Brewing with Questionable Water Quality

Hello,

I am living in Guatemala, Central America and getting ready to do a bit of home brewing, I do not trust tap water enough to drink so I will be brewing with bottled water, do you think it is needed to boil the entire amount of bottled water or assume that since it is from a NSF Certified whatever, that is is good enough for brewing. How would potentially bad tap water affect washing and saniation, planning to stick with no rinse cleaners to eliminate a post sanitizing infection.

Thanks!
Thor

I think the bottled water should be OK without boiling. If you use a good amount of healthy yeast they will kill out anything too bad.

I think if the water is clear (no organic material) it is fine for making the no rinse sanitizer. Kind of makes a difference depending on the sanitizer.

My first couple of batches I boiled bottled spring water. My last couple I didn't boil and I haven't had any problems.

Boil/cool the tap water for washing and sanitation. Use bottled water for the beer itself. You shouldn't have to worry about sterilizing the bottled water. Nevertheless, when in doubt, boil.

Good luck.

Great - thanks for the tip, now all I have to do is find something sutiable for using for fermenting, orginally I had planed to just use the empty water bottles but due to size and other issues I have read about here I am off on the hunt for something a bit better...

Thanks again!

Thor

If you can, use glass. It's non-porous and non-permeable. Most regular plastic is oxygen-permeable so it will let oxygen pass through into your beer over time and oxidize it. Plastic fermenters are okay but they just need to be PET food-grade plastic.

Stainless is also a good choice (same reasons as glass) but can be hard to make something work without the right tools and can be expensive, but maybe the value of scrap stainless isn't as high in Guatemala.

In this months BREW YOUR OWN mag. They have an article called 10 keys to great extract beers. Number 4 is use distilled water. They say using any other type of water is adding more salts to your beer. When they make the extract all the salts that were in the original water stay in the extract. So adding more bottled or tap water will add to many salts which in turn will affect the flavor.

kingjam said:

In this months BREW YOUR OWN mag. They have an article called 10 keys to great extract beers. Number 4 is use distilled water. They say using any other type of water is adding more salts to your beer. When they make the extract all the salts that were in the original water stay in the extract. So adding more bottled or tap water will add to many salts which in turn will affect the flavor.

Click to expand...

Hmmm, That something to think abought..:rockin:

i'm assuming minerals in water from a natural spring would affect the flavour as well...but might i ask how? there is a natural spring near me and i'm considering using it...but it does contain a fair amount of minerals...

in guatamala people tend to boil their water anyways...why not just boil the tap water and save on buying bottled spring water (which isn't much different)?

kingjam said:

In this months BREW YOUR OWN mag. They have an article called 10 keys to great extract beers. Number 4 is use distilled water. They say using any other type of water is adding more salts to your beer. When they make the extract all the salts that were in the original water stay in the extract. So adding more bottled or tap water will add to many salts which in turn will affect the flavor.

Click to expand...

Someone brought that up to me years ago, and it's true. Chances are, it won't mess up your beer too much, but I've used distilled water for my extract brews ever since.


TL

You are saying using normal water will not mess your beer up? I have used Alabama spring water for the last 4 batches all were pretty good. Next week iam going to go with the distilled water