Help with Water Report

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Flaviking

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Hey Guys,

Sorry for yet another water report thread, Ive been trying to go through all of them and see if anything is comparable to mine and it's just making my head spin.

Im hoping someone could give me some direction in what I would need to do (If anything) to reach the desired Mash PH.

I called my local water department and they gave me this over the phone:

PH: 9.0
P- Alkalinity: 4ppm
M- lakalinity: 48ppm
Total Hardness: 56ppm
Calcium Hardness: 46ppm OR 18.4mg/L
Magnisium hardness: 10ppm OR 2.43mg/L
total Chlorine: 3.65ppm
Free Chlorine: .19ppm
Sodium: 28.6 mg/L
Chloride: 44.1 mg/L
Sulfate: 15.2 mg/L

I have no idea what any of this means or how it relates to getting my Mash to the proper PH. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks.
 
Not exactly good information, but it appears that the water is nearly soft and nearly low alkalinity. It also appears they use chloramine for disinfection since the total chlorine is high and free chlorine in low.
 
Not exactly good information, but it appears that the water is nearly soft and nearly low alkalinity. It also appears they use chloramine for disinfection since the total chlorine is high and free chlorine in low.

Intresting.. What Info should I be looking for?
 
Boil off the chlorine if you want and otherwise, if you want to get desirable mash pH's just use some darker or roast malts. Theres a ton of info available on HBT for this topic.
 
Pretty nominal water. The only thing at all unusual is that the pH is higher than the recommended level but that will not be a problem for you.

The water is chloraminated and the chloramine should be removed. Boiling will do that but will require hours of boiling and so it is much more practical to simply add a fraction of a Campden tablet. See the Sticky on Campden tablets for details.

The total (M) alkalinity is just below the desired level of 50 so you should be able to brew many beers with this water without doing anything to it besides using a little acidulated malt (sauermalz). See the Water Chemistry Primer in the Stickies for details on that. It would be desirable to get the alkalinity down a bit further. Addition of 1 part of RO water to each part of tap water will do this. Again, see the Primer. Or addition of enough phosphoric acid (available from your LHBS) to reduce the pH to 6.5 as measured by the use of pH test strips (LHBS) will get the alkalinity down to the point where the recommendations of the Primer apply.
 

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