First Brew - Water Question

Anxiously awaiting the arrival of my Northern Brewer small batch kit and hoping to brew my first batch this weekend or so. I have a red ale and a pale ale coming also.

We live in the country with very hard well water from about 130' deep. There is a lot of iron so we have a whole house iron filter as well as a water softener. The water is safe for drinking and tastes ok, but we drink bottled as the wife doesn't like the well water.

For my small one gallon batches should I just buy gallon jugs of drinking water? What would be best between distiller, spring, purified, or my well? I can take water from well prior to softener and filtration also.

Thanks in advance.

 

Water softeners add a lot of sodium. And if it doesn't filter most or all of the iron, you'll get metallic-tasting beer. Get bottled water. I assume you're doing extract brewing? If so, you don't need to worry as much about water additions, as extract contains most of the minerals needed.

 

If you have an opportunity, I might suggest brewing the same kit twice, preferably at the same time, once with bottled water and once with the filtered / softened house water. Compare the two and see if you can taste a difference.
At that point you will be able to see what your best option is going forward.

 

The beer kits I have coming are extracts, yes. Just bottled drinking water like Nestle Pure Life or something similar then?

I think later on it'd be worth trying my well water in the small batches after I move on to 5 gallon batches of something I like. I will have the one gallon car boys for test runs and recipe tweaking.

 

Sure. Since you're doing extract, you could even use RO or distilled.

 

If you're going to use RO or distilled water, make sure you're also using some yeast nutrient to make sure that the yeast are getting everything they need.

I would absolutely not use softened water, since it strips out the good (calcium) and adds in some good-in-small-amounts-but-otherwise-bad (sodium).

If you want to use the straight well water, is it HARD or is it ALKALINE? For extract brewing, it's not that important, but for all-grain brewing that'll be a big factor. They kind of get used interchangeably when they're different, and it's often both. Hard water is easier to work with than alkaline water. If it's highly alkaline, you'll probably only be able to use it for dark beers without going through some steps (stripping out the carbonate or adding a bunch of acid to bring down the ph)

 

I would use some store-bought spring water. If your tap water doesn't taste good, for whatever reason, I would't use it. Spring water still has minerals in it so you don't have to worry much, if at all, about adding anything back in. Since these are extract kits there is really very little to worry about in terms of water except for the way it tastes.