I have been lurking here for a while, and brewing beer for about the last 10 years with decent results. I want to take it a little more seriously, and have narrowed many of my issues down to initial water quality. I live in Colorado, where the water is great, but tends to be high in minerals and in my local area tends to have quite a bit of chlorine. Never really done anything special with the water, but I have noticed a better taste when I use purified water from the store.
Also my wife has been demanding that I make a fruit beer for her. I have not had good luck with fruit beer in the past due to it being cloudy or having a sour bitter flavor that ruined the batch (might have transferred too much trying to clear up the beer and oxidized it). I want to give it another try and brew a peach cream ale with some local palisade peaches.
I bought a standard three piece 10" filter setup that I plan to use to filter my own water for the batch. The rig is basically three separate filter units, and I think that I am going to break it into two. So one of the setups will have an activated charcoal and a 1 micron filter, and that will be used to filter the water used for brewing. The second will just have a single filter unit with ball locks and will be used to transfer between kegs as described below.
So my plan is to brew a standard cream ale and wait until the primary is done. Then I will blend, boil and strain the peaches down to a syrup. There will be some small pulp in there, but hopefully not any big chunks. When the secondary is finished, even if it is still a little cloudy, I will transfer it to a keg. Then I will push it through a filter into a second keg to finish transfer and filter out any suspended junk.
Here are my questions:
1) Does my water filtering strategy sound good, and like it will be enough to clean up the water?
2) Does my plan for the peaches sound like it will provide a good fresh peach flavor to the beer?
3) What size filter should I use for filtering the beer to maintain body and flavor, but reduce cloudiness?
Also my wife has been demanding that I make a fruit beer for her. I have not had good luck with fruit beer in the past due to it being cloudy or having a sour bitter flavor that ruined the batch (might have transferred too much trying to clear up the beer and oxidized it). I want to give it another try and brew a peach cream ale with some local palisade peaches.
I bought a standard three piece 10" filter setup that I plan to use to filter my own water for the batch. The rig is basically three separate filter units, and I think that I am going to break it into two. So one of the setups will have an activated charcoal and a 1 micron filter, and that will be used to filter the water used for brewing. The second will just have a single filter unit with ball locks and will be used to transfer between kegs as described below.
So my plan is to brew a standard cream ale and wait until the primary is done. Then I will blend, boil and strain the peaches down to a syrup. There will be some small pulp in there, but hopefully not any big chunks. When the secondary is finished, even if it is still a little cloudy, I will transfer it to a keg. Then I will push it through a filter into a second keg to finish transfer and filter out any suspended junk.
Here are my questions:
1) Does my water filtering strategy sound good, and like it will be enough to clean up the water?
2) Does my plan for the peaches sound like it will provide a good fresh peach flavor to the beer?
3) What size filter should I use for filtering the beer to maintain body and flavor, but reduce cloudiness?