How important is water for good beer? on a scale....

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davis119

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On a scale of one to ten
Ten being must be perfect
one being eff it....

Ok with me being a new all grain brewer I don't get all the water hype...
I live in a condo so I brew every where but home.... so I obviously can't have water reports for all the towns I brew in.....

What are some of the ill effects of water around 7.0ph.
(Honestly Idk if the higher the # means more acidic or less)

I have done 4 ag batches and drank 2 so far
I achieved my OG with in a few points each time

Are there any other experienced brewers out there that just go with the flow. Just add water and mash?
 
Just for the record I have never measured pH or acquired a water report for my area and I have never had any problems with any of my beers (extract or all grain)... except for the one that sat in a leaky keg for three months in the basement. That one tasted like cardboard and found the bottom of a drain rather quickly. Cheers.
 
davis119 said:
On a scale of one to ten
Ten being must be perfect
one being eff it....

Ok with me being a new all grain brewer I don't get all the water hype...
I live in a condo so I brew every where but home.... so I obviously can't have water reports for all the towns I brew in.....

What are some of the ill effects of water around 7.0ph.
(Honestly Idk if the higher the # means more acidic or less)

I have done 4 ag batches and drank 2 so far
I achieved my OG with in a few points each time

Are there any other experienced brewers out there that just go with the flow. Just add water and mash?

The issue with the stuff out of the tap is mainly chloramine and chlorine. It can seriously affect the taste of the beer.
 
Draken said:
The issue with the stuff out of the tap is mainly chloramine and chlorine. It can seriously affect the taste of the beer.

So is there some thing that could just take care of that issue?
 
HawksBrewer said:
Just for the record I have never measured pH or acquired a water report for my area and I have never had any problems with any of my beers (extract or all grain)... except for the one that sat in a leaky keg for three months in the basement. That one tasted like cardboard and found the bottom of a drain rather quickly. Cheers.

So that would be a 1. Eff it
 
If your water tastes good brew with it, just be aware of the chlorine content of the water. Mine still sucks when it's filtered and I've moved to using RO with salts.
 
If your water tastes good brew with it, just be aware of the chlorine content of the water. Mine still sucks when it's filtered and I've moved to using RO with salts.

I would agree with this unlesss you shooting for something with a specific water profile. One easy thing you can do if using tap water Is to let your water sit for a day or two before using. This will at least let the chlorine dissapate, although I don't think chloramine will. Probably better than using right out of tap.
 
I would agree with this unlesss you shooting for something with a specific water profile. One easy thing you can do if using tap water Is to let your water sit for a day or two before using. This will at least let the chlorine dissapate, although I don't think chloramine will. Probably better than using right out of tap.

You need to filter or hit it with campden tablets to get rid of chloramine.
 
Im finding im seeking the holy grail of water.I think alot of water ive used were not helping too much.And giveing me "mehness", alot is in your hands also with your ph for your mash also. Im still experimenting with yeast nutrient,brewing salts,and water still.
I think r/o water and brewing salts and yeast nutrient works pretty good and i think i found a artesian water i think is gold for brewing recently.
Your water is your beer. Tasting your water may be your best bet,but i like the taste of r/o or distilled and only a few spring watersthat tastes good. But its possible to not make the best beer out of your favorate water i guess,but it is an important thing to consider, my tap is weird the beers suck at first but then those ive brewed with it got better with age. That just makes me think it really should be filtered. It can be part of one of those technical things that makes a beer thats good ,to great,along with many other things its important. that being said check your mash ph and adjust. I do it every batch with the crappy cheap ph strips,but it gets me close and i still make pretty good/ great beer most of the time.
 
I can only speak from the experience I've had thus far. My water tastes great straight outta the water softener from the well. I could always taste something off in the beers that I made. I switched to RO water from the well and built my recipe (additions) accordingly. It has done wonders for the beer I make now. Funny, because my boss is a big fan of Granite City brew pub and all their beers taste the absolute same to me, just like my beers did. Unfortunately for him, he tastes the same thing now and doesn't like the beer they make but still likes mine. Water is at a bare minimum, 8 in the taste of your beer. Unless you have perfect water, unfortunately, I do not straight outta the well.
 
I think the answer here depends on where you are and what you are brewing. Some places have water that is just fine for most applications. However, certain pH levels and mineral content will be more complimentary of certain styles of beer. As a general rule, if it's good to drink, it's probably OK to brew with. However, if you are practicing good sanitation and fermentation temp control, but still getting off flavors, water is the next most likely culprit, I think. Honestly, you can be as particular about water as you want to be. Mine is fine, and I just use it as is, straight out of the tap. But I also know of other people that will build their water up from RO with minerals appropriate to what they are trying to brew. Like so many other facets of this hobby, you get to decide how much you want to concern yourself with it. I know I would be much more concerned about it, if it was causing issues. But it doesn't seem to, so I'm good with it.
 
I don't like my tap water but I like my beer. Doing all grain, I use a ****load of water so the cost and hassle of going out and buying then dragging home 10 gallons of water has kept me just using tap treated with metabisulfite. I do wonder a lot if better tasting water would make my beer better, and it seems like the answer is a pretty obvious yes so I continue to struggle with the idea.
 
Oh, I really got mad about my beer. Everything I did was to the letter and then I tasted the brew pub my boss recommended to me. It became clear as a bullet through the chest. My water in the well did not not make good beer and no matter what style I made, it had the same off flavor. I'm not talkin about sanitation issues because my equipment sat for almost a year and nothing appeared to grow. It wasn't until I switched to RO water from the well that I truly began to make decent beer. It depends on where you are but even though my water is drinkable and tastes good, it doesn't make good beer straight from the faucet.
 
We have extremely hard water(never bothered to get it analyzed) but over the years I guess I've learned to make adjustments to my recipes and brew beers that work well with my water instead of trying to fix the water.
Besides being cheap and lazy the third reason for not getting it analyzed is that our rural water co-op has numerous wells in different areas and we never know which well our water comes from on any given day, but we could taste the differences if anybody actually drank this vile stuff from the tap. But it does make good beer.
 
I have fantastic well water! No chlorine and cold and pure from centuries ago! Family fills their jugs up when they visit.

Unfortunately, its loaded with calcium, in the form of carbonates. We have a limestone quarry just a few miles away. Being mostly reacted the pH isnt outta line too bad, and I add 5.2 to get my efficiencies. It still creates a cloudy beer, no matter what I do. Not bad, but the haze is there. I also have to back off a bit on the bittering hops on the ipa's. But I love the taste my well water creates. The minerals and the hops dance together very nicely. I dont drink saisons, but I bet those would be stoopid good.

Water matters. Alot. You dont have to get super technical about it, but just understand it affects all phases of your beer profile.
 
To elaborate on my earlier statement of "7":

I used to brew with water straight from the tap. It's not the best-tasting water in the world, but it's also not anywhere near the worst water in Florida. Based on the water analysis, it's actually very nice water for brewing most beer styles than can tolerate 70 ppm of sulfate. I thought the beer was good, but people kept commenting on my "peculiar" house flavor.

As my palate evolved, I could start tasting very subtle chlorophenols. Something to keep in mind is that chlorine will evaporate in the boil, but it apparently also reacts with the malts during steeping/mashing to form more stable chlorinated compounds that don't evaporate as easily. Using campden tablets to treat the water fixed that.

Eventually, I switched to using Glacier RO water (for $3 per 10 gallons, it was a no-brainer) and initially used Palmer's calculator to adjust the water salts (not so much for mash pH - most grists will stabilize in the proper pH range without any salts whatsoever - but for flavor.) It was a difference like night and day (well, maybe not that much, but the "peculiar house flavor" was finally gone). I now use Bru'n water to adjust the RO water and only use CaCl2, CaSO4 and occasionally, for very dark grists, CaCO3.

Some people out there have awesome, soft brewing water that is perfect for just about any style with minor adjustments. Others have water that makes the beer taste ok, but not as great as it should be. Short story is, water is every bit as important an ingredient as any other, and that importance goes far beyond mash pH alone. If you want to make the best beer possible, you should consider adjusting your water chemistry to suit the style of beer you are brewing. Note that this does NOT mean copying brewing water from the major brewing cities that are listed in so many homebrewing books, because many breweries in those cities will adjust their water in ways unknown to us.
 
So is there some thing that could just take care of that issue?

I am on private well water so I don't have the same issues as some who are on town water e.g., no chlorine. However, when I did live in an area where I was on town water I used to leave a bucket of water out overnight to let the chlorine dissipate before adding it to my fish tank, I'm going to assume the same thing can be said about water for beer.
 
I am not sure about this, however, I am doing an experiment at home. I have done a batch with water I filtered from my fridge. I just got done doing a batch with water from the tap (I was lazy that day and did not want to wait on filling up the filtered water). I will see what happens. Right now I am a 5 but I am sure that it will change up or down.
 
I can only speak from the experience I've had thus far. My water tastes great straight outta the water softener from the well. I could always taste something off in the beers that I made. I switched to RO water from the well and built my recipe (additions) accordingly. It has done wonders for the beer I make now. Funny, because my boss is a big fan of Granite City brew pub and all their beers taste the absolute same to me, just like my beers did. Unfortunately for him, he tastes the same thing now and doesn't like the beer they make but still likes mine. Water is at a bare minimum, 8 in the taste of your beer. Unless you have perfect water, unfortunately, I do not straight outta the well.

HIJACK!!!!!:
Where in Indianapolis are you? Where do you work? I spy Granite Sh_t holy brewpub from my office.
 
I'd say water is up there... maybe 8? I didn't think it mattered much but after using this water filter to strip the water to nothing, I saw much improvement over tap water. It's $18, high flow and lasts for like 5000 gallons. I thought it was a much more practical alternative to the overhyped/priced Pur filters. It just seems easier to strip the water down and add calcium chloride and gypsum based on the water primer sticky. I saw a noticable difference in my beer, especially in my IPA's, which never seemed to have the bitterness "snap" that commercial beers had.
 
99% of your finished beer is water. So I'd say it's pretty important.

On a more metaphorical note...your water is the canvas on which you 'paint' your brewing masterpiece. Would you rather paint on a dirty piece of burlap you found in your garage (average tap water), or the freshest, cleanest piece of canvas you can find?

Maybe you don't give a crap, but I brew because I like drinking what I make.
 
scoundrel said:
I'd say water is up there... maybe 8? I didn't think it mattered much but after using this water filter to strip the water to nothing, I saw much improvement over tap water. It's $18, high flow and lasts for like 5000 gallons. I thought it was a much more practical alternative to the overhyped/priced Pur filters. It just seems easier to strip the water down and add calcium chloride and gypsum based on the water primer sticky. I saw a noticable difference in my beer, especially in my IPA's, which never seemed to have the bitterness "snap" that commercial beers had.

How much is that filter actually stripping out of the water? Is it getting it close to RO water? I think my next step is playing with the water chemistry, and that filter looks like a good option for my outdoor setup,
 
That filter isn't stripping much, 100 microns is a particulate filter mostly. The mineral content isn't being stripped at all with that filter.
 
I'd have to agree with water being up there in importance, somewhere in the 8-10 range. One of the main reasons different regions are known for a particular style of beer is that the water is one region is conducive to one style of beer, where water in another part of the world is conducive to another. Beers from England benefit from hard water, whereas a BoPils benefits from the soft water found in eastern Europe. More water goes into your brew than any other ingredient, therefore it's important to make sure your water is appropriate for brewing.
That said, most water will make good beer. As long as you can remove the fluorine, chlorine, etc., and the water has an appropriate pH for mashing, it should make good beer. (obviously, if your water tastes foul, it could make foul beer) I've made great beer from my tap water (boiled, unfiltered), bottled spring water, tap/RO mix, RO w/trace minerals added, and water from the Schmidt Brewery in St. P. (from aquifer under St. Paul). You can get very technical about your water, or simply use filtered or pre boiled tap, and make good beer. It's all a matter of how far you want to delve into water chemistry in your hobby.
 
Agree on the Camco being a particulate and maybe a charcoal style filter.

As to PUR filters, I used to work there. Both gravity pitchers and faucet mounts will remove particulate (sub 1 micron), contain activated carbon ro remove chlorine and other volatiles, and also remove lead. The gravity pitchers also contain ion exchange resin (think water softener), so hardness ions like calcium and magnesium will be reduced. The faucet mounts will not remove hardness, and may even briefly add it for their top filter. Neither will remove alkalinity in the water. The pitchers are a little less convenient since they cannot filter on demand and require some advance time to filter large volumes of water. Good products IMO, and yes there are some profit margins at play.

Depending on beer styles I use a combination of Grocery store RO water, unsoftened tap (for minerals), and PUR filtered tap. Usually a mixture of all 3 to hit my numbers. Sometimes just RO and hard tap.
 
Like just about everyone else, my answer is: it depends.

Dark beers: camden tablet and maybe a pinch of minerals. Might need some acid.
Light beers: 40%-100% RO water and build the mineral profile from scratch. Acid is required.

A good water report + Bru'n Water spreadsheet are essential tools for me.
 
Like just about everyone else, my answer is: it depends.

Dark beers: camden tablet and maybe a pinch of minerals. Might need some acid.
Light beers: 40%-100% RO water and build the mineral profile from scratch. Acid is required.

A good water report + Bru'n Water spreadsheet are essential tools for me.

i gotcha
but like i said its not possible to have a report for every where i brew
and how much is RO water ??
i dont think i have ever seen it in the store ? purifiedwater the same thing ?
 
GilaMinumBeer said:
.33 a gallon from the culligan stations at WalMart. YAMV.

YAMV?

And what do you do bring jugs? And fill them up. ? I have never seen any thing like that
 
YAMV?

And what do you do bring jugs? And fill them up. ? I have never seen any thing like that

Your Are May Vary.

They usually have a rack, near the soda section, with empty jugs/carboys ranging from 1 gallon to 5 gallon. You pay for the carboy the first time and just pay for refills each time after that.
 
Ughhh this is a portion of the hobby that I have been very reluctant to dive into. Being an engineer I understand there is necessity to nitpick and be detail-oriented, but that mindset seldom falls through to my homebrewing. I guess I equate homebrewing to more like cooking rather than baking.

But all this discussion (plus my engineer-conscience in the back of my head) has me thinking I should at least send my water away to get it analyzed. For $20, at the least it would be good peace of mind. At the worst, it will cost me hundreds of dollars on an RO setup that I convince myself (and SWMBO) we absolutely need because I will be too lazy to buy water from the grocer.

Currently I filter my tap water through one of those under-sink activated charcoal filters. The last batch I did I measured all my brewing water out the night before and treated with a campden tablet. Havent tasted that brew yet but it felt like a good thing to do, let the water sit out overnight at the least.

Hopefully my water report will come back that I have pretty good readings, and that I don’t have to do much to it.
 
If money isn't a big deal, would it be better to purchase RO water or bottled waters (Evian, Poland Spring, etc.)? I'm sure there's a complicated answer, but if I was going to try with non-tap water and just wanted to buy something without having to treat it, which way do you go?
 

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