Wamart's Great Value Spring Water

[breeves2245]

New to all grain after ten or so extract brews. I have High Gravity's BIAB electric 15.5 gal system. Brewed four batches so far and used my local Walmart's spring water. Now that I am comfortable with the new system I want to check into my water chemistry. The gallon jug has the water source named as Premium Water, Riverside MO. So I went to that website and printed out their spring water 2016 report. New to the water chemistry side of brewing but recall PH should be somewhere around 5.2-5.5. This report has PH at 7.8 among many other measurements. How do I take this report and modify the water profile for brewing? What aspects do I review and adjust? Or should I use a different source and start from there?

 

[JonM]

Others will chime in, but I'd go with distilled water. Wal-Marts and grocery stores usually have a dispenser that will give you distilled water for something like 30 cents/gallon. (Bring in your fermenter and fill that up instead of buying all the one-gallon jugs.)

After that, you can build a water profile using any of the online calculators like Bru'n Water or Brewers Friend.

For starters, read through this: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=198460


The short version is add a little calcium chloride to the water for dark beers, and add calcium chloride and aciduated malt for lighter colored beers.

Without knowing the mineral content of the spring water you'd be kind of flying blind, and I bet the spring water costs more than the distilled water from the dispenser. Good luck!

ETA: If you have the spring water's mineral content handy, maybe post that?

 

[breeves2245]

New to water chemistry so I'm not sure if the below is considered mineral information but here goes.

Chloride = 17
Magnesium = 9.1
Nitrogen,Nitrate = 7.7
Sodium = 11.0
Sufate as SO4 = 38

Other
Alkalinity as CaCO3 = 220
Bicarbonate = 270

Not sure is this helps or not. Many others listed but almost are are labeled ND, which I guess means Not Determined.

 

[JonM]

That's pretty darn high alkalinity in the spring water. You'd get much better results with the distilled water.

 

[nobadays]

If your Walmart is like most it will have an RO water dispenser (what JonM is referring to? I've never seen a distilled water dispenser at a Walmart...not that some might have one.) and that is great water to use to build any profile you want.

I too am a nubie at water adjustments but I found this thread helpful - there are a lot of pro/con posts there bt after trying this simple approach myself... it worked fine on the IPA I have on tap right now. It was a good place for me to start...not being a chemist.

Cheers!

 

[breeves2245]

Thanks for the TheMerkle thread. That helped a lot to just start from a baseline with the RODI water.

 

[nobadays]

Glad it helped!

Cheers!

 

[breeves2245]

Went to the closest Walmart Neighborhood Market at lunch today and they had a Primo water dispenser. It was RO and 37 cents/gal. So a good place to start.

 

[nobadays]

Must be local pricing... I'm in north central AZ and ours here is 27 cents/gal. But hey... 10 gallons of water at less than $4.00... Not a high price to pay for better beer!

Cheers!