Water sanitation

Do you think it's necessary to boil water before adding it to your wort to cool? I have a filter that works through my fridge and that's what I've been using for water. I boiled it all for my first brew but I see a lot of people just use bottled or filtered (or even tap) water and chill it ahead of time without boiling it.

Generally pretty safe?

Before I startd doing full boils, I would add bottled spring water. I wouldnt trust unboiled tap water, although there are plenty of people around here that do and have no reported problems.

- magno

Personally, I'd boil anything that was going into the beer, unless it was some fermentable that had been pasteurized like apple juice or something. I always used to boil top-off water.

Sanitary is what sanitary is: no significant amounts of anything dangerous.

If your tap water is safe to put in your mouth and into the mouths of your children (or the children of people you care about) then it is safe for your beer. There are other reasons to shift to boiling water-- like off flavors from mineral content or chorination-- but if you're not afraid of getting sick off your water then your beer isn't afraid of it either.

I have always freely used my unfiltered tap water when I needed top-off water. No worries.

If you're using boiled water, it will be devoid of oxygen and you may need to address this with some aeration technique to give the yeast the oxygen they will need in the wort.