Brew day today! Help with water!

I'm brewing an AG hefeweizen today, but I don't have a water report to help determine brewing salt additions. We have well water where I live.

Should I just run out and grab some R/O water and use that?

I brewed an IPA without any additions and it turned out astringent-tasting.

Thanks!

I would get R/O water just to be safe, seeing as how your are on well water you have no idea what minerals or level of concentration they are at.

Cheers

R/o or distilled water will help. Just be careful to not put too many minerals you can wind up tasting the minerals.

Not intending to hi-jack this thread but I have been questioning something similar to this. I am on well water also so I ended up using 2 gallons of purified water and 3 gallons of spring water for my first batch a week ago. Would I have been better off using all distilled water?

Not necessarily as long as you don't have chloramines in your well water. If you drink it and it tastes like chlorine then you want to avoid using it. If it tastes good out if the faucet then it should be good for brewing.

Another benefit of distilled water is you know your base profile and can make more repeatable beers.

Also well water normally doesn't have chloramines in it.

This advice is for all grains if your using all extract then using only distilled water with no mineral additions is best. The minerals are already in the extract.

Nok said:

Not intending to hi-jack this thread but I have been questioning something similar to this. I am on well water also so I ended up using 2 gallons of purified water and 3 gallons of spring water for my first batch a week ago. Would I have been better off using all distilled water?

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Also it depends on what beer recipe you are brewing, some beers call for hard water, try a search on using hard water in beer making or some search like that.

Cheers

Nok said:

Not intending to hi-jack this thread but I have been questioning something similar to this. I am on well water also so I ended up using 2 gallons of purified water and 3 gallons of spring water for my first batch a week ago. Would I have been better off using all distilled water?

Click to expand...

Ah, so we're in this boat together. I decided to cut the water like you did on brewday.

I don't know if this is something that would interest you, but took cues from several ppl on this site and sent a water report into Ward Labs so that I can more easily determine how to adjust my water for different beer styles. Here's a link: https://producers.wardlab.com/default.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2f

A big thanks to everyone who replied.

cherbhy said:

Ah, so we're in this boat together. I decided to cut the water like you did on brewday.

I don't know if this is something that would interest you, but took cues from several ppl on this site and sent a water report into Ward Labs so that I can more easily determine how to adjust my water for different beer styles. Here's a link: https://producers.wardlab.com/default.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2f

A big thanks to everyone who replied.

Click to expand...

Awesome, thanks!