Water Recommendations

[Andrew Hodgson]

I have a couple brews under my belt and like many homebrewers have turned my attention to my water source. I started using extract and our city tap water and since switching to BIAB wanted to up my water game also.

I went to my LHBS looking for Campden to at the very least remove the chlorine/chloramine from the water before brewing, when asked where they kept it he looked at me like I was an idiot "This town is famous for the water blah blah" long story short he directed me to try and use the natural water from the springs in our state park. I used this water (again without treatment) for my first BIAB beer (which I have not tasted yet).

To further confuse matters there are 7 spigots of "normal tasting" water and one "hard" spigot for mineral water, which has an odor and taste to it (and the health buffs are all crazy about). I used the normal water for the above beer. Can anyone just by the values confirm if this readout would be for water that smells and tastes minerally or if this may be the readout of the "normal" tasting water spigots? If this is indeed the read out of the hard mineral water I think if I were to use the normal spigot in the future I would still want to use Campden as I bet they are just using city water for the other taps.

Now at first I was skeptical that the HBS guy didn't try to talk me into buying Campden anyway, but is this profile solid for general brewing or does anything stand out to the water gurus out there? ANy and all advice is appreciated. I could use RO water like most do but I figure if I have access to this water I should make every effort to use it unless something is really out of whack that I can't fix.

Doing a little digging (and reading while I was filling my bucket at the park) I have found the mineral content of the spring.

There are a few caveats here, the below values are posted on a plaque at the spring, which leads me to believe that this is a working average of the contents of the spring (or they are spending too much to update a plaque when they test) but that is neither here nor there.

Here is what they list as being the mineral content of said water:
Sodium 2 ppm
Potassium .15 ppm
Calcium 32 ppm
Magnesium 4.4 ppm
Iron .4 ppm
Bicarbonate 104 ppm
Chloride 4.8 ppm
Silica 5 ppm
Sulfate 22 ppm

total mineral content 175 ppm
https://www.saratoga.com/business/state-seal-spring-10232/

I have thought of experimenting with using 6-7 galls of the normal water and .5 to 1 gallon of the hard water to see if it imparts anything special.

Thanks in advance for the insights.

 

[cire]

Many beers could be brewed with that water after simple treatment, except that its iron content is greater than the advised upper level. Iron can produce negative flavours at levels of 0.1 ppm Fe and above, especially in delicate flavoured beers. You might wish to proceed to hopefully find your beers to be unaffected, but if they are, an alternative source should be tried to find if that eliminates the problem.

If it can be resolved or it isn't a problem and you wish to continue with that water, treatment will depend upon the style of beer you intend making.

It will help greatly if you read up on the basics of water treatment although you will find conflicting views of what will help make the best beer.

 

[Andrew Hodgson]

So I think that confirms what I was going to test. I will use the water from the normal spout and treat it with campden, maybe in the future I will add small amounts of the mineral water and see how that goes.