Water here is pretty good. About a mile away from Lake Michigan. Tap water that I use doesn't have any bad flavors to it.
Session IPA with one type of hops
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Water here is pretty good. About a mile away from Lake Michigan. Tap water that I use doesn't have any bad flavors to it.
Water here is pretty good. About a mile away from Lake Michigan. Tap water that I use doesn't have any bad flavors to it.
Good tasting/smelling tap water doesn't necessarily make great beer. Bad tasting/smelling tap water will make bad beer.
You may want to take a trip over the the brew science forum and read up on water. Hop forward beers are greatly accentuated by the addition of sulfate. Without it they just taste flat. It's kind of like eating food without any salt.
I can say from experience that I've made a lot of good beer with plain filtered tap water. I never made a great beer until i tweaked it though, and didn't make an outstanding beer until i used reverse osmosis water and added the minerals to it.
The tap water here tastes good but it's a nightmare for brewing. Most of the homebrewers just buy bottled water. Someday I'll work on water treatment, but that's a whole big project in itself and I'd rather work on my brewing for now.
That's basically how I feel. I'm sure I could get better tasting beer if I messed with water treatment but for now, I'm not going to worry too much about it. Call me crazy, but I'd rather keep things as simple as possible even if the flavor of my beer suffers a little bit. I'm not trying to impress anyone.
Update on this beer for anyone who is curious about how things are going:
I dumped 2oz. of Centennial into my primary after it had been fermenting for 2 1/2 weeks. Dryhopped for 4 days and bottled after it had been in primary for exactly three weeks.
This was my first time dryhopping, and I didn't take into consideration that I didn't want to get hop pellet bits in the bottles. I thought about cold crashing the glass carboy in my fridge, but I was afraid it would be too heavy for the glass drawers on the bottom of the fridge. On bottling day, I just put my BIAB bag in my bottling bucket to catch as much of the hops as possible.
I set the carboy on a chair to transfer to the bottling bucket and only got three gallons in the bucket. Afterwards I realized that the chair tilted the carboy so the side I was looking at when I was racking looked like a lower level of beer above the yeast cake. If I had been looking at the other side (the side that tilted more towards the ground), I would have ended up with at least another half gallon of beer in the bucket. Oh well.
I used just under 3 oz. of priming sugar for three gallons, and I ended up with 33 bottles when it was all said and done.
So tomorrow will be two weeks since I bottled... I couldn't help myself and drank two of them last night, and it was really good. Could have been a little more carbed, but it's still a bit early, and I was really afraid of having bombs. The malt profile was awesome. The bitterness was great for me. Probably not quite as hoppy as a session IPA should be, but I'm good with that.
So, that's where I'm at. Thanks for all of the pointers and suggestions along the way y'all.
I dumped 2oz. of Centennial into my primary after it had been fermenting for 2 1/2 weeks. Dryhopped for 4 days and bottled after it had been in primary for exactly three weeks.
This was my first time dryhopping, and I didn't take into consideration that I didn't want to get hop pellet bits in the bottles. I thought about cold crashing the glass carboy in my fridge, but I was afraid it would be too heavy for the glass drawers on the bottom of the fridge. On bottling day, I just put my BIAB bag in my bottling bucket to catch as much of the hops as possible.
I set the carboy on a chair to transfer to the bottling bucket and only got three gallons in the bucket. Afterwards I realized that the chair tilted the carboy so the side I was looking at when I was racking looked like a lower level of beer above the yeast cake. If I had been looking at the other side (the side that tilted more towards the ground), I would have ended up with at least another half gallon of beer in the bucket. Oh well.
I used just under 3 oz. of priming sugar for three gallons, and I ended up with 33 bottles when it was all said and done.
So tomorrow will be two weeks since I bottled... I couldn't help myself and drank two of them last night, and it was really good. Could have been a little more carbed, but it's still a bit early, and I was really afraid of having bombs. The malt profile was awesome. The bitterness was great for me. Probably not quite as hoppy as a session IPA should be, but I'm good with that.
So, that's where I'm at. Thanks for all of the pointers and suggestions along the way y'all.
