Water Report

[Tpolson]

Hi,

I recently receive my water report and believe I have it figure out but want some interpretation. I knew that I had very hard water and alkaline water in my area but am fairly new to AG brewing. My water comes from a mix of two sources so I only have a range for each mineral or ion, so I listed the range.

Alkalinity- 228 - 319
Calcium- 83 - 159
chloride- 75.5 - 464
Hardness Total - 305- 573
Magnesium - 23.8- 43
pH- 7.74 - 7.85
Sodium - 25.7 - 201
Sulphate - 41.7- 145
Bicarbonate - 278 - 389

Prior to even receiving this I was looking into following the water chemistry primer guidelines building from Distilled since the few batches I've made have been a little astringent or have lingering bitterness. I believe possibly due to too high a mash pH.

Also, depending on time of day and flow rates in the area water may come in any combination from either treatment area, making it tough to predict dilutions accurately. Regardless I believe it is too alkaline especially for brewing pale beers.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

Your water is way too alkaline for even the darkest Imperial Stouts. That plus everything else is also well in massive excess.

I went down the road of trying to use well water that analyzed very similar to your values (via 3:1 dilution with RO plus acidification), and even though I was able to get my mash pH into the 5.2 to 5.5 range (as measured with a pH meter) the resulting beer was terrible. As soon as I switched to straight RO water with added minerals my beer started tasting great.

You will need to heavily cut this water with distilled or RO plus acidify it appreciably to get rid of most to all of the very high alkalinity. By the time you are at 75-80% RO and you are wasting money on acids (and still making lousy beer), you might as well go with 100% RO plus (minimal) added minerals and make good beer. For lighter colored beers you will still need to acidify a bit, even with RO.

I was warned, but I was bull-headed and needed to find out for myself. Hopefully you will not waste good beer like I did in learning my lesson.

You potentially have lots of other ucky things in that water, like high iron, high manganese, iron eating bacteria, sulfur eating bacteria, sulfur odor, etc.... None of which will be beneficial to good beer making.

 

[BlueHouseBrewhaus]

^ What he said. Yeah, both your water sources are bad for brewing. The good news is you can probably find a big box store (Walmart, etc) where you can get RO refills for cheap. I get mine for $.37/gal. Takes the guess work out and you start with a clean slate.

 

[Tpolson]

Thanks Guys. This is what I had figured but wanted to get someone with more experience to take a look. Did my first brew with Distilled and building the water profile yesterday. Fingers crossed that it's better.