Speaker to Animals wrote: ↑Sun Jul 28, 2019 2:12 pm
If you spend the money you can create whatever water you want. It cost money, though, which is why places like Asheville became a microbrewery hub -- the city water is already perfect for brewing. You don't have to spend a shit ton of money on water which is the largest input in the process.
It's that presumption that processing water for beer is so expensive that I dispute. We're not talking billions of gallons for a city water supply, just what goes into the tanks. And especially less relevant proportionally for high priced microbrews.
https://vinepair.com/articles/craft-bre ... ngredient/
Water, and its filtration, is an integral part of brewing no matter which way you cut it, explains Richie Saunders, the head brewer of Shmaltz Brewing. For Saunders, it’s about filtering out the regional vicissitudes of the water in different places or, sometimes, adding it back in. “When we as brewers look at the traditional European water profiles, we are generally looking at mineral content, so we can mimic water to match profiles for beers and characteristics we are trying to duplicate in our beers produced in the U.S. of A,” Saunders says. Say you’re living in Dublin and want to make an IPA. You’re going to want to manipulate the water to make it ideal for the beer you’re brewing, rather than just relying on the water that Dublin has to offer. “Yeah, you are removing the ‘terroir’ element,” Saunders admits. “But when we filter water, we don’t think of taking away character — more as maximizing the outcome, because we are able to take the water down to a base and allow ourselves to build the water up to almost any mineral mix we are focusing on based on the flavor elements we are trying to develop.”
When approaching a specific beer style, hardness and alkalinity can be a factor. So can trace minerals. For example, pilsners, a signature beer of the Czech Republic, have been made historically with soft water, or water without a high concentration of ions. Alkaline water has higher concentrations of bicarbonates, which can have a surprising effect on grains during the boiling process. Acids are extracted from grains during the boil and the alkalinity of the water neutralizes them, which can depress flavors or tease out a wine-like characteristic in the final product. Water that contains high concentrations of calcium chloride tends to produce hoppier beers, because hops cling to calcium.
If itinerant brewers depend on purification methods to reverse engineer the perfect water, what do brewers in permanent spaces do? Shmaltz Brewing Co., which has straddled the temp-perm worlds of brewing by circumstance, not design, has a bird’s eye view of both ethos. The brewery was founded in 1996 by Jeremy Cowan on a semi-lark in San Francisco, when he made 100 cases of He’Brew beer and hand-delivered it throughout the Bay Area from the back of his grandmother’s Volvo. In 2003, Shmaltz moved into Mendocino Brewing Co.’s facility in Saratoga Springs, N.Y, and in 2013, the brewery opened up what it hopes is a permanent HQ in a 20,000-square-foot brewery in Clifton Park, N.Y.
The brews Shmaltz has created have always been relentlessly offbeat, with tongue-in-cheek names like She’Brew Double IPA, Hop Orgy, and Funky Jewbelation, but with serious beer geek chops. The brewery has won armloads of accolades, including multiple gold medals at the World Beer Championships.
But behind the freewheeling appearance is Saunders and his team of scientifically-minded brewers measuring, tinkering, perfecting. Saunders has earned a rep within the industry of being able to pull off methodical madness, and because of that, Saunders does a lot of contract brewing for other beer labels. And when they make beer for a crew that hails from the West Coast or overseas, chances are, subtle differences in water quality will evade filtration technology and seep through to the end product, unless additional precautions are taken.
“When brewers call on us to reproduce brands for them in our facility, there is an expectation that products made here will meet the same standards as those products produced at the home brewery or other contract production brewery,” Saunders says. But there are differences, and often those differences in flavor come down to water. “We can bring the same raw materials into our brewery as the contract utilizes at their home facility, but the quality of the water can be a game changer,” he explains. “There are often conversations regarding water quality and adjustments to water before we really get into talking about recipes from the perspective of what most people think of as brewing raw materials. Fortunately for us, it has been very easy to manipulate water constituents to provide exactly what we are looking for in water for a recipe.”
We are only accustomed to dealing with like twenty online personas at a time so when we only have about ten people some people have to be strawmanned in order to advance our same relative go nowhere nonsense positions. -TheReal_ND