Apologies. Perhaps better stated, use campden in the water preparation. Filter if you you feel the water tastes better. Aj has a paper on his site about Chlorine and Chloramine treatments (
http://www.wetnewf.org/pdfs/Brewing_articles/BT_Chlorine.pdf). Filtering and campden (see the sticky) are what I have found to be most effective. I understand that chlorophenols are formed in the mash when hypochlorite (chlorine treatment byproduct) interacts with organic compounds - which survives boil and fermentation through to the finished beer.
I am on a rural water supply - and I carbon filter all of our drinking water which dramatically improves it's flavor. It is not necessary from a safety perspective, but it does remove much of the chlorine, but also other occasional smells and flavors, and judging from the filter replacement cycles, a good deal of sediment. I don't want any of that in my beer. I use campden as a preventative because it seems that some chlorine makes it past my filter, probably when I filter with too high a flow rate. My beers made an immediate improvement when I carbon filtered my water. I also had a couple odd batches with chlorophenol off tastes (despite filtering). Then I used campden as a second step resulting in another large improvement. Then, because I had so many pH issues in the mash - I got the Ward Report (high sodium and alkalinity) and switched to R/O water. R/O gives me a consistent basis to build water to suite any beer style. I hesitate to recommend it because of the relatively high costs and maintenance requirements when there are cheaper solutions and tap water is ok for brewing. But I am very happy with my decision. If considering R/O, re-brew one of your common recipes with store bought R/O or distilled, add salts to match the recipe, and compare.
As per your later example, yes. It is possible that you would get a report that represents the minimal characteristics of your water supply, however, it is very important that the anion/ion ratio balance, otherwise, any spreadsheet/program will provide garbage results. You can take a few steps to track and understand the consistency of your water supply - to your tap. A pH meter and a TDS meter, can provide statistical information about your water. Using both and logging results from the source water on your brewday will help you to compare to a Ward Report (or data from your water utility) and determine if the results are too far off your baseline to be useful. I do this behind my R/O system to determine the status of the filters, and now do it at our tap as we have had some very wild swings lately in water quality. It is a useful tool in communicating to a water engineer that there maybe an issue. To be clear, you will get very little diagnostic information,
rather data that says something has changed, and perhaps a correlation (as Martin suggests) with a specific season or activity, and then can take appropriate steps (delay brewing or use store bought filtered water). I am also very OCD about my brewing... so this might seem overkill to you.
I should add, homebrewers brew with inconsistent water sources all the time, with award winning results. I know there is a large brewing community in Cincinnati - and consultation with other local homebrewers may may be more helpful. Taken on face value - I suspect your water is ok for brewing with a chlorine treatment. You would have to accept some variability on occasion that
may show up in your finished beer.
- jbaysurfer - thanks for the kind words. Martin should also get a lot of credit - he did some serious editing, and I learned a lot in the process.