Brewing Salts Really Are "Seasonings" For Your Beer

Now not to get ahead of ourselves, the flavors in your beer predominantly come from malt, hops and yeast byproducts. So as I've said before, dial that shit in before you start screwing around with your beer. Otherwise, it's analogous to dumping a full salt shaker onto a well-done steak and expecting that to magically transform it into a perfectly seared, crusty but medium rare and juicy steak. It just doesn't work. Now you're just eating an extra salty piece of crap instead of a piece of crap.

But once you've honed your process and want to think about tweaking the flavors in your beer to really bring out the profile you're looking for, it's time to start thinking about water treatment. (This post is only about the flavor additions - there's a lot more to water treatment. See this other post.)

Sulfate (SO4) and Chloride (Cl-) are the two primary ions which have an impact on beer flavor. The presence and concentration of either ion independently appears to be less important than the actual ratio between them. A ratio which favors a higher Chloride concentration will accentuate malt (bready, toasty, caramelly) flavors where a ratio with a higher Sulfate ratio will highlight hop bitterness and sharpness.

Jeremy and I have only really just started to successfully tweak this ratio of salts in our beers. We've brewed three batches of Russian Imperial Stout over the past year or so, partially out of need to fill a five gallon used whiskey barrel we bought this past winter. The first two batches were brewed last fall and were pretty solid, well executed beers. But something was missing. They lacked the velvety, chocolatey notes which make a big stout the kind of beer you want to slowly nurse out of a snifter, savoring the aroma and pairing with a brick of blue cheese or a cigar.

In hindsight, we totally screwed up the water treatment. We'd been brewing hoppy beers all summer, and without a real insight into the balance necessary in our water, dumped a boatload of gypsum into the beer. Our Chloride to Sulfate ratio was something like 1 : 3, which completely over-accentuated the bitterness and downplayed the malt. On our re-brew we were 1.5 : 1. The third round has those massive chocolate, stone fruit and roast notes that make it characteristic of the style.

Furthering the cooking analogy, the first two stouts were nicely cooked steaks but lacked something almost intangible. We made a tiny adjustment, just like learning to salt the meat and let it warm up to room temperature in order to create that perfectly caramelized crust. The more I brew, the more these little adjustments start to really matter and impact the finished beer.

(Bad choice on the analogy. Now I want to eat a steak and drink one of those stouts at 8 in the morning...)