Water ??

New brewer here and just a quick question about water I haven't seen or read anywhere what time of water to use for brewing using tap water doesn't seem right to me. Should I use distilled water ? Or spring ? Thank you in advance for any advise

Some have a filter rigged to their faucet for getting good brewing water. You can also use distilled or RO water as well. After trying tap,distilled,& store spring water,I started going to Artisian Springs for their water at 25c per gallon. 7 gallons of local spring water for $1.75 is still dirt cheap & works great for my PB/PM BIAB beers.

For extract brewing I recomemnd using distilled water. Malt extract already has the salts disolved in it. (Details on how much salt is in extract and how to work with it is in my book)

For All Grain tap might be fine. If you get a water report from the city or have it tested you can find out if it will be suitable for brewing.

It depends on how complicated you want your brewing to be. Generally, if your tap water is good enough to drink, it is good enough to brew with.

You want to be sure to remove any chlorine or chloramines, by letting the water sit out overnight (or boiling) or dosing with campden tabs, respectively. If you use distilled water, you will need to add some minerals, check out the brewing water primer in the brew science forum for a ton of mostly useful info.

Spring water is useful. You can usually find the mineral content of most commercial spring water online. It is very common to dilute tap or spring water with distilled water in order to reduce some mineral properties of the water for desired styles.

Adjusting your brewing water takes a fair amount of research, usually a commercial water analysis (wardlab.com), minerals from your LHBS, a fancy spreadsheet like bru'n water or brewers friend, some trial and error, and a lot of time.

There are loads of very knowledgeable people on here, so ask away.

Also, the Kaiser and Woodland have excellent websites to check out.

I got to where I stopped using tap water because of the varying amount of chlorine in it during different parts of the year. Lots of amoebas in it too. And spring water,not be confused with well or ground water,is very clean. no mineraly tastes like with well water. Very clean tasting stuff,since it comes from pockets in the bedrock like oil & gas. What little minerals are in it seem to be loved by the yeasties & makes good tasting beer. A tad better than the Lake Erie tap water around here. So I think spring,distilled or RO for any kind of grain brewing.

WoodlandBrew said:

For extract brewing I recomemnd using distilled water. Malt extract already has the salts disolved in it. (Details on how much salt is in extract and how to work with it is in my book)

For All Grain tap might be fine. If you get a water report from the city or have it tested you can find out if it will be suitable for brewing.

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Good idea on the distilled water and extract ! I'm gonna try that with my Pumpkin Ale I ordered from Midwest last week, should arrive before Saturday I hope.

For anyone in the Cleveland area,here's the White House Artisian Springs company water info; http://whitehousesprings.com/OurWater.php
So water marketed as "artisian in nature" comes from underground rock formations. They also describe their treatment of it.

My favorite water source is reverse osmosis water. It's generally in those big "water machines" at the grocery store and in places like Wal-Mart. It's relatively cheap (I paid $1.78 for 4 gallons) and RO water is perfect for all types of brewing!

Thanks all for the responses