Stout water without too much mineral flavour

[Smash café]

Greetings all, It has been almost a year since I have brewed. In the last year I have moved from Dublin to Amsterdam. My go to styles in Dublin were stouts and porters as water out of the tap was perfect for these styles.
Since moving to Amsterdam I have been trying various craft and home brew stouts made in my locality, all of them that use Amsterdam water, and are any way close to good , the brewer has used a large addition of chalk and / or epsom salts to try to hit a Dublin style water profile. While the additions are within the safe limits of additions, I find the balance of the minerals / almost oily mouth feel that results from such additions to be way over the top and kind of ruins a good stout for me.

Any tips / advise on getting the alkalinity up without adding so many salts? Anyone else in Amsterdam or similar water profile area doing anything else apart from chalk or epsom additions?

 

[Starter Hops]

Steeping the dark grains separate from your normal mash will immediately impact chalk additions. Just recently I found this article useful http://www.madalchemist.com/archives/mashing-the-perfect-sweet-stout/

 

[Smash café]

Thanks Starter Hops!

I will give this a try, makes sense to me.

 

[Nosybear]

My take is to manage the mash water and the sparge water separately. Capping - adding the dark grains to the sparge - is another technique that can help you reduce the minerally flavor of over-processed water. Did a mild a while back that tasted like baking soda, that got me going down the path of separating the water and treating each separately. Bonus: If you always cap the dark grains and crystals, you can build up a "standard" basic mash and always work from there....

 

[Thurston Brewer]

Two great approaches to a difficult problem. Hats off to Starter Hops and Nosybear!!

 

[Nosybear]

Forgot to mention acidifying the sparge water to ph 5.6 or thereabouts (depends on whether I get a heavy hand with the phosphoric acid). Generally for mash capping - adding the dark grains to the sparge - it's not a problem but a little extra tartness often improves the beer's flavor. Which brings me to a technical issue - the water calculator doesn't handle this kind of mash technique well. You have to formulate the "base malt" mash, then calculate the entire recipe with the character and dark malts.

 

[Smash café]

Thanks Nosybear!