Interpreting Water Report

ajdelange said:

If I add 0.08 mmol ( 3.17 mg) of lye to a liter of DI water the pH will be 9.9 but the alkaliniity 0.08 mEq/L (4 ppm as CaCO3). So you can set the pH pretty much anywhere you like without much effect on the alkalinity until the pH gets bigger than about 10. At pH 10 the alkalinity would have to be at least 5, at pH 10.3 it is at least 10 but at pH 11 it would be at least 50. So the thing with this water is that it doesn't contain much bicarbonate (about 21 mg/L). What does he have to offset all that hardness (and sodium)? Sulfate. Thus most of his hardness is permanent hardness and he won't be able to remove it by the usual techniques of boiling or lime addition.

But then hardness isn't really that much of a problem unless it is temporary hardness as that means alkalinity and it is alkalinity that we are really after when we use lime softening. A better term for brewers is decarbonation.

The report itself shows an alkalinity range of 20 - 65 with the average being 33. We usually say that 50 is about the upper limit of where we want alkalinity to be. Clearly OP will be OK most of the time but occasionally he will go over a bit and mash pH will be a bit high so it should be checked.

The real problem I see here is sulfate which may be a problem for some beers but if brewing is limited to styles that benefit from high sulfate and sufate is to OP's taste he should be fine.

The sodium is quite high but shouldn't be that much of a problem though some would probably advocate a 1:1 cut with RO water. That would get rid of any potential alkalinity problem, solve the sodium problem and mitigate the sulfate problem.

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