First Lager advice water treatment ?

[TheSumOfAllBeers]

Planning my first lager, and I just use tap water for all my beers, only treatment is a Camden tablet/overnight rest normally.

Mains water is London water/tower hamlets ish. Probably fairly hard.

Anything I should be concerned with here if I forego water treatment? I am not trying anything that is known for needing soft water, like Czech pils.

[RobP]

I think London water is temporary hard, has lots of Calcium Carbonate in it? You'd know if your kettle furs up a lot. If I'm right, the best thing you could do is boil enough water for your brew the day before you need it. After treating for chlorine boil for 15 minutes and leave to cool undisturbed. This will precipitate out a lot of the Calcium Carbonate, the following day empty the vessel through the tap and discard the portion left under the tap. You will have removed a lot of the alkalinity in the water.

[Jocky]

If you can brew decent pale ales with no crystal then you can brew a hearty exportbier with the same regimen.

But if you don't know what's in your water or have a way of testing your adjustments then there's no specifics that will help you around water treatment.

[TheSumOfAllBeers]

I don't do water treatment : it's on the list of things to do, but I want to speed up my brewday process for now before I start to experiment with it.

Ok thanks guys

[Jocky]

You're not going to get some crazy off flavour if that's your worry.

[dbambrick996]

You should get a salifert test kit for alkalinity and calcium, very easy to do and you can adjust you water, it's very easy and very well explained in this post.

http://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/showt ... 2&p=605368

You will notice a considerable difference in your beer

[Barley Water]

If you lived in the states you could just ask your local water authority for a water analysis; then you would know more or less what you where dealing with. I have moderately hard water here in Dallas (both temporary and well as permanent hardness). It works just fine for many styles and does especially well for darker beers but it sucks for lighter beers. If I want to make something light what I do is cut it with distilled water (which is cheap here). I have friends with RO systems but they are expensive (and I'm frugal) plus it's just one more thing to screw around with. Also, if your water is alkaline like mine is you can also use that 5.2 buffer stuff, works great and it allows me to easily control the pH without a lot of trouble. I also batch sparge which also allows me to easily control the pH (because your pH will rise when fly sparging unless you doctor the sparge water) and avoid the dreaded tannin extraction. Is this hobby fun or what?

[Fil]

your local water report should be available online, it may not have all the salts/elements of interest to brewers listed but an email should elicit a reply with the information needed, just dont expect it to arrive within 6 weeks if contacting thames water..

Another option is to buy softer bottled water if bought in 5l+ volumes its not that expensive..

aquarium shops in your area may also give away RO water, our local store will give 50l away just for the asking, tho i will buy a cheap pack of ph test strips while im waiting for my bottles to get filled due to guilt/pressure.. however pure or RO water will NEED some salt additions so is a head first dive into the deep end of water treatment or burtonisation or you could use it to cut your tap water or bottled water as suggested above..

pure (distilled) lab grade water is less than £1 per litre delivered to the door, just google for it..

[mabrungard]

Pre-boiling your tap water, letting it settle, and decanting the clear water off, is a decent beginner's water treatment. That can get you part of the way to where you might need to be. But to get to even better results, you will need to learn to use an acid to further tune your water for the batch at hand. You could employ distilled or RO water for your brewing, but that is an added cost that you may not want. I invite you to visit the Water Knowledge page of the Bru'n Water website to learn the why and how of water treatment.

Forget about using that 5.2 stuff that Barley Water mentions. It is snake oil and doesn't do what it purports to do. All you will have from using that stuff, is salty tasting beer!