interested in water chemistry and how it affects home brew

[lld3jster]

Hello all,
My interest in this forum is about how water chemistry affects your home brew. I'm not selling anything, just gathering data on personal stories about what's in the water in your area and how it affects the flavor and success of your home brews. I'm particularly interested in a disinfectant called chloramine. It's made by combining chlorine in your water with ammonia. The water authority does this at the water plant, and then distributes it into the distribution system and finally into your house. It's the least expensive way for the water company to keep within EPA regulations without really cleaning up the water. It may affect the fermentation or flavor of home brews.
Any info about this will be of interest to me and the group that I work with called Chloramine Information Center.
Thanks,
Lorrie
Thanks for any info you can relate to me

 

[zachattack]

Hi Lorrie, you should check out the Brewing Science forum below.

There's lots of information on chloramine (and water chemistry in general) in most homebrew books. The basic idea is that water chemistry is much more of a concern with all grain homebrewing rather than extract-based, but chlorine and chloramine can react during fermentation to produce unpleasant chlorophenols. Most homebrewers using treated municipal water will "neutralize" the chloramine by treating the water with Campden tablets (metabisulfite).

 

[sweetcell]

you'll want to post this in the Brew Science sub-forum, that's where water chemistry discussions usually take place: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f128/

the common approach for dealing with chloramine is to crush up a camden tablet and add it to the water before the mash & boil. plenty of people have posted how chloramine gives beer a plastic taste, and how camden tablets took care of the problem.

do a search for "chloramine camden" (click on the pull-down menu by the word "Search" and use the custom Google search instead) for some insights.

edit: what zach said.

 

[zachattack]

Haha this is the second time in the last week that another member and I basically posted identical replies within a couple minutes of each other.

 

[sweetcell]

so THIS is what group-think looks like...

i want to add that a single camden tablet is good for treating 20 gallons of water. so for a 5-gal batch, a quarter tablet is sufficient. it needs to be crushed up into a fine powder then mixed thoroughly into the water.