Hi Gang!
Within the last year, I have been trying to pay attention to my water. The main reason being that my water does not lend itself to malt-forward dark beers, but I've tried to apply water treatment to every beer.
I have a copy of my water report, and I've input that into the calculator on brewers friend. To determine my desired water profile, I use Bru'n water, that speadsheet allows you to put in the type of beer your making and gives you a desired water profile. I then take that info and input it into the Brewer's friend calculator, and adjust my ions with salts from there.
Recently, a friend of mine, who's opinion I value a great deal, said that my pale ale tasted minerally/metallic. After tasting the beer, I'm not sure if I taste that or not. I just entered it into competition, so we'll see.
My water started out with 23 PPM of Calcium, 23 PPM of Chloride and 16 PPM of sulfate. I added 6g of Gypsum and 2g of Cal Chloride to 48.32 qts of water (7 Gal Batch) to end up with: 65.5 PPM of calcium, 44.1 of chloride and 89.2 PPM of Sulfate. The chloride:Sulfate ratio is 2.0. Everything I've read says you'll really notice a bitterness increase after a sulfate presence of <200 PPM of sulfate, so I feel mine is still low, I was just going by the Chloride:Sulfate ratio.
If anyone who is familiar with water additives could let me know if my math and/or logic is flawed, that would be great.