thebamaking

Recipes 

are there any major differences in distilled and spring water for brewing?

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+1 FOR MORE HOPS

azscoob

Recipes 

spring water has minerals, distilled water has none, distilled is fine for extract brewing because the extract has the minerals in it from processing, but for all-grain you would need to build your water so the minerals needed for brewing are in there, I brew all-grain and use bottled spring water because my tap water is crap out here.

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Shirts n Steins: Grain Reaper Brewing

azscoob

Recipes 

someone will be along with a better answer than mine, I just stated the basics....

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Shirts n Steins: Grain Reaper Brewing

Dr_Gordon_Freeman

Recipes 

I wouldn't count on the extract for minerals. Why not use drinking water? It tastes better to begin with and the yeast might be assisted by the minerals contained. No reason to ever use distilled that I can think of.

malkore

Recipes 

you can use distilled or RO water if you plan to add minerals and brewing salts back to the water to recreate a specific regions water parameters for a specific style.

Otherwise spring water or good tap water works fine. The chloramine in tap water can cause some off flavors if the levels are high. If you like you can treat 20 gallons of tap water with 1 campden tab, and it works in just a few minutes.
Or spring water from the grocery store works fine.

For extract kits you shouldn't need to get fancy on water. partial mash and all-grain is a little more involved but doesn't have to be rocket science.

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Malkore
Primary: English Mild
On tap: Pale Ale, Lancelot's Wheat, English Brown Ale, Steam Beer, HoovNuts IPA
Bottled: MOAM, Braggot, Raspberry Melomel, Merlot, Apfelwein, Pyment, Sweet mead, Cabernet
Gal in 2009: 27, Gal in 2010: 34, Gal in 2011: 13, Gal in 2012: 10