Using Distilled water

Haven't fully decided if I am going to use tap water or not for my first extract w/speciality grain brews. The tap water tastes good, I drink it from the tap all the time but I haven't had a chance to test for chloride, chlorine etc. levels and would hate for my first brews to taste like medicine so I have contemplated using distilled water.

If I go the distilled water route, what do I need to add to the water to harden it since distilled water is soft water?

Thanks!

Without going too deep into water chemistry, tap water will be fine. If you're worried about chlorine/chloramines, use an activated charcoal inline water filter. I picked mine up at bed bath and beyond for like $16.

If you want to get into water chemistry, here's a place to start.
http://www.winning-homebrew.com/brewing-water.html

I really don't recommend making water profiles from scratch unless you have a good idea what you're doing. I made a few mediocre batches of beer when I first started adjusting my water.

If your tap water tastes good then I doubt it will cause your beer to taste like medicine. My understanding is if you are doing an extract brew than you are fine using distilled water because the extract already contains the minerals that the yeast need. I did my first extract brew with distilled and it is coming along fine.

If you are doing all grain my understanding is you shouldn't use distilled, or at least then you need to add some stuff.

Have you ever baked a cake or cookies and forgot to add salt? It doesn't taste good. The same is true with brewing salts and water ions.

Even though the yeast will be fine with just the minerals from the extract, there are a lot of flavor components in your water that you'll be missing if you use distilled. Unless your water tastes bad and is horribly hard, you'll get better results from an inline filter than going totally distilled.

If you're worried about your water then you can use distilled/spring water with no issues if your brewing with extracts. The minerals in the Maltster's water have been dried and are now part of the extracts. Until you make the jump to All Grain Brewing, there isn't too much to worry about as far as Water Chemistry is concerned.

I used distilled water once because I didn't know what I was doing. The beer came out weird and lifeless. Just really strange.

Especially if you are extract brewing, don't waste money on bottled water unless your tap water tastes horrible. If you are worried about chlorine, boil 6 gals or so of tap water the night before and let it cool. This will dissipate the chlorine. When brewing with extracts you really don't have to worry a lot about water chemistry. I live in an area with extremely alkaline (hard) water. Haven't had any extract brewing problems. Now AG brewing has been another story.

I use bottled Poland Spring water... all grain. 3 to 4 2.5 gallon jugs. My tap water is fine. However, since I changed to bottled (at the request of SWMBO), I find my beer to be cleaner tasting... a very subtle, barely detectable sulfury taste that used to be there is now gone.

are you on a well? Is your water softened? If yes to either question, i'd use bottled spring water and brew something in the 12-15 srm range.

if no, use tap.

JJL said:

Especially if you are extract brewing, don't waste money on bottled water unless your tap water tastes horrible. If you are worried about chlorine, boil 6 gals or so of tap water the night before and let it cool. This will dissipate the chlorine.

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You don't have to boil water to allow chlorine to dissipate, it will do it on its own in 24 hours or less. If your water has chloramines you will need to treat it with campden (1 tablet/20gal) as choloramines will not dissipate. Campden will also handle the chlorine.

From my limited knowledge of chemistry I can tell you this, distilled water won't boil on its own. Sure it'll reach 212F all day but you won't see bubbles. The water has no trace elements that have porous surfaces that allow the bubbles creation...that being said, distilled water is cool-if you kinda know what your doing.

Type in "brewing water calculator" on google and click on the first result. Set all of your original levels to 0 (distilled water has NOTHING in it, purely two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen). Then theres a drop down menu allowing you to select Target Amounts. Pick the one you want for your said style of beer and start changing the salt additions around to make all your numbers turn green. Dont forget before you do any of this...to add up the total amount of water youll be using for the batch (mash, sparge, top off)-this way it can give you proper addition amounts based on the amount of water your using.

I made an IIPA with this and distilled water, it turned out FANTASTIC. You can recreate water styles from the world over. Want to brew a true English pale, this is your tool.

Keep in mind if you take the route listed above, get ready for a trip to the home brew shop for brewing salts.

Here's a link to Oswego's 2012 water report http://www.oswegoil.org/pdf/2012 Water Quality Report.pdf that should give you a rough idea of what's in your water.

plinythebadass said:

From my limited knowledge of chemistry I can tell you this, distilled water won't boil on its own. Sure it'll reach 212F all day but you won't see bubbles. The water has no trace elements that have porous surfaces that allow the bubbles creation...that being said, distilled water is cool-if you kinda know what your doing.

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Chemist here: of course it'll boil. But it's true that you can super-heat absolutely pure water in a smooth container, because there's a lack of nucleation sites for bubbles to form. That's why labs use boiling chips (little pieces of pumice stone) to introduce places for bubbles to start. A quick scrape on the bottom of a pot with a metal spoon or leaving a wooden spoon in the pot will do the same trick.