Water adjustment - Austin, TX water chloramines pale ale

Brewing an IIPA tomorrow. Gonna try tweaking my water for the first time. Actually, what I am most interested in is driving off the chloramines. The local water is heavy with this stuff and I want to see if we can clean up the taste of my brews a little bit. Sorry if this is mundane, but just wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing anything here.

Basic recipe:
IIPA, SRM 5.6, OG 1.082, IBU 90.7, 11.5 gallons of water, 8.5 gallons preboil, 6.5 gallons post boil

Austin water report: Q4 2009

I entered these data in the EZ water spreadsheet, and played around with additions of gypsum.





So, my workflow for brew day will be:

1. Draw up 11.5 gallons tap water into holding tank.
2. Crush 1/2 campden tablet. Mix.
3. Heat strike water, add 5g gypsum. Mash-in.
4. Add 5g gypsum to boil.


Am I missing anything else here? Seems pretty straightforward.

One question: I'd like to load the full 11.5 gallons into my HLT and just treat the water there. Is there a good reason not to just add the entire 10g of gypsum to the HLT and strike/sparge out of there. Is it absolutely to add the boil addition only during the boil? Thanks.

Look who's number 2:

http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/14/water-cities-drinking-forbeslife-cx_avd_0414health_slide_10.html

So you only want to add gypsum?

Here's the water profile i use for IIPA. The Burton profile is a little extreme, altough I see you're not close to their sulfate target.


Ca+2 Mg+2 Na+1 Cl-1 SO4-2
110 118 17 50 350

If you're going with what you have listed; Add the 5 grams of gypusm AFTER you mash in. Then sparge without any addition. Then add the 5.1 g into the boil kettle. Most brewing salts won't dissolve in water alone.

I use a very similar water profile for my IIPA and it works great.

You are spot on with the Campden tabs. Works like a champ. Our water up here in P-ville is worse than yours when it comes to chloramine. Smells like a friggin swimming pool.

My neighborhood, Southern California, uses lots of chloramines in their water too. I use aquarium dechlorinator in my brews, to great success. It's less than $2 ordered online and a bottle treats about 1000 gallons of tap water.
Weco Dechlor is the brand, you'll want to use something similar, that is principally sodium thiosulfate and free of other additives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_thiosulfate