An easy way to begin ‘cooking up’ your own water recipe is to begin with distilled water, which is free of minerals. This is readily available from most supermarkets and hardware stores. Remineralisation can also be carried out using the water from your existing public water supply. We recommend against remineralising water from the public water supply if it has an LSI of above 0.7.
You can adjust the mineral component of the distilled water by simply adding a buffer concentrate and a permanent hardness concentrate to it. To make life even more simple, you can use baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to mix up the buffer concentrate and Epsom salts (magnesium sulphate) to add the permanent hardness. Most supermarkets and pharmacies sell these two cheap and readily available ionic substances. By combining the buffer concentrate, the permanent hardness concentrate, and distilled water, you can produce a custom blend for your brewing water.
The Recipes
You’ll need the following before you start:
- Baking Soda – NaHCO3, Sodium Bicarbonate (not to be confused with baking powder)
- Epsom Salts – MgSO4.7H2O, Magnesium Sulphate.¹
- Deionised/Distilled/Ultra-pure water
- Scales (accurate to 0.01g)
- 3 x ~1L water containers (preferably glass, and odour/residue free)
The Buffer Solution
Dissolve 1.68g of sodium bicarbonate in 1L of deionised water. This creates a solution with a KH (as CaCO3) as close as we can get to 1000ppm.
The Hardness Solution
Dissolve 2.45g of Epsom salts in 1L of deionised water. This creates a solution with a GH (as CaCO3) of 1000 ppm.
Remineralisation Calculators
Create Your own Water Recipe using Deionised water
Using these two solutions with deionised water is very simple. To get your desired KH and GH,