Water treatment question

My tap water is pH 7.4, hardness as CaCO3 is 267 mg/L, nitrate is 18 mg/L, Magnesium is 11 mg/L, Sulphate is 123 mg/L, total chlorine is .66 mg/L

Can anyone please suggest how to treat the water to brew pale bitters?

Is your total hardness 267 mg/L or is that your calcium hardness?

Rancid - total hardness (as calcium) is 107 mg/L

Robcj - the water report says .05 mg/L free chlorine, .66 mg/L total chlorine, and the water has been treated with chloramine. No separate figure for chloride is given.

That water report is insufficient to assess what you should be doing for a pale ale. Sending a sample to Ward is recommended.

As for the sulfate level. It is low for a pale ale, but will work just fine where its at. You can go up to around 350 ppm if your tastes agree, but I find that 300 ppm is as high as you want to go. In any case, you would not want to have your chloride level any higher than 100 ppm with the sulfate this high. For even better results when sulfate is high, you will need the chloride to be at 50 ppm or less.

If you want more guidance, I suggest downloading and reading Bru'n Water.

Enjoy!

I have sent a sample of my water to a UK brewing services company, will share their report with you all as soon as I get it.

Total hardness is the sum of your calcium and magnesium hardness, usually reported as CaCO3 (calcium carbonate). You can take your numbers from your municipal report and plug them into the EZ water calculator (google it) or into the water chemistry app on brewers friend. If you can't get the water profile you need from your tap water you can either dilute with RO or distilled water (as mentioned above) or else use entirely RO water and add the "salts" you need. You should be able to find them at your LHBS. Good luck!

I should have added, with only 11 mg/L of magnesium hardness your calcium hardness is going to account for nearly all of your total hardness so you should be fine if you overlook it.

Still waiting the analysis from the specialists, but water company have now told me chloride is 68 mg/L.

BOBTHEukBREWER said:

Still waiting the analysis from the specialists, but water company have now told me chloride is 68 mg/L.

Click to expand...

I deleted my previous post because it was mostly incorrect.

Your water has an approximate 2:1 sulfate to chloride ratio and I've read that's not a bad ratio for British pale ales, though some people prefer more sulfate and most examples I've seen seem to have much more volume of sulfate (and proportionately more chloride).

thanks, still waiting for the professional analysis and their recommendations...