Austin Texas tap water: chlorine (or chloramine?)

The tap water here in Austin contains between 2.23 and 2.09 mg/L of "Residual Chlorine" according to the water utility. Is this considered high? Is this something that I can count on dissipating in the boil or should I treat it?

To anyone from Austin: do you know if they use chlorine of chloramine in the water here?

Cheers!

Its typical. A water utility is required by law to have that disinfectant residual in their distribution system.

From the austintexas.gov website:

Q. Is chlorine a safe disinfectant for drinking water?

A. Austin uses chloramine to disinfect our drinking water. Chloramine is used in municipal water treatment and is the most effective way to ensure that water stays disinfected as it travels through water delivery systems.

Use a Campden tablet in your brewing and top-off water and you should be fine.

Thanks guys!

Hey!


I live in Austin and I am right outside the COA utility zone. My water company uses chloramine. It RUINS beer. 4 batches I had to throw out. I Putin a cheap(ish) water filter from home depot and it cleared that problem right up.

I live in Austin and just recently started brewing, but I have bought 2.5 gallon jugs from heb everytime I have brewed. I know our water here just doesn't taste that great and I rather be safe than sorry. I buy 3 of the 2.5 gallon spring water jugs and it cost about 7 bucks.

If chloramines are the disinfectant in the water system, you are much better off using campden tablets to remove the chloramine than activated carbon filtration. The flow rate has to be SUPER low to achieve adequate chloramine removal. When properly dosed, campden tablets do not appreciably alter the ionic content of the brewing water and do not add appreciable sulfite to the water (its all reacted).

Hi Martin. It seems that activated carbon would, at the least, reduce the need for Campden. Would an aquarium chlorine tester be sufficiently sensitive to determine the appropriate level?

I just found out my water company uses 3-4 ppm chloramine. I have been using a 10 inch 1 micron filter, no problem. Most brewers I know are using 5 micron filters.

Either way it passes AJ’s smell test. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f128/campden-tablets-sulfites-brewing-water-361073/

As my old boss would say “ I don’t understand all I know about this.”

I also use campden, remember only a little is needed. I use 1/2 tab for 10-15 gallons batches.

Activated carbon does reduce chloramine concentration, but it is very sensitive to the time its in contact with the carbon. That is the reason for the very slow flow rate. To achieve near complete removal, the residence time in contact with the carbon needs to be about 8 minutes. For the little 10" filters, that means a flow rate of 1/10th gallon/min or less. For most people, that flow rate is ridiculously slow. If you are willing to wait, this treatment is fine. For most people, they have better things to do.

A filter with a micron rating is a particulate filter and it probably doesn't have an activated carbon component. Filtering with either 1 or 5 micron filters is useless for brewing purposes.

Unfortunately, AJ's smell test is not reliable when dealing with chloramine. Chloramine has low volatility and most people have difficulty smelling it. That makes the presence of small concentrations even harder to detect. Since it only takes tenths of a ppm of chlorine or chloramine to produce chlorophenols in perceptable concentrations in beer, you must remove all or virtually all of these disinfectants from water prior to brewing.