Tap or Spring?

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Connman

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I have always used distilled or spring water to brew my beer. Anyone using tap water? What are advantages/disadvantages you have found? Chlorine, PH etc...

Do you think i'm wasting money buying water for my gold?

I prefer to do a full boil because it seems like the beer is missing something when i use 3.5 gallons. Is this my imagination. Most kits recommend something like 3.5 gallon boil and adding the rest after chilling the wort. -Cheers
 
Bottled water has fewer guidelines to follow than municpalities so as far as drinking tap is safer but if you boil then you pretty much kill everything in the water so as far as bacteria goes either is fine but I have always heard that if you like the taste of your tap water then you will like it in your beer
 
Depends on your tap water, but packman's advice about liking to drink it is a good guideline. In NYC, I use the tap water. In my other hometown where we're on a nasty well, I buy bottled water.

Seems like full vs. partial boil is a popular theme this week. I think there are at least three or four other threads, so I'm not going to repeat everything here. The short answer, though, is that you should do what your recipe tells you, because the recipe designers made their calculations about hops and color assuming that you'd follow their instructions.
 
Thanks for the feedback. I will have to search those related threads. Makes sense about following the kit instructions.
 
I have used straight tap water, filtered tap water, well water and spring water. It seems that the more I move to the right in my first sentence the better my beers get! Of course, maybe I'm getting more careful and smarter as I go. Ok, so it's more the former than the latter!!

B
 
It all depends on your tap water. Mine started smelling like bleach about a month ago and I switched to bottled water. I know I can boil to get the chlorine out but the sudden shift bothered me.
 
It's possible that the bleach/chlorine smell is due to the increased amount of salt used on roadways. I use tap water for my brews and have been fine. When I can, I will fill my kettle 24 hrs in advance and give it a vigorous stirring to help get rid of chlorine.
 
FWIW, I'm a newbie, and the way I look at it is that by using spring water instead of tap water, I'm eliminating a variable as I try a few different recipes to learn about how the different extracts and different hops produce different flavors.

Using store brand spring water bought in 2.5 gallon containers costs me about $5 per 5 gallon batch, so I consider that a negligible expense....

Hope this helps you....... :mug:
 
I had my tap water tested by Ward Labs. It's cheap and fast.

Turns out I have fantastic tap water for brewing. I fill my HLT right from the hose :) And I think I make some mighty fine brews, if I do say so myself.

-Joe
 
I think the major advantage to using tap water is the O2 content. The aerator on the tap is a handy tool IMO.
 
This confused me as well. Unless you are using the tap water for top-up water?

Precisely. I only do a partial boil, and add tap water to bring the volume up. I don't have to worry about flat bottled water, and have never had an issue with infection.
 
Precisely. I only do a partial boil, and add tap water to bring the volume up. I don't have to worry about flat bottled water, and have never had an issue with infection.

Ah, gotcha. But that depends on your water supply. I live half the time in New York City (where I don't bother to boil tap water) and half the time in Kathmandu (where the water has cholera in it). Not that most water supplies are that bad, but I've definitely lived in places in the US too where I wouldn't assume the water to be usable without boiling.
 
It all depends on your tap water.

This. I can't stand my tap water (won't drink it without putting it through a Brita filter since it smells like a swimming pool). Rather than filtering 6 gallons of tap water, I find it easier to spend 5 bucks on spring water at the grocery store.
 
My beer was extremely astringent until I switched to spring water. 5 dollars a batch is well worth it.
 
If you can drink and like your tap water it is more than fine.

I prefer to use gallon jugs of spring water for a number of reasons including those posted.

Distilled water is not a good choice as it has absolutely no minerals in it and is, therefore, essentially tasteless. Water being 90+ percent (or more, guessing) of your brew, distilled water would cause a significant loss of taste, body, etc. I believe I've read this somewhere.

You'd not want this for an IPA for instance, unless you are doing your own water chemistry. Using distilled, you can start from scratch and add in specific amounts of minerals to match the water qualities of specific regions. The Burton on Trent area (Bass, etc.) has a high mineral content and thus, Burton Salts can be added.

Just an opinion.

EDIT: I am curious to hear how Connman's distilled water brews came out.
 
Distilled water is fine unless you are doing all grain. I do see your point about hop utilization but you can always alter distilled water to your liking with salts.
 
It's awesome to hear everyones opinions, theory and facts:)
You know us California people drink bottled water:) I actually filter all my water before drinking it. My coconut porter was pretty dam good and never had a bad batch yet!

My next batch is an IPA so i might try using tap or spring water as woodstone suggests. My porter was great but tasted a tad thin. I followed the directions to the Tee, maybe it was due to topping off the wort with the 1.5 gallons? Maybe it was the distilled water?
 
Bottled when I'm in the city (current location). When I lived on well water, I used that. Last year I used city water from the tap and all my beers were poor. Not entirely blaming the water, but it couldn't have helped. Kyle
 
Okay, so i brewed my IPA on Sunday, It is bubbling away like crazy this morning. Anyway. i used tap water and filtered tap water for topping off. I was a lil hesitant at first. I will let you all know how it turned out in a Month or so.
-Cheers Mate!
 
Yeah, this one did not turn out so well. I am convinced it was the tap water since it was the only thing i did differently. I am getting ready to secondary my Black IPA as well as my IPA. I used spring water this time. Ill let you know in a few weeks!:mug:
 
We have good tap water here and its produced nothing but good beer for me, however being ever cautious I've started to treat my water with Campden tablets to force off free Chlorine and more importantly, Chloramine.
 
I had been brewing in Philly for about a year and a half, and always used the tap water because I think it tastes fine. I had a flavor in the finish of every brew that bothered me; I can't describe it and nobody else seems to be able to notice it. I don't detect it in the tap water, not even when I heat it for tea. Then I noticed that same aftertaste in some of the brews from the local breweries and knew I was on to something. I tried using distilled water for an extract-only brew (knowing that all of the minerals I need for proper body and flavor remain in the malt extract after the water has been driven off) and the offending flavor is gone! I still use 1:1 tap water and distilled with a couple of salt additions for mashes, but now when I do an extract-only or extract+steeping brew I use distilled only. It made all the difference!

Of course now I can't drink the local breweries' products with as much enjoyment as I do my own.
 
Sounds Like alot of you guys are really lucky .....my tap water has 2 flavors, Chlorine and Pond Water ...so I have always brewed with spring water, and its worth the 4-5 bucks
 
Has anyone used RO water? I have brewed 2 beers so far one with Tap water and the other with RO, I have not tried these yet one was bottled over the weekend and the other is in primary. It will be a few weeks before I try them.
 
Has anyone used RO water? I have brewed 2 beers so far one with Tap water and the other with RO, I have not tried these yet one was bottled over the weekend and the other is in primary. It will be a few weeks before I try them.
I'm in the exact same boat as you. RO water brew (an IPA) is currently bottled. Tap water (a wheat bear) is bubbling away.
 
I used tap water in my OS lager brew from cooper's. It turned out good,but way down in the back of the taste was a quinine-like flavor. Just a little. Then,on the next batch,I used store brand spring water from here in Ohio,& it's gone. I think the beer tastes better too. Better qualities of malt/hop flavors without the chlorine/chloromine thing tainting it. We get lake water here,which at times tastes like flat alkaseltzer. So the extra few bucks for spring water top off is worth it to me.
 
In my last few batches, I've started using water from kiosks they have throughout Tucson. It tastes much better than my tap water, but the more I've been reading about wter chemistry, the more I'm wondering how the processing is affecting mineral content important for brewing. I've asked them if they have a chemistry report they could furnish, or at least give me estimates. I'm wondering if I should get in the practice of always adding some gypsum or something to the water I get there.

Does anyone have any experience with this (i.e. buy water like this and then just add a standard addition of minerals to get good brewing water)?
 
In my last few batches, I've started using water from kiosks they have throughout Tucson. It tastes much better than my tap water, but the more I've been reading about wter chemistry, the more I'm wondering how the processing is affecting mineral content important for brewing. I've asked them if they have a chemistry report they could furnish, or at least give me estimates. I'm wondering if I should get in the practice of always adding some gypsum or something to the water I get there.

Does anyone have any experience with this (i.e. buy water like this and then just add a standard addition of minerals to get good brewing water)?

I took a look at the link for the water kiosks, and it would seem that part of their process (step 5) is reverse osmosis, which i believe means that that water will have almost zero mineral content
 
If any of you do all grain or begin doing all grain you will have to look at the mineral content of your water (specifically PH levels). If you do extract then by all means buy distilled or RO. There are many threads around here about using distilled, RO, spring or tap water. The first step always is to get your tap water tested.
 
I agree that it really depends on YOUR tap water. There is no right or wrong answer. It's like asking if you should bring an unmbrella to work today....depends on the weather where you work!

My tap water is extremely hard (23 grains, practically crunchy). I buy 5 gallon jugs of RO/DI water at a local pet store for $3.25 a jug. Through experimentation I've found the best mix of RO/DI and filtered tap water for each style. For example, for IPA's I do 50/50. For Lagers or Pilsners I do 90/10. For pale ales and wheats 75/25 (RO/DI to tap ratio) etc. etc. I played around with measuring water chemistry at the different mixes and fine tuned through experimenting and now, without a lot of fuss, I get a pretty good water profile for each style. I also use PH5.2 in my mash so I'm probably not optimizing my mash PH but my beers turn out well so I'm sticking with what works.

I do all grain. Haven't tried this method with extract or partial boils.
 
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