New Brewer Here, Need Advice on Water Report (Evergreen CO)

[erranceloup]

I just got into homebrewing and want to start with all the advantages I can get so I decided to get my well water checked. Would any of you experienced brewers be kind enough to give me some general advice on my water makeup? Is this a good baseline?

And do I need to worry about chlorine/chloramine with well water?

Thanks much!

 

[ajdelange]

Very typical water so that it brings with it the well known challenges of dealing with the appreciable alkalinity found in typical municipal water. You can certainly brew plenty of beers with water like this without adjustment but using some flavor neutral phosphoric acid to knock out that alkalinity, some calcium chloride to get the chloride ion up for the sake of body, and some gypsum to accentuate hops bitterness if you wish to do that will make for better beers. As this water is so nominal discussions of how to brew with it abound - here and elsewhere. You should poke around on this and other sites for those discussions. If there were a one or two sentence description of what to do with water like this I would give it but there isn't. There are many ways to deal with it depending on what kinds of beers you want to brew. The conceptually simplest is to dilute it 5:1 or more with RO water and add back the salts you want but then you aren't working with this water. You are working with RO water.

 

[mabrungard]

No, you won't have to worry about chlorine or chloramines in your well water. But you may need to worry about manganese and iron in the water. Assuming you have no staining around your plumbing fixtures, you are good to go.

That is a very good starting point for your water. But you do have to neutralize that alkalinity for many beers. That alkalinity level is not that bad and it should be very easy to use either phosphoric or lactic acids for that neutralization. You will then be left with a pretty good starting point for brewing. The other ion levels are fairly low and would not require any dilution for use in many beers.

 

[erranceloup]

Thank you both for the great advice, that helps alot. I'll look around the forums for more info. Cheers!