Do you worry about your water profile?

I'm curious...

I know that alot depends on your brewing water's mineral profile. ProMash has a whole section dedicated to calculating your own water's profile, and how to amend it to clone, say, water from Burton-on-Trent. I've never done any of this...I mostly use bottled spring water from the grocery store, mixed with filtered tap water from my fridge dispenser.

So, how much attention have you paid to your brew-water profile?

I always pay attention to PH and since I have fairly hard water I do some simple adjusting for some beers, sometimes. Other then that I don't worry. But I do recommend paying attention to PH if you are an all-grainer.

So far I have only added gypsum. The next peice of equipment for my setup will be an activated charcoal water filter, to remove chlorine. Other than that, I'm not going to go too crazy with water profiles. I may also give that pH5.2 stabilizer a shot, but I'm not really worried.

I've fooled with my water because I noticed my stouts were really getting a nasty acrid bitterness that I couldn't figure out. After that I did a bunch of research on getting PH right and how to correct different aspects of water.

A PH monitor is a great tool--but more than likely you'll only need it a few times, once to measure for lighter beers and once to measure for dark beers, and after that you should be able to have your salts and your water profile dialed in.

I used some bottled water when i started since I was doing extract and they were easy to get cold in the freezer. When i went to all grain i started to use tap water and had no real problems. The water in san diego seems to be pretty good. my last batch i got lazy, and didn't want to carry the 13 gallons of water from the kitchen to the deck, so it came straight from the hose. I assume it will still be fine, it all got boiled.

I always treat my water, but that is only because I have very soft water and brew hoppy pale ales that like calcium and sulphates. A bit of gypsum and epsom salts is cheap and easy, so I don't have to worry about it.

-a.

Hermish, my first batch I asked about the S.D. water at the HBS. They said it's great for English browns. Perfect answer for me, I was hooked on Newcastles then. But after drinking my own Brown Rye, that commercial stuff is pretty thin.

Lately, I've added a charcoal filter. But I think my biggest improvement was to replace my home made stainless false bottom with braid- wrong metalurgy made an iron-y taste in several batchs.

I use bottled water from the store that is not distilled, usually it just says "purified water" but the water in san diego is generally hard and I've preduced excellent brews with it every time. The purified water is usually just filtered municipal water or spring water.