Carbon Filtering water

Will filtering tap water through carbon do anything more than remove chlorine/chloromine? I have a water report and want to use the Primer in the Brew Science section, but will filtering change any of the other numbers such that I don't need to dilute as much?

An activated carbon filter does not alter the concentration of ions of interest to brewing. The water report concentrations will be maintained.

Be sure to restrict the flow through the typical 10" water filter to less than gal/min in order to strip all chlorine or chloramine. To find out more about brewing water, download and read Bru'n Water.

Enjoy!

Carbon filters pretty much wipe out the minerals too.
If you have chlorimine you need to get campden tablets.

Carbon filters pretty much wipe out the minerals too.

Click to expand...

So they do the same as distilled/RO?

No, activated carbon filters don't wipe out the minerals we are interested in.. but they are effective in removing bad tastes from the water.. read chlorine, etc.

Read THIS for some good info.

Yeah, my bad on the mineral filtering with carbon, i have a kdf shower filter which filters cholorine and other things like minerals and stuff.

There are filters that include an ion-exchange section that do remove hardness minerals like calcium, magnesium, and iron. But these are rare and they are not really desirable for brewing since Ca and Mg are wanted in brewing water. Stick with filters that contain only activated carbon and pass water through them at low flow rates to improve the removal of taste and aroma components from the water including chlorine and chloramine.

I used to BRITA filter my brewing water. It removes chlorine and I had previsouly thought it removed chloramine. But after reading more, it seems that it probably does remove some chloramine but certainly not all of it. Apparently, the contact time with the activated charcoal in a BRITA filter is not long enough to remove all the chloramine.

And BRITA does remove some mineral content and it does affect pH. This is a good link for that:

Brita Filter for Homebrewing

The bottom line is that you need to check on the info provided by the manufacturer with regard to mineral removal, affect on pH and removal of chlorine/chloramine.

Thanks for posting to the study on Brita filters' impact on water for brewing. It was very useful.