What's your water like?

Post by **Jim** » Mon Dec 27, 2004 6:40 pm

...and how does it affect your brewing (e.g. do you need to treat your water before brewing?)

Reg · Post by **Reg** » Tue Dec 28, 2004 2:18 am

The water here is hard as nails and would almost certainly require treatment...

We have to run a water softener full time to stop it from runing our plumbing

Post by **Jim** » Thu Dec 30, 2004 5:25 pm

I presume that your water's chalky, which is a problem for some grain beers.

These waters contain a lot of carbonates, which tend to result in the mash being too alkaline (unless you include a lot of dark roasted malt to balance it). Sulphate hardness is what you want for pale beers.

Boiling and racking it to remove some of the carbonates would help, although if you use a chemical water softener, these can add undesirable (from a brewing viewpoint) salts to the water.

Untreated, it should make great 'Guinness' style stout, though.

Reg · Post by **Reg** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 3:42 am

It looks like I should start lookig at crystal and chocolate malts then

Post by **Jim** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 2:38 pm

QUOTE (Reg @ Jan 16 2005, 01:42 AM)It looks like I should start lookig at crystal and chocolate malts then

Try roast barley for Guinness type stouts. It's better than using dark malts.

Reg · Post by **Reg** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 1:20 am

QUOTE (jim @ Jan 16 2005, 12:38 PM) QUOTE (Reg @ Jan 16 2005, 01:42 AM)It looks like I should start lookig at crystal and chocolate malts then

Try roast barley for Guinness type stouts. It's better than using dark malts.
Aha! That'll be the answer then, but if don't want to brew stout or boil me water for 17 hours, are there any other alternatives...?

Post by **Jim** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 6:45 pm

You can get stuff to add to the water to react with the salts and make them precipitate out, but I've never used them.

This link might help: http://www.portchesterbrewery.freeserve ... 0treatment

Reg · Post by **Reg** » Wed Jan 19, 2005 10:03 am

Aha

Interesting, although I have an inherent reluctance to use chemicals... kinda goes against the "grain" of the whole thing... Phnar... phnar...!

I guess I could just get me a good quality boiler to precipitate out the solids, then clean the thing out with plain household vinegar after every use...? That shoudl stop it limescaling up... Whaddya think...? :huh:

Post by **Jim** » Wed Jan 19, 2005 6:35 pm

I've not had to deal with really hard water before, but boiling will definitely remove carbonates (cos of course that's what the scale in you kettle is!).

Can't comment on the vinegar, though, as I've never tried it; you'd need to be sure it didn't harm your boiler in any way (e.g. the heating element).

The small amount of scale that forms on my plastic boiler just rubs off with a cloth (though the element needs one of those plastic scourers to get the scale off).

FlippinMental · Post by **FlippinMental** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 12:48 am

Water is so soft here it has to be coaxed out of the tap.

Post by **Andy** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 10:35 am

Well the plan is to brew up tomorrow and I'll certainly be using my new POU water filter. But wasn't planning on doing anything else, I'm in a moderately hard water area (total hardness as calcium carbonate (CaCO3) mg/l is 289.31 according to my nice water people) so ideally would do something to take down the temporary hardness e.g. boil the water and rack off the sediment. Not sure if I'll have to time to do this however so might just add some gypsum to lower the pH.....

It's all a bit of a black art as far as I can see.

BlightyBrewer · Post by **BlightyBrewer** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 2:47 pm

My water is, in a word, pants! I'm sure it is sourced from the local swimming pool!

Post by **Andy** » Thu Apr 06, 2006 6:37 pm

Visited the LHBS at lunchtime and obtained some http://www.the-home-brew-shop.co.uk/item867.htm and http://www.the-home-brew-shop.co.uk/item1840.htm so will try those out in the next brew.

Post by **Andy** » Thu Apr 06, 2006 9:29 pm

There's a great guide hidden away on the Brupaks site:-

http://www.brupaks.com/brewing-aids.htm

The CRS stuff should do for 6 or 7 batches so not bad value at Ã‚Â£1.99/bottle, saves a load of water boiling etc too!

The two Brupaks products are basically rebadged Murphys water treatment products.

Post by **Andy** » Thu Apr 06, 2006 9:43 pm

QUOTE (Daft as a Brush @ Apr 6 2006, 09:39 PM) Cheers andy...maybe we could all get organised one day and buy in bulk from Murphys and Sons and cut out the middle man. B)

More info here:-

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.j.ed ... _Water.pdf

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What's your water like?

What's your water like?