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Treat water as an ingredient #152

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@pricelessbrewing

We should treat water as an ingredient using for any infusion of water during all process steps in order to support the following common scenarios.

A) Water chemistry required the base water profile for mash, and sparge volumes. These do not necessarily need to be the same water.

B) Many brewers limited in volume will add an infusion of water to any of the following:

  • pre-boil, avoiding a sparge,
  • during the boil if their brewkettle is too small, this is preferred for hoppy beers in order to keep the IBUs under the solubility limit.
  • postboil if their brew kettle is too small.
  • After transferring their wort to the fermenter (fermentation step).

Each of the above would require a different calculation for preboil/postboil gravities, and efficiency if the water additions are not accounted for properly in the recipe file (and software).

Either 1) Add an infusion object to all of the process steps (mash/infusion, mash/sparge,boil,fermentation).

Each of these objects should contain the following;
amount (volume),
temperature,
and water name (and/or product ID see #146?).

Amount and temperature should be required.

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  1. matty0ung commented on Oct 22, 2026

    @matty0ung
    Contributor

    I get where this is coming from, but I'm not convinced that it's ideal to treat water as an ingredient. Partly this is because it diverges too much from other ingredients (eg no supplier, product ID, inventory, etc). Partly this is because you don't typically use "X amount of water Y then P amount of water Q". It's more likely that you start out with water profile Y and then make various mineral and acid additions to try to bring it close to water profile Q.

    I would have thought that, most of the time, most brewers care about one or two water profiles per recipe (typically starting profile and target profile). I'm happy to be corrected, but I'd be surprised if a lot of folks were, say, using one profile for mashing, another for sparging, another for post-boil top-up etc. In Brewtarget, we're moving towards this model (but still retaining the option to mark various water usages as having a % of reverse-osmosis water for folks that need that).

    Would be great to get other folks' thoughts on this subject.

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