cheyenne (25:38):
That’s really interesting. That’s very cool to hear, and it sounds like, like you were saying, going into the pH, how it affects different beer styles. And so if you’re going for a lower pH, that might be great for different beer styles.

Aaron (25:52):
It is. And so when you think about beer styles, just base malt in itself in distilled water will acidify the water, because during the kilning process you have the Maillard reactions and you get a natural organic acids that are produced and melanoidins, which are acidic. So malt is acidic, and the more that you kiln and the more that you roast, the more these acids and melanoidins you produce, then the more acidic the malt is. So let’s say you go to a Munich 20, that’s going to acidify your mash more. If you use caramel malts, it’s almost linear going from, let’s say, a C20 to a C120, how much those malts will acidify your mash. Now, once you get to the really dark roasted malts, let’s say like your roasted barleys and all those others, the more you roast, a lot of those acids start to get volatilized or polymerized during those extreme Maillard reactions.

(27:14)
So then it starts to actually… The acidifying effect starts to reduce again. But no matter what, dark malts are going to equate to a more acidic mash. So when you start talking about beer styles, you’re going from, let’s say your lager, you’re going to have to be more aggressive with acidifying your mash than, say, an amber, which has acidic malts in it, versus your stout, which is so acidic that you’re going to have to combat that acidity with… Well, the easiest way is with baking soda, sodium bicarbonate. And we can get into that right now or we can get into it later. I’m fine.

Adam (28:08):
We’re here, so let’s get into it now. What are some of the… Because if not, it’s going to fall right out the side of my head.

Aaron (28:16):
It’s going to disappear. Yeah, yeah. I hear you.

Adam (28:19):
What are some of the tools that you have in your belt for different styles of beer, for getting things where you need them to be on the water scale?

Aaron (28:32):
I gave another talk on water for the San Diego Brewers Guild here in town last year, and we gave the talk, and a couple other brewers were there and they said, “Oh, yeah, we use RO and we add salts back, brewing salts.” And at the end of the talk, someone said, “Hey, most of us don’t have RO, what do we do?” And that’s a valid question. And the easiest answer is brewing salts. And when I say that, we’re talking about calcium sulfate and calcium chloride, you’re introducing calcium. Calcium goes into your mash, it binds with phosphates and precipitates and releases a hydrogen ion, so it makes your mash more acidic. So calcium sulfate, calcium chloride, and acids. So the two most popular ones are lactic acid and phosphoric acid. The thing with phosphoric, word of caution, is that if you don’t hit your target pH, if the pH is too high, the phosphoric acid will start precipitating calcium. So you just have to make sure that if you’re using phosphoric acid to use enough to hit your target, otherwise you’re going to remove calcium.

(30:01)
And like what I was talking about earlier about the importance of calcium, you do not want to remove that. You need it to remove oxalates during the boil. And of course, the yeast needs calcium to flocculate. So really those are the two things that you can reduce alkalinity so you can hit your target mash pH. So let’s say you have a lager, you’re going to have to be a little bit more aggressive, and depending on what type of lager you’re trying to make, you’re going to have to be more aggressive using that calcium sulfate, calcium chloride, or acids. So I would say that going into specific ions, you have your sulfate and chloride. Chloride is going to accentuate the maltiness and make a more round beer, whereas sulfates are going to be more dry and accentuate hoppiness.

(31:01)
So if you’re trying to make a traditional lager, I would say just use calcium chloride and a little bit of lactic acid to hit your target pH. And they have water calculators out there, John Palmer has one. You can look it up online. You have BeerSmith, you have all those. EZ Water Calculator is another one that’s online, that’s free, that you can just do all these calculations, and it will spit out what the finish mash pH is going to be. So you really don’t have to think too much about it. I have my own spreadsheet that I developed over time, that’s a combination of all of them together. But I would say for a lager, use calcium chloride, a little bit of lactic acid. And I would say that if you’re moving up to an amber ale, I would say you have to pull back all that because of the acidic malts.

(32:06)
And then, of course, a stout, you’re going to have to do the opposite. You’re going to have to build alkalinity back in, you’re going to have to use baking soda. So those are in your arsenal. I wouldn’t use any of the other stuff. I would say just use those brewing salts and acids. And during the sparge, I would also encourage maybe using a little bit more acid, just because during those final runnings, your pH can really get out of hand. So we will always dump in another 20 mils of lactic acid near the end of sparge, the end of louder to really control that pH and try to keep those last runnings at six pH or slightly below that. Otherwise, you’re going to just really extract tannins and you’re going to have haze problems and flavor problems.

Heather (33:03):
Yeah. Well, that kind of jumps into my next question about where throughout the brewing process are you actually treating the water and where throughout the brewing process are you doing all the testing, and how often are you testing your water throughout your brewing process?

Aaron (33:21):
Right. Great question. So we used to dose in the hot liq tank, but I found that it’s really hard to control mash pH. These salts, so calcium chloride, it’s interesting how fast calcium chloride dissolves. You put it into a bucket and you put water in, it almost immediately dissolves. It’s an exothermic reaction, so while you’re holding the bucket, it heats up, it actually almost gets hot. It’s pretty phenomenal, whereas calcium sulfate takes a while to dissolve. In fact, it’s better if it’s a little bit acidic. So it’s almost better just to throw it in the mash. In fact, at this point, my business partner, Brandon, and I, we said we’re not going to throw it in the hot liq anymore. We don’t even know if it’s dissolving. So now we just throw everything in the mash tun, so we will have the salts ready, and during mash in, during dough in, we’re just sprinkling the salts in periodically. I’ll take the lactic acid and put it into a pretty large pitcher of water so that I can sprinkle that in as well throughout the mash in process.

(34:42)
So I think that’s the best place to do it. We were hitting our targets way better doing it that way, versus just throwing it in the hot liq and doing it that way. It wasn’t working out. And I think that’s when we were starting to have some haze problems as well, we just weren’t hitting our targets. So I would just say throw it into your… If you have a mash mixer, throw it in the mash mixer as you’re doughing in. And if you’re not hitting your target, if you’re at the end of boil and you’re still way high, you can always still add a little bit of lactic acid in the kettle before it goes into the fermenter just to make sure that you have a nice stable wort prior to fermentation. But we are measuring pH of first runnings, last runnings, pre boil, post boil, and then every day of fermentation all the way to finished beer. We even pull it straight off the faucet, finished products pH, so pH all the way across.

Heather (35:52):
Every step of the way.

Aaron (35:54):
Every step of the way. You can’t have too much data. If anything, that’s just verification that what you produce is really what it is. Sometimes people had caustic in their beer lines or brewery lines and didn’t know it, and all of a sudden their beer tastes flabby or weird. And so no, pH is just a way to verify what you want is what you got. So you want to have a good pH meter, and there’s some out there, and don’t skimp on money. You should be spending at least a hundred dollars on a pH meter.

Heather (36:34):
I was going to say, is the pH meter in your brewery the hardest working object in your brewery?

Aaron (36:37):
It is.

Heather (36:37):
Yeah.

Aaron (36:38):
We’re using it so often that you have to recalibrate it. We recalibrate it every week. I know some brewers that are even more aggressive with that, but we do it every week, and I think that’s adequate. And you should be cleaning it probably every couple weeks and know that that probe is going to just eventually wear out and you’re just going to have to replace it. You’re going to have to replace it, and usually you want a probe where you can just pull the probe off and replace just that and not the actual unit itself so that you’re not spending so much money buying pH meters. But yeah, we’re about to come up on a year and we’ll replace that probe, because that sensor just wears out. And it’s so important. That’s one of the most important things that you can do for beer quality, so you have to do it and pay for it, and it is what it is. That’s not even that much money, to be honest, for something so important.

Cheyenne (37:39):
In the grand scheme of the things that you have to pay for in a brewery, it really is not that much money. I used to brew as well, and we were brewing a kettle sour, and so we were taking the pH every hour for the span of 24 to 36 hours. And I kept having to recalibrate that thing every four or five hours just because we were using it so much.

Aaron (37:59):
Yep. And I had a staff of eight brewers and everyone had their way of handling the workload. We’re mashing in every three hours, so we’re doing eight brews a day. And some people inevitably would leave the probe in wort for 20 or 30 minutes, which really fouls that probe. And you know it stop stops working because it takes forever for it to get a reading, and you know it’s time to clean it. And my goodness, it’s so important. I will say this, in a brewery, when you’re doing it that often, and we’re brewing Sculpin, geez, 60% of the brews, 70% of the brews were the same beer. So once the system has been verified, more than likely, I don’t want to say you don’t have to measure, but the measurements become very stabilized and predictable because you’re just doing the same thing over and over and over.

(39:04)
But yeah, you got to get a pH meter. A pH meter is the most important thing, and analyzing the water, you’ve got to do that. But the thing is, I took finished beer samples from beers from all over the world to see what kind of water people were brewing with. And you would be surprised, you’d think that ones that you think, “Oh, they use soft water, they have this soft water,” and I analyzed some of those. And it’s like, “Oh, you know what? Either they’re really aggressively treating their water or maybe the water is just not as soft as what people thought.” So never go too far into the rabbit hole of traditional beer styles and water profiles for those traditional beer styles. I would just say just hit your target mash pH. It makes great beer, just make great beer.

(40:00)
I would say one that’s probably the most unique that probably has the most impact on flavor is that Dortmunder water profile, which is very high TDS. It has kind of a high minerality, that one for sure is noticeable. But gosh, we did this one experiment where we altered the sulfate to chloride ratio because brewers will kind of play around with that, because again, sulfate can give dry sharpness to beer and chloride is a little bit more mellow. But we did this for an IPA and we totally flip-flopped the ratio of both of those. And we have 30 or 40 sensory panelists analyze, and they couldn’t tell the difference between the two IPAs. And I know a lot of brewers that are probably listening to this podcast are saying that’s BS, because a lot of people swear by it.

(41:06)
And to that, I just say, just as long as you go one way or the other and go hard into it, lean into it and really go heavy into sulfate or go a little bit heavy into chloride without over-treating your water, mind you, because if you’re adding too much salts, when we did this on the R&D level, the beer becomes… We had to dump a beer because it was so highly mineral. The mineral contra was so high it was almost metallic. So don’t over-treat your water, but you definitely want… If you’re going to go chloride, go all in. If you’re going to do sulfate, go all in with that. And the trained panelists, I kind of separated the data, the trained panelists actually did notice a difference when you flip-flop. So the average consumer probably won’t notice, but a trained panelist can. And if you’re trying to win awards, which all of us would love to win awards, I would say that it does make a difference. So that’s just things to think about when you’re trying to formulate a beer.

Cheyenne (42:23):
Yeah, that’s definitely very interesting to hear the difference in taste that people are finding with that.

Aaron (42:30):
It is. We brewed this… We did another one where we brewed an IPA with the soft Pilsen type water profile. The TDS is very low. And then we did another one, which was a little bit harder water, and there was a sensory difference, very different. The way it sits on the palette, the soft water, it sat on the palette longer. And for IPA, you kind of don’t want that. You want a certain amount of acidity and minerality so that it has that crisp, clean finish and just disappears. And all lagers are that way as well. We also learned that when you deionize your water, the head retention improved. So there’s something about, I don’t know if it’s a specific ion, and I didn’t get enough time to really study that, but there’s something about high TDS that can also impact head retention. So if you soften your water, more often than not, you will get improved head retention.

Cheyenne (43:35):
Wow, that’s very interesting. And so speaking of treating water, I want to pivot just a little bit, because you had previously mentioned that if you have your RO water, that can also have a corrosive effect on your hot liquor tank. Can you speak a little bit about how water can affect equipment and any precautions that brewers can take?

Aaron (43:56):
Yeah, so if you have hard water here in San Diego, you have a hot water tank or hot liq tank, especially if you have an electric one, those probes in there get really hot to heat up the water, and they will get scale on them very quickly. And that scale is very… It can become corrosive and destroy that heating element. And we had that at one of the R&D breweries, to the point, and this is probably just faulty equipment, but the water in the hot liq got electrified. And he had come in and he could see it sparking, so he had to cut the power and drain the water. And we looked in there, and lo and behold, yes, the electrical element was exposed to the water, which is terrifying.

Cheyenne (44:56):
I was going to say, that sounds like a safety hazard.

Aaron (45:02):
It was just… But I think it was also there were a couple things at play there. Two of the heating elements maybe were too close to each other, so there was a whole slew of things that were wrong. But then we realized, “Oh, my gosh, well, we need to be acid cleaning to remove that scale because acid will just dissolve that scale.” It’s calcium carbonate, so the acid will just dissolve it, and you should be doing that frequently. We learned that also on the LAR scale, we would heat up the water through a heat exchanger, steam heat exchanger, and go back into the hot liq. And all that was getting scaled, and we’re thinking, “Geez, what is going on here?” And I talked to another brewer here in town, gosh, this is years ago, and just said, “Hey, I’m having this problem.” And he said, “Oh, yeah, well, lower your hot liq temp to 185 degrees.” He’s like, “Don’t go even one degree above that, and the amount of scale will decrease significantly.” And he was right.

(46:11)
So even our hot liq right now is just hot enough to get our sparge water, when it gets pumped over to the brewhouse, it’s exactly 170 degrees. So our hot liq is 175 because it loses five degrees once it goes to the brewhouse. So we try to keep it as cool as possible, and that really does control scaling. But you do, you have to clean your hot liq, I would say, every month or so. If you have soft water, good for you, you’re lucky. And there are quite a few places in the country that have soft water, but not here in San Diego. And the other place that you want to treat water is your water boiler, if you have one. We also had… We have water treatment, a water softener going into the water boiler for the same reason, because you have extreme heat mixed in with water. So you have to soften that water, otherwise you’re going to get immediate scaling on that boiler. And if you’re not tracking that water softener and making sure that it’s still efficient, the boiler will scale up so quickly that it just stops working.

(47:29)
And that totally happened to us because the water softener stopped working, and I actually had brewers that would come on staff, and every time they came onto their shift, we had a checklist. And so every three hours we had a new brewer coming on, because we had this staggered schedule. So they were checking everything around the brewery, and one of them was the waters softener and making sure that was still working, because opening up that boiler and getting rid of all that scale, they can do an acid clean, but sometimes if it’s so scaled, the tubes, the heat exchange tubes in there get clogged, they have to drill the scale out. So this guy had to get this huge drill bit and just drill through this scale. It was crazy. And of course, it shut us down for a day. This guy was so angry. He was just cussing up a storm, man.

Cheyenne (48:33):
I can imagine.

Aaron (48:33):
And I’m like, “Isn’t this your job? Why are you so angry? You’re getting paid. I’m the one that’s in trouble here.” But yeah, so water boiler. Also, for your dishwasher, you need a water softener so that your glassware doesn’t get scaling on there as well. So I would say those are things that you need to focus on just around the brewery for water treatment. I could go into you can chase beer with water, so you need to deionize that as well, because you don’t want high TDS water mixing in with finished beer. So you probably want to at least have a little bit of deionized water there. Obviously, it needs to be sterilized and de-aerated as well if you’re pushing finished product around the brewery. Yeah, beyond that, I wouldn’t say anything else beyond that. I think some people use UV sterilization as well just to remove bacteria and other organics, kill any other organic living microbes. I’ve seen that also. We had that at Ballast Point. It just depends on what size of brewery you are and what you’re trying to accomplish.

Adam (49:51):
I have to say this has been incredibly knowledgeable. I’ve got one more question for you, but first I just want to thank you for making what can be such a seemingly difficult topic for a lot of people into a very… Hell, I understand it. So if I can figure, if I can understand it-

Cheyenne (50:10):
Me too.

Adam (50:11):
Everybody else out there can figure this one out, so no, thank you for that. That’s absolutely amazing. But the last thing I wanted to touch on was terroir and water. Is it a thing? If it is, how do you work with it, besides just hard water and soft water? Is terroir in water something that is looked at in the brewing world?

Aaron (50:37):
It is, but when John Palmer gave his talk, he always talked about to not chase those because brewers have been treating their water to achieve their results forever. So no matter what water you get as a brewer, you just have to adjust that water and make it whatever you want to create for your beer. And really, you’re just trying to maximize flavor and aroma. So I wouldn’t get too much into that, but when we were doing all these studies, one thing that I did notice was how much malt affects the ionic structure of your finished beer. So when people sit and try to chase these specific ionic profiles, just realized that once you mash in, I noticed that sulfates would go up 50 to a hundred, and that’s straight from the malt. Chlorides would go up almost a hundred ppm. Magnesium would almost go up a hundred ppm and sodium.

(51:42)
So just realize that a lot of that terroir for water, I look water as more of a tool. And then you’re throwing these ingredients in, and I would almost say that the salinity or the mineral content of your malt may actually have a bigger impact on finished expression of your beer. We just learned that… And even hops add sulfates, chlorides, sodium, and all that stuff as well. So it really just takes experimentation and knowing what works best for what you’re trying to accomplish. And if you want to deep dive into what I was just talking about, I had a brewing summit talk, gosh, that was years ago, showing what malt adds to your beer. I would also say one other thing, and I don’t want to forget about this, the other ion that I forgot to talk about is zinc. Zinc is precipitated during the boil in hot break, so you need to supplement that into the fermenter.

(52:58)
So we will just take hot water above 140 degrees, usually about 170, just straight from the hot liq. And we dose one gram of zinc sulfate into… We put one gram into 10-barrel batch. And you can look it up, there’s a talk. I can’t remember his name. I think it was Joe Kenny or someone did a talk about zinc, and he talks about dose rates. So I’d recommend just going there and looking that up. It does help with yeast health. When you think of yeast nutrient, one of the biggest things that any yeast nutrient has is zinc, zinc sulfate. So that’s the other unsung hero of all the ions. And it’s… Oh, my computer’s blowing up. Yeah, it’s highly recommended. It’s for yeast health. You need to have zinc in there.

Heather (54:01):
Awesome. So you’d say more or less the terroir of malt and hops more affects your water than the terroir of the area that you’re in?

Aaron (54:12):
To be determined.

Heather (54:17):
Okay.

Aaron (54:17):
I know a lot of brewers, they will fixate so much on a very specific water profile and then not realizing that the moment that you mash in, what you thought was what you’re getting is not what you’re getting. And generally speaking, I looked at malts from Germany, from the United Kingdom, from everywhere, and I noticed that different malts, different barley varieties will impart a different profile, so you can really go into a deep rabbit hole with that one. And I know that in Montana State, they’re doing some studies to better understand that, malt and terroir and mineral content that goes into the malt. Because what affects it is, what’s the water source that’s going into that barley? So is it irrigated, is it rain? What kind of soil is there? And then beyond that, what’s the water during the malting process? Because you’re reintroducing water into that malt and then you’re introducing those specific ions during the malting process. So my recommendation is to not really chase specific water profiles, just hit your target mash pH.

(55:46)
And by accomplishing that, again, just use calcium chloride, calcium sulfate, or one of those acids, lactic acid, phosphoric acid, and just know that each one of those ingredients will impart some sort of flavor. And what you’re trying to accomplish, just use it. One other thing I forgot to mention was for stouts, stouts are so acidic, it’s really hard to get a stout to knock out at about 5.2 pH. So usually what I do is for finished products, if it is too acidic, I will take four taster glasses and just micro dose increasing rates of baking soda into each one of the glasses and do a blind taste test.

Heather (56:36):
Really?

Aaron (56:36):
And you’d be surprised, adjusting the pH just a little bit in a stout can go a long way to improving mouthfeel, head retention, and just overall flavor. So you can always adjust pH post into the finished product. Usually with stouts, you get the best results. With stuff like lagers, it’s really hard. You can’t just dump lactic acid into the finished product and think that it’s going to taste good.

Cheyenne (57:05):
You can’t?

Aaron (57:10):
Sour lager.

Cheyenne (57:11):
Shocking.

Aaron (57:12):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So delicate beers like that, it’s really tough. So you really want to control that mash pH and knockout pH prior to fermentation.

Heather (57:24):
I’m writing down malt and terroir for a later podcast episode now.

Cheyenne (57:29):
I already added it to our notes.

Heather (57:34):
Okay, good.

Aaron (57:34):
And hops too. Hops, it’s not as much, but hops do, they have chlorides in them. Another thing that I noticed that malt has a lot of is potassium. And I noticed that when I was measuring beers from around the world, some beers had tons of potassium and others just didn’t. And I could also see some of them were like abiel, so I could see that, what is it? Belgian Candi Syrup has a lot of chloride in it, and so you would see the chloride levels in these abiel were through the roof, like 700 to 800 ppm of chloride in finished beer. So it’s really phenomenal when you think about it. I can really… Honestly, I can look at a beer’s finished ionic structure and backtrack and see what water they’re brewing with. You can really do that, because you kind of know what average malt will add.

(58:47)
But each malt’s unique, so if I had the time, if I had the money, which I kind of don’t have anymore now that I’m a business owner, but I would definitely do more research into this because I think it’s really… When you really think about it with water being 90% to 95% of your beer, it’s the difference between a good beer and an excellent and award-winning beer. And that’s just a fact. So yeah, again, don’t overthink about it. Hit your target mash pH. Make sure that you’re carbon filtering ,that’s first, and if you have the money, think about doing RO or deionizing your water to eventually hit your targets.

Heather (59:37):
Awesome. Aaron, thank you so much. As Adam mentioned, I actually do feel like I understand this a lot more than going into it, which I know is going to reflect out to all the listeners out there, too. So thank you so, so much. Before we jump, is there anything going on at East Village Brewing that you want to plug? Got any events coming up, anything rolling into the summer?

Aaron (01:00:01):
Thanks for asking, because I totally forgot to mention this earlier. We just got our winemaker’s license.

Heather (01:00:08):
Oh, wow.

Aaron (01:00:11):
That was actually part of the original idea, was for us to be an urban brewery winery. So we just got that. We have a cider, we’re going to start with ciders, then move to sparkling white wines. And once we can afford equipment, we’ll dabble in some reds. But yeah, we have a cider in the tank. It should be ready in about a week. That’s a whole different world. We’re super excited. I’ve only home-brewed ciders and wines, and they were just okay.

Heather (01:00:47):
They’re fine.

Aaron (01:00:48):
It’s a little scary to get in wine making. But yeah, so we’re going to be doing that. So we that. That’ll be offered. The first cider will probably be ready by the 4th of July. We expanded our patio, so now we have food. So for every Padres game that’s on a weekend, we’re going to have food on the patio. The sun is coming out finally, and you can sit on the patio and enjoy a beer. We’re really excited about doing that wine and cider as well. So I don’t even… Luckily, we don’t have to do water treatment with that. You just get what you get with the fruit.

Heather (01:01:26):
But also terroir affects your fruit.

Aaron (01:01:28):
It is.

Heather (01:01:29):
It’s so much.

Aaron (01:01:30):
It is all about terroir.

Heather (01:01:30):
Yeah.

Aaron (01:01:32):
Yeah. Well, I guess people will post acidify, but we’re not into that. We try to use as few additives in our beer as possible. And in fact, we use little to no additives in our beer. We try to keep things au naturel, so we’re going to do the same thing with our wines.

Cheyenne (01:01:50):
Do you mind if I ask where you’re getting your fruit from, your juice from?

Aaron (01:01:56):
Well, most apples we’re going to try to source from California, but it’s really hard to get apples and cider-making apples here in California. I think there are a couple farms that provide that. Otherwise, gosh, so many apples are grown in Washington state, and we already know a lot of farmers up in Yakima Valley and up in Oregon, because we’re going to be going up there in July to talk with farmers, and now we’re going to have to talk with apple farmers. But most of the apples that are growing in the United States are in Pacific Northwest or in the Northeast. So those are really the only places that you can source from, so ours are from up there in Yakima Valley.

Heather (01:02:40):
That’s great. Well, awesome. Aaron, again, thank you so, so much for joining us. If anyone is in the San Diego area, go visit Aaron at East Village Brewing Company. Thanks again.

Aaron (01:02:52):
It’s a pleasure.

Adam (01:02:53):
Thanks so much for tuning in. Join us for our next episode where we chat with folks from Homes For Our Troops about their work they’re doing and how the Veterans Hop Blend will benefit their cause.