Paranoid Water question

Would going AG make chlorine noticeable in my beer when it wasn’t noticeable when I did extract? I ask because I’ve recently moved albeit just down the street basically. I’ve brewed three times since the move. An extract IPA that came out great. A PM robust porter. That has been in bottle for two weeks. I tasted it yesterday and it had a really strong, what I’m thinking is chlorine smell and taste. My first AG is bubbling away in primary.

New items introduced since extract IPA. 10 g MLT with ss false bottom. Which I filled with 180ish degree water before I ever brewed with it thinking it would ‘season’ it or get rid of any plastic smell. Some high temp nylon reinforced tubing. Keggle. Also a new garden hose.

I will say this. My water does taste like chlorine if I don’t run it through a brita inside. But everyone in my brewing club says Memphis water is great and no adjustments are needed.

I hope I’ve provided enough info. Thanks for any insight. Freaking out that my first AG batch will taste weird like the porter. This forum is invaluable thanks again.

Maybe it's the garden hose.

maida7 said:

Maybe it's the garden hose.

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I agree. If the water from a faucet indoors tastes the same in the new house as it did in the old house, you are certainly getting rubber/sealant/preservative flavors from the hose. I have a hard time imagining that one house is getting very different water from another on the same street, as they would likely be hooked into the same connection to the main.

If you have had a lot of rain or abnormally high heat recently, the authority over your water supply may have released extra chlorine into the water supply to prevent bacterial growth. That could also be an explanation.

I think a good point that emerges in this thread is that you have no real control over what comes into your house if you're on a municipal water supply. You have to treat it yourself, or use water of a known quality to eliminate this variable.
I don't have to worry about our household supply, because it's from a well and contains far too much dissolved calcium and iron to be suitable for brewing. I use the RO (reverse osmosis) water from the machine at the grocery store. It costs me $1.67 including tax for five gallons, the beer is great, and I regard this as money well spent.

You're not being paranoid, you're being smart. Beer is too much work to dump batches due to something as simple as taking care of your water.

1) Are you using the garden hose for your chiller or are you using it to actually fill your hot liquor tank? Traditional garden hoses, the nice green kind, are not "drinking water" certified, meaning they will leach a lot more nasties than the white "drinking water / RV" hoses. I would strongly suggest not using a hose to fill your brew water and if you do use a hose make sure it's drinking water certified.

2) Your water tastes like chlorine? If I understood your post correctly, nevertheless you are not filtering it because your brewing friends say it's fine? I would ALWAYS filter any municipal water for chlorine. You can get drinking water from the grocery store that is chlorine free (I'd personally avoid R/O water because R/O also removes minerals that are needed in the brewing process - so unless you add your own minerals back in you may be doing yourself a disservice by R/O - only my 2 cents but I comment since the poster above suggested RO). Also, keep in mind just like some people are more sensitive to diacytal than others, some people are more sensitive to phenolics than others.

Are your friends extract brewers? I ask this because chlorine reacts with the phenols, the pre-cursors of which are derived primarily (thought not exclusively) from the mashing process and sparging processes. During fermention yeast interacts with these precursors to form phenols (your clove, pepper, spicy properties when used with the correct yeast and in the correct manner for the style). There are good phenols and bad phenols. One of the types of phenols that is generally bad are polyphenols which are typically associated with the extraction of Tannins from overparging or sparging to hot (+170). I don't want to get overly technical, but the precursor compounds which react with the chlorine are less present in extract because you're skipping the mashing/sparging process so there are less phenols for the chlorine to react with to bond and create chlorophenolics (that nasty bandaid / medicinal aroma). So it would make sense that if you were using extract in your prior brews and didn't notice the influence of the chlorine that now that you've switched to PM and All Grain you'd notice an increase in the reactions. You're also typically bringing your water to boiling when using an extract before adding anything to the water - likely boiling off some, if not all, of the chlorine before you ever add your extract. Not so with PM or all grain because the chlorine is bonding to the phenolic precursors (and any polyphenols or tannins) created during the mashing / steeping process as the water is not hot enough to drive off the chlorine.

3) The taste your describing could also not be the chlorine. Bad phenloics, burnt plastic, medicine, band aid, etc can come from other sources including tannins from oversparging (see above), tannins from over crushing grain, bacterial infection, insufficient rinsing of sanitizing agents, a whole myriad of causes.

If you want to assume it's the chlorine in your water, which I think is a better assumption than the other causes listed in (3) based on the content of your post, you can fix the issue by using bottled drinking water, running your brewing water though a filter, pre-boiling your water, or treating it with cambden tablets. All viable options.

Last but not least, even if you are treating your brewing water, keep in mind that the water you are using for cleaning (including the water used to mix up your sanitizer) also likely has chlorine in it so be sure whatever treatment process you're using on your brewing water you're using on ALL water that comes in contact with your beer.

garden hose = bad...it'll put goofy rubbery/plastic/vinyl flavors in beer.

R/V hose for potable water, however, is food safe and shouldn't lend a funk to the brew.

that said, I do treat my tap water with campden to remove the chloramine in the city tap water.

Kelly K
1.I use the garden hose to fill my HLT.
2.Friends are AG brewers and make great beer so when they said use it as is I listened. Which is surprising because I usually try to make things harder than they need to be.
3.Looking back through my notes I might have oversparged the PM porter. I mashed in with 2 qt/lb (per Palmer) then I had trouble getting temp up and we added a decent amount more water. Not sure exactly how much but remembered thinking it was too much.

I guess I'll have a better idea when I taste the bitter that is in the primary now whether it is the water or sparging mess up. I really appreciate all the input from you guys. Great stuff. Who would have thought that the garden hose might have done me in? Here I was studying old posts on the forum, making lists left and right so I didn't forget anything, anything I could do to nail it down. And it might end up being the garden hose that foiled me. What a dope!!

Regardless I will be filtering the water in some way going forward. Even if it ends up that I just over sparged. Oh yeah, and getting a new hose.

they make a filter that goes on a garden hose. Perhaps you can use one of those with an RV hose.

Memphis water makes very good beer. All the riverboats fill their fresh water tanks in Memphis. They put a tad bit too much chlorine in it, but that goes away fairly fast.

If anything, going AG should REDUCE the amount of chlorine. When you heat the mash and sparge water, you are driving out a lot of the chlorine. The boil should remove the rest.

Go down to Lowes or Wally World and get a food grade (blue) water hose. Worth the money.

I suggest not use ANY kind of hose. Fill a glass directly from the spigot and mark it with an A on the bottom. Fill another identical one from the hose and mark it B. Have someone swap the glasses around on you and taste them.