Soft water issue?

Using filtered tap water, but have a water softener. I read that soft water is bad for brewing. Is there anything I can add to brew water?

before you start adding anything to your water you need to know whats already in your water. get a water test kit and see whats in there. only then can you make any decisions on what and how much to add to your water to correct its softness.

Does your water softener use salt? There's no way to get it out. Your best option might be to filter water from an exterior tap. Most of the time, those will not be connected to the softener.

Here's what I did:
1. Sent a sample of softened water to Ward Labs for analysis. Came back high sodium and basically no other minerals.
2. Sent a sample of water with the bypass pushed in on the softener, Came back with a much richer mineral bill, though iron is high.

I now brew with the hard water exclusively, and it's worlds better. I used to have an acidy, weird aftertaste with the softened water. I guess I could analyze it even further and add distilled to cu some of the iron, but I'm not at that point yet.

Turn on the bypass and run the faucet for a while to clear out the softened water and brew with the hard water. I plan to plumb a pipe over to the brew-rig from before the water softener so that I can have hard water that also goes through a carbon filter.