Adding Tap water Straight to Wort

I'm using extract at the moment, and what I currently do is bring half the water to the boil to kill germs, and leave it to cool, while I boil the extract in the other half of the water.

However I've heard other people here say that rather than adding boiled and cooled down water to the wort, they top up straight from the tap. Waiting for the water to boil and then cool, takes ages. Doing this would speed up the brewing process enormously.
Is there much risk of infection from clean tap water?

I personally think it's fine to use tap water. I always did, for all of my brewing and for my wines.

If you have very good dependable tap water, it would be ok. If you have heavy chlorinated water, or chloramines in your water, you may want to boil it or use bottled water.

When I did extracts, I always topped up with cold tap water.

I've used it for quite awhile, with no problems.

I used filtered tap water because ALL of our water comes in soft and . . smelly!! But basically it's the same stuff.

I put 3 gallons into a refrig at 40 degrees and it will cool the wort down from 110 to 65.

I've never heard of a problem adding extra cold water to hot (110 degree) wort.

I use filtered tap water and have yet to have a problem with it.

I'm currently using 16# of Ice to ~3 gallons of wort. This crashes the temp nicely.

Stir it with a clean spoon to dissolve the ice, and pitch the yeast.

If re-using the yeast cake, I add the ice right before I pitch the wort in so i don't hurt the yeast. My fermentations have been taking off like crazy in 5-6 hours.

I thought I read somewhere that using ice directly in the wort was bad. I forget if this was a problem because of the sanitary concerns (who knows where the ice has been?) or if it was a question of actually hurting the wort with the cold shock.

By the way, I've been using tap water to top of my partial boils, and it seems to work fine. My tap water is ok around here, and as a bonus it seems to aerate the wort nicely when I use the sink sprayer to top off the fermenter to 5 gal.

I top off straight from the tap and have had no problems, but I do let it run for a minute before hand.

I would make sure it's filtered. Chlorine and Chloramines can lead to some nasty phenolics.

PseudoChef said:

I would make sure it's filtered. Chlorine and Chloramines can lead to some nasty phenolics.

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+1. It took me the longest time to figure out this was the cause of my off flavors.

Straight tap water should be fine. The only contamination risk I have heard of for municipal water is from mold since mold spores can survive in the treated water. Even if you get a mold infection, it won't ruin the beer, so I say RDWHAHB and do whatever is easiest.