Water Report Help Please

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JrZyBud

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Williamstown, NJ
Hey guys, I just recently went and picked up a water report at my local utilities building and wouldn't you know that it had absolutely no information that could help me. I checked online and found this report, but after looking at it, I really don't see anything that relates to brewing? Where do I get the information that I need and does anyone see anything in here that can help me. I've been trying to add my information to BeerTools Pro. Thanks!

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I had to email the water dept with specific requests such as calcium and bicarbonate after getting the same type of report as yours. then ended up finding out they draw water from two different sources at any given time and mix from the two sources indiscriminately. Therefore the readings could be very different at any time. The only thing they tracked was each well and if they were both ok then mixing commenced based on each wells available output at the time.
 
My township draws from about 7 or 8 different wells from what I've read.
Sounds like Im going to have a really hard time pinning this down. Is it better
to use bottled water then if I want to mimic a certain style of water? It seems
like all of my beers have a certain taste to them and the only constant is the
water. I was hoping with a water report I could fix it.
 
Municipal water reports usually tell the homebrewer nothing in the way of useful information. The levels that they show have to do with the safety of the drinking water, but not the ion concentrations that we are interested in.

Contact Ward Labs and spend the $16.50 for the W-6 Household Mineral Test, or the W-5 test for $10 more if you have concerns about iron and fluoride. This will tell you everything that you need to know about what's in your water.

As far as the multiple municipal water sources are concerned, what I did, knowing that my municipality draws from 3 different sources throughout the year, was to send 4 quarterly samples to Ward Labs to see if there was any appreciable difference depending on the time of year and the source they were drawing from. There was virtually no difference in the 4 samples, so I'm fairly confident with the numbers that I have now. I still send one sample a year to Ward just for piece of mind.
 
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