Consolidate the salt additions to mash/sparge only.#207

I think many people add all the water addition’s to the mash only. It would be good to have this option without ticking the “no sparge” box in the settings.

Came here to say this: Since based on what I’ve read most of the mash conversion action happens in the mash, not the sparge, I add all my salts/acids to the mash. But the water calculator seems to want to add it to both, which is… not great.

Hi @Eric Pavey ,
Here is what our Brewing expert has to say regarding this request when we asked them:
“Is it better to add all salts and acids during the mash stage instead of splitting them between mash and sparge?”

Answer: There is little difference. The main argument here is that some of the sparge salts are absorbed by the grains.

But whats not taken into accout is that the malts already contain significant salts due to the water profile of the water used in thce malting process, which the water is then dried off leaving the salts.

But the salts are added not only for yeast functions but also pH functions during the process. So if you add all the salts to the mash (and not doing no sparge) then you have a significant amount more salts for a small volume of wort. This can lead to pH and conversion issues. Adding salts to the sparge water drops the pH of the sparge water to closer to that of the wort (also acts as a buffer) this helps to reduce the likelihood of extraction of tannins due to increasing pH.

What could be done is acidification of the sparge water (more than what we calc) then run the sparge and then add the salts at preboil.

So really the amount of loss through the grains during the sparge is of low significance compared to other factors not taken into account by brewers

Regardless of people’s opnions on the matter of how/when to contribute the ion additions: The math behind how much to add if you’re doing ‘mash only additions’, or sparge only (is that even a thing?)’, should be considered by the software, and the option (to do one or the other, not both) provided to the user… like other similar apps. I’d like to use the app now, but can’t based on how this is being split up. I don’t add salts to my sparge water, not do I plan to. FYI, I just added a number of proposted suggesteions to the water app here: https://grainfather.nolt.io/290

Hi Eric, we try our best to accommodate eveyones requirement, but there will be times were we won’t be able to. Currently we accommodate for users that do split their water additions, and for those that like to combine their water additions they can easily add them together. However, we will consider adding a feature to combine these amounts visually, in possible future releases.

Thanks for the consideration, appreciated. My goal is to use the software more, which is why I’m supplying the feedback. BTW, the G40 has been great!