Does anyone else ignore their water?

Williams 728
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jonny24 said:
What kind of effect does water softening salt have? I'm on a well with a water softener, been thinking about using my water instead of buying jugs.
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It replaces most of the calcium, magnesium, and iron(II) cations in the water with sodium. I don't know if its does anything with iron(III) and aluminum.

It doesn't really do anything with anions like sulfate, chloride, carbonate, etc. (I had to look up cation vs anion ;) )

You really don't want to use softened water for brewing unless you just use the softened water as feedstock for a Reverse Osmosis machine.

You should have some faucets plumbed with hard water -- usually the kitchen cold water, and outside spigots.
 
jonny24 said:
What kind of effect does water softening salt have? I'm on a well with a water softener, been thinking about using my water instead of buying jugs.
Click to expand...

Water softeners typically remove most ions with higher levels of sodium ions resulting. Softened water is poorly suited to brewing typically.

RO water is different from softened water.

_______________________

On another point, sorry

As is so often the case in discussion like this, people will espouse the virtues of their water and it tastes good so the beer will be good argument rears it's head.

While water that tastes good may be well-suited to brewing, the argument that water that tastes good will be good for brewing is complete nonsense. Forget that idea. That is not to say of course that if the water tastes good it wont be suited to brewing. There is simply no link.

OTOH if the water tastes bad it is highly likely that any resulting beer made from it will also by bad tasting.

Not caring about water chemistry is fine but best not to introduce oft-touted nonsense to the thread.

Expensive tasty water unsuitable for brewing

san-pellegrino.jpg
 
has anyone actually had there water affect efficiency? I have recently moved, and started up brewing again after 6 months. My process has stayed the same, except i have a new mash tun, and i am using well water. I have been getting poor efficiency. Have done 4 brews so far. I will list eff below as proposed/actual

1065/1052 54%
1080/1070 64%
1079/1060 56%
1056/1052 64%

I have beersmith set to 75% eff, and i used to get around 78-80%

Im pretty sure its not the mash tun. Its built the same exact way my old one was, just wanted a nice, new, clean one. And i grind my grain to almost a powder. The only other thing i can think of is the water. I have yet to test it or anything, and am not putting in any additives. Could it be the water ph?
 
I haven't done anything with my water yet. The next batch I do I'll be running my water through a RV filter and letting it set over night to remove the chlorine then testing and adjusting the PH for the mash.

Note: filter says it will remove chlorine, not sure but will check it out.
 
johnsant said:
I haven't done anything with my water yet. The next batch I do I'll be running my water through a RV filter and letting it set over night to remove the chlorine then testing and adjusting the PH for the mash.

Note: filter says it will remove chlorine, not sure but will check it out.
Click to expand...

The RV filters will not remove chloramines and will only remove chlorine if you use them at a tiny flow-rate. A long exposure time is needed meaning that it should take hours to filter all your brewing water at a trickle. Having it sit out overnight will allow Cl- to boil off which will affect the Cl levels more than the RV carbon filter.

Fortunately there is a way to eliminate both chlorine and chloramines instantly. Cost is about $0.02 for 10 gallons of treated water.

CT-100.jpg
 
z-bob said:
It replaces most of the calcium, magnesium, and iron(II) cations in the water with sodium. I don't know if its does anything with iron(III) and aluminum.

It doesn't really do anything with anions like sulfate, chloride, carbonate, etc. (I had to look up cation vs anion ;) )

You really don't want to use softened water for brewing unless you just use the softened water as feedstock for a Reverse Osmosis machine.

You should have some faucets plumbed with hard water -- usually the kitchen cold water, and outside spigots.
Click to expand...

Gavin C said:
Water softeners typically remove most ions with higher levels of sodium ions resulting. Softened water is poorly suited to brewing typically.

RO water is different from softened water.
Click to expand...

Good to know, thanks guys.

I'll check and see if I have a tap before it. If it tastes good without the softening I'll give the hard water a try. I think it was mostly iron that we got the softener for.
 
I use wards lab report data from a number of other brewers who also use Indianapolis City water. It gets me in the ball park. Close enough without testing each batch of water before I use it.
 
Gavin C said:
As is so often the case in discussion like this, people will espouse the virtues of their water and it tastes good so the beer will be good argument rears it's head.

While water that tastes good may be well-suited to brewing, the argument that water that tastes good will be good for brewing is complete nonsense. Forget that idea. That is not to say of course that if the water tastes good it wont be suited to brewing. There is simply no link.

OTOH if the water tastes bad it is highly likely that any resulting beer made from it will also by bad tasting.

Not caring about water chemistry is fine but best not to introduce oft-touted nonsense to the thread.
Click to expand...

Spot on Gavin...
My tap water runs 350 - 400 ppm alkalinity, is very hard, and tastes absolutely wonderful, but is not at all good for brewing.
My realization of this came at one of my first brews - a 4 SRM maibock that tasted like pond swill. My mash Ph was well over 6.0 but I was new and didn't pay attention to Ph.
Brewers in my water predicament don't have the luxury of developing consistent processes first, then looking at water later, which is so common. We need to dig right in with RO water and Bru'nwater.
 
Unfortunately, I can't ignore my water. It is vary hard, and tends to either bring out tanins in mash or over accentuates the hops.

Now, I use RO water with adjustments.
 
BroomVikin said:
+1! I just get RO water from the "fill-your-own-container" dispenser at the local grocery store. It costs $.39/gallon. I figure it's worth the 3 bucks to not invest in a ph meter, water filter, various and sundry chemicals. And most importantly the chemistry degree it seems you need to understand some of the water threads on here.
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Ah, that finally explains how you guys find it so easy to buy RO water. I've only seen it sold in 4pt bottles here.
 
Got really good tapwater here, but I don't ignore the minerals. I carefully choose my desired profile and measure out each addition on a 0.01 gram resolution digital scale.
Then I just forget to add them. Pretty much every time I do that. Beer turns out good though.
 
I generally just go and fill up some gallon containers for .25 a gallon. I added a little tap to get to desired volume my first beer and added a whole gallon on tap to my third batch this past Monday. Ideally just to be safe I'll probably just keep using purified water but I figure in a pinch it does the job.
 
That's IPA levels of sulfate and a lot of sodium. And high alkalinity. I'd go with RO from the store.
 
I usually use 1/2 campden tablet to get rid of the chloramines, but sometimes I don't, and don't notice the difference... It's cheap insurance, though.

I have tried to get more into water profiles, and I even bought the Water book from the Brewing Elements series, but I found it kind of dry. Guess I'm just not ready to get that in depth yet...
 
The article in the Nov/Dec 2015 issue of Zymurgy was focused on exactly the sentiment posed in the original post for this thread...why mess with water? The article included examples of what happens to your beer when your tap water tastes great, but isn't well suited for brewing. The article also provided some baby steps that brewers could try on their next batch to find out: "Did that make my beer better?". If it did, great. Maybe it will help illustrate that minor adjustments can make a positive change to beer quality and taste.

The thing that daunts a lot of brewers is that water chemistry is a hard thing to understand and they don't want to wrap their mind around that. That's OK! Those baby steps presented in the article were things that could easily be implemented just based on what they perceived in previous batches. They don't have any math harder than multiplying the dose by the number of gallons or liters in their batch. It does not have to be rocket science!

I noted an old brewing myth in one of the posts in this thread: If your water tastes good, you can brew with it. Unfortunately, the water's taste has nothing to do with how well your beer will come out. You'll make beer, but it probably won't be great beer. For some brewers, their water supply may be so bad that their beer won't even be good. If you have been struggling to make a decent batch of beer and you know that your other processes are right, water is the next subject you should tackle.

Water is the largest component in beer. It can easily screw up every other component of your beer. So don't ignore it.
 
Gavin C said:
The RV filters will not remove chloramines and will only remove chlorine if you use them at a tiny flow-rate. A long exposure time is needed meaning that it should take hours to filter all your brewing water at a trickle. Having it sit out overnight will allow Cl- to boil off which will affect the Cl levels more than the RV carbon filter.

Fortunately there is a way to eliminate both chlorine and chloramines instantly. Cost is about $0.02 for 10 gallons of treated water.

CT-100.jpg
Click to expand...

Would using campden tablets help out RO water at all? I have never tested the RO water that I have bought from the grocery store. I doubt that the quality of RO water is consistent at every place it is sold through out the year.
 
Only bought water once and that was my 1st 5 gal batch.
It was a hassle and extra expense so tried our deep well water
and everything came out fine.
After getting some brewing experience/knowledge I examined the detailed lab test
of our well water and determined that the most important aspects of beer brewing water
like minerals, hardness and PH were all close enough for me and never looked back.
 
So to try to keep things as simple as possible for un-informed brewers to start with what 3-4 simple steps could people take assuming that they start with RO water? I am asking about starting with RO water because not everyone will have easy access to a water report. Starting with RO water and using some type of calculation software might be a good starting point for brewers wanting to try to make small changes to their water w/o being intimidated by too much information at once with too much information overload.
 
I started brewing Octoberfests, stouts, IPAs and what not and was ignoring my water and they tasted great. I tried a blonde ale and the resulting taste from the yeast reacting with the chlorine was so bad that I started adding camden which made a night and day difference. My city water has a very high ph and I just bought myself my first ph meter for xmas.
 
A couple bad batches is what prompted me to start caring about water. (It was a stout with a really bad chlorophenol problem and a Biermuncher Centennial Blonde with a far too high mash pH.) I've never looked back.
 
I just filter out the chlorine with a carbon block filter. According to a guy I talked to years ago and goose island, other than all the chlorine they use Chicago water is pretty good for brewing.

This was years ago, so I thought about getting it checked again, but I like my beer and so do others so why change what isn't broken. If it works for you, then brew on.
 
msa8967 said:
So to try to keep things as simple as possible for un-informed brewers to start with what 3-4 simple steps could people take assuming that they start with RO water? I am asking about starting with RO water because not everyone will have easy access to a water report. Starting with RO water and using some type of calculation software might be a good starting point for brewers wanting to try to make small changes to their water w/o being intimidated by too much information at once with too much information overload.
Click to expand...

With RO water, most recipes will call for some amounts of calcium chloride and gypsum at the very minimum.
You can find a few simple "rules of thumb" salts additions in the Brew Science stickies which I find horribly inaccurate and frankly, wonder why they're posted there.
Why not get to the heart of the matter and use accurate additions with Bru'nwater? This tool is quite simple to use with RO water. Pick a profile based on your recipe and make the adjustments.
Where I find water chemistry somewhat intimidating (and fascinating) is digging deeper into WHY certain salts affect styles and palates.
 
Does anyone else ignore their water?...Not with the pills I'm taking! ;) About all I've done to this point is notice what tap water, & two different spring waters do to my brew's final products. whether they be AE or PB/PM BIAB.
 
Ward labs,Carbon Block and Bru'n water. It makes a world of difference IMO. 40$ for the testing and around that same amount for a Carbon Block.
 

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