Should I use Campden Tablets for next brew?

I have city water available at my house and we use a brita water filter to drink what is on tap. I can tolerate the tap water without the brita filter (it's not attached faucet it is a pitcher) but it definitely has a slight chlorine smell/taste to it.

I'm doing a partial boil and then will be adding my top off water to bring it up to 5 gallons. My question is for the top off water, should I add 1 campden tablet to the top off water to remove the Chlorine taste? Or should I be adding a tablet pre-boil to partial and then another tablet to top off?

If I understand correctly the boil off removes the need to use a tablet to the pre-boild wort, correct?

1 tablet is way too much campden. 1 tab is for 20 gallons of water. So if you're using fewer than 20 gallons, divide your campden tablet accordingly.

I would treat all of the water, even the water you will boil. IIRC, boiling will drive off some of the chlorine, but not the chloramine your city probably uses to treat your water.

Thanks, I thought maybe 1 was too much as it treats 20 gallons. Even splitting it in half would then in theory be too much. Pretty hard to split a tablet in eights but I suppose if you are crushing it you could divide the power easier. It would be nice if they made smaller portions for just this reason but not a huge hassle overall.

I'm not sure that my city (Wyoming, MI) uses chloramine because it is not listed in their water report. It does however list chlorine so I know that is in the water supply for sure.

Thanks again for the advice.

If it's just chlorine, a simple charcoal filter will do the trick.


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Then the question is how does I filter 5 gallons of water through a charcoal filter? In other words are you talking about having to hook up an in-line filter of some kind to my water source?

I have a brita filter but that's a tiny pitcher, so filling that hundreds of times is out of the question.

We are in the market for a new kitchen faucet but it will likely be the kind with the pull out handle so I don't think the filters hook onto those that I'm aware of.

Any suggestions on that front? Long term I'd imagine a whole house filter would be the way to go. But I'll be brewing tomorrow so short term what is the quickest way I could charcoal filter my brew and top off water?

Thanks guys for all the advice.

I use 1 Campden tablet for my brews, I usually will use about 10 gallons of water for a 5 gal batch, 20 for a 10gal batch, since I do All Grain. I just don't use all of the tablet. I can't imagine that there would be detrimental effects of using the whole thing even in 5 gallon batches. It is Sodium meta-Bisulfate, and since Grand Rapids City water is low in Sodium and Sulfate its not that big of a deal.

Oh, since you'll ask one day, Grand Rapids, MI water Report is:

Ca+2 = 38
Mg+2 = 11.1
HCO3-1 = 126
SO4-2 = 32.35
Na+1 = 8
Cl-1 = 15.66

pH at my house is 7.0

If it's chlorine, set you water up the night before and it will evaporate. If it's chloramines, use the campden tablets.

ok, been reading and searching and still need a little clarification. in the summer my tap water smells like chlorine. last summer it was wicked hot and my brews suffered as a result. i just started doing full boils, can i just drop a crushed campden tablet into my full pot, then proceed to immediately fire up the burner and proceed as usual or do i need to wait? thanks in advance - rb

http://uploading.com/files/12f34d98/Campden%2Bcalculator.xls/
This is a calculator for determining how much Campden to add in chlorine/chlormine removal. It performs a simple calculation for determining the weight of Campden that is necessary as well as the fraction of a tablet that is necessary. I use this to determine for my own brews, though that I'd ought to share it with the community.