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Are you sure it's a diacetyl thing and not DMS from the pilsner?

Why would you want to filter out everything completely down to RO water? You remove all character that lends into your beer. Take out the harmful stuff, minimize the difficult stuff, analyze the rest, and aim for a target. In this age of renaissance brewing and historical efforts it seems...

I used a hand crank grist mill for years until I bought a Cereal Killer mill and put my drill on it. Awesome investment and my efficiency went up considerably.

Huh? So $34 for 2 months of filtered water from your tap, and $3 a month after that isn't worth what people either pay Culligan to deliver in 40lb jugs or you have to drive to pick up in containers? After 2 years it averages to $4.17 a month for all the filtered water you want right out of...

Water is easy and it's not. Building RO water is relatively easy but also easy to end up with mineral water. Conditioning tap water just right is difficult. Calculating residual alkalinity and hitting a target is hard. Residual alkalinity is the difference between decent and great beer.

You can put a relatively inexpensive filter housing under your kitchen sink that uses generic size 10" filter cartridges. $3-20 depending on the cartridge. Maybe $20 for the filter housing. A few $s for 2 fittings and an extra faucet supply hose. Then you can put in a combination 1-5 micron...

Update. I've had this on CO2 for about a week now in the kegerator. It's interesting. I've never had anything like it but it's delicious. It has a hint of diacytal but it compliments the malt flavor. Really clean finish.

Thanks. Yes everything went super for fermentation and into lagering. It was in month 2 of the lagering that the temp went up.

Yeah, I could do that with the keg. Thanks.

Yeah I was kind of thinking that. Or maybe restart the lager process. Just wondering what may have happened with the remaining yeast. It was lagering off the yeast cake.

Well I've been working on my first lager, it's been in the chamber @36 for 2 months now. Or so I thought. I just got back from a 30 day deployment and the compressor died somewhere in there. It's 73 right now. What do you think is up with the beer?

First you gotta deal with the chlorine. You can either run it through a simple carbon filter, or you can boil it. Boiling it also helps to knock out some alkalinity. Then you can experiment with a tsp of gypsum, tsp of calcium chloride, 1/4 tsp of epsom salt, and a 1/8 tsp of canning salt.

What are you going to brew? Light or dark ale? Extract or all grain? There is a lot you can do with the water through boiling and simple salt additions and acids without worrying about another test.

you can get the above results that you need (pH, chlorine, hardness, alkalinity) from a swimming pool test kit.

pretty useless. The pH does tell you that there is a low-moderate level of alkalinity. You need to send off a sample to get a brewing water test done. And you need to call the water company and see if they use chlorine gas or chloramine as the sanitizer. The first is ok with a carbon filter...

Batch sparge sounds low temp. You want to kick it up to stop all enzyme activity. You could do an acid rest around 104 and then just convert at 152.

I spoke with my water company today about chemical additions they use because I recently found out about "chloromine" sanitizers and the added effort to remove them. I wanted to know which chemical they used. But it turns out they also add fluoride (not surprised) and "iron inhibitors". Upon...

So I had a few boll weevils running around in my victory malt and me being sort of cheep and 90 miles away from the closest HBS, I decided to improvise. So I thought, hey, the best way to dispatch the little buggers would be to roast them alive, and then I forgot about the oven. Ended up...