Reverse Osmosis water?

[adm]

Thinking about ways to improve my beer, I was wondering about using reverse osmosis filtered water and then building up water profiles from that. But I realised I know nothing about this, other than RO filters can be bought at fairly decent prices....

So - do these things filter EVERYTHING out of the water, or what? Do they make any difference to the Alkalinity?

Basically, if I was to get one, should I expect "Blank canvas" water out of it that I can then add chems to to get it exactly how I want it - i.e. imitate the Pilsen water profile perfectly for example?

(A bit anal I know, but.....why not?)

[boingy]

There's an RO thread here:

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=27851

Whether you will be any the wiser is a different matter!

[adm]

Pah....and it was updated as recently as Sunday too. Should have read that first.

Anyway....my take aways from that thread are:

1) Yes. A good RO/DI system will give you pretty much the blank canvas with everything taken out. But you need a good one.
2) It will waste 85% of water in the process - so to fill my 50 litre HLT, it would need nearly 350 litres of water.
3) I could then add salts as I wanted to get a pretty much smack on profile for any type of beer. But it might be difficult to get them into solution - how difficult are we talking here? For 50L could I just throw 2L of hot RO water into a jug, add the relevant salts, zap it with a hand blender and then stir into the rest of the HLT?
4) I'd save approximately tuppence a year on CRS and Camden tablets. But would have hundreds of pounds worth of fun messing with arcane water profiles that I can't get otherwise. And probably don't need, or really want to get anyway.

So....if breweries use these things, I can't believe they just chuck away 85% of the water. Can the rejected water just go back into the plumbing loop for other use in the home? I can't really see these being on the market if they just p1ss hundreds of litres of water down the drain

Hmm....

[boingy]

I know nothing about RO but that thread is a bit "soapboxy" for my taste. Maybe you should check out some marine aquarium forums. There should be plenty of RO experience on those, although obviously not with any brewing specifics.

[Garth]

Alasdair, Camerons Brewery at Hartlepool uses RO water as a base and then add the rocks to that to get the exact water profile they require, and even though they are a mere mile from the sea they have their own borehole giving fresh water. So they can probably afford to chuck loads away, or maybe it gets re-routed to get used for cooling etc.

I think they do this as they contract brew several different widely available brews, Mackesons stout and Heineken spring to mind.

[mysterio]

Hi, I don't know anything about RO but obviously your biggest problem is getting that chalk dissolved to adjust your alkalinity. Here's how Braukaiser does it : http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php?ti ... lved_chalk

Maybe you could work out another ingenious way to do it. I remember Graham suggested using a cornie keg and a stir plate

The other salts should dissolve OK with your hand blender method.

Another note is to be careful with these legendary water profiles, some of them look a bit suspect and you never know for sure that the breweries aren't adjusting. I've heard it said Pilsner Urquell brewing water uses Calcium in the standard 50 - 100 ppm range, rather than the close to zero its sometimes reported.

[Aleman]

Having pretty close to RO water here I can tell you that it is not easy to recreate so called 'perfect' brewing water profiles . . . . It is also a pointless and fundamentally futile exercise. . . . as Mysti says the brewers in these classic regions treat the water anyway . . . The Germans are masters of water treatment, especially the ones that abide / abided by the reinheitsgebot.

And what do they do to their water?

1) Adjust the alkalinity to that suitable for the style of beer they are brewing
2) increase the hardness (Add calcium) where required to ensure sufficient available for the rest of the brewing process (i.e. make sure its at least 60ppm and preferably >120 to 150 ppm).

And that is pretty much it . . . Munich Helles has a lower hopping rate than a Bohemian Pilsner because the Munich water has High sulphate . . . which they can't easily remove . . . so they adapt the beer style to suit the water they have . . . A bit like Burton brewing Pale Ales and London being a Porter/Stout region . . . not that they can't brew the other styles . . . just that is is easier.

[mysterio]

Is that still the case with Helles? I thought the Germans were the masters of high-tech brewhouses and processes and so on. I would have thought dialling in a very specific water type would be no problem for the big breweries - don't know, genuinely asking!

[adm]

Having pretty close to RO water here I can tell you that it is not easy to recreate so called 'perfect' brewing water profiles . . . . It is also a pointless and fundamentally futile exercise. . . . as Mysti says the brewers in these classic regions treat the water anyway . . . The Germans are masters of water treatment, especially the ones that abide / abided by the reinheitsgebot.

And what do they do to their water?

1) Adjust the alkalinity to that suitable for the style of beer they are brewing
2) increase the hardness (Add calcium) where required to ensure sufficient available for the rest of the brewing process (i.e. make sure its at least 60ppm and preferably >120 to 150 ppm).

And that is pretty much it . . . Munich Helles has a lower hopping rate than a Bohemian Pilsner because the Munich water has High sulphate . . . which they can't easily remove . . . so they adapt the beer style to suit the water they have . . . A bit like Burton brewing Pale Ales and London being a Porter/Stout region . . . not that they can't brew the other styles . . . just that is is easier.

Thanks Tony, I get all that - and this whole thread is more of a thought experiment than anything else. I'm not about to run out and buy an RO unit.

I also understand that breweries treat their water for their own beers - and that even if the water in Pilsen is almost neutral, the breweries there make better beer by treating it for their specific needs, so I don't intend to go chasing off trying to get perfectly neutral water.

More than anything, I was wondering if - as a home brewer who might like to brew conceivably ANY style of beer, but is limited to one source of water (apart from bottled) that I might have a better chance of nailing some of them starting from a blank canvas. For example, I can't get close to a theoretical Pilsen water by adding stuff to my water. Or at least, not by adding anything i can calculate with Graham's calculator....just like the way Munich has higher sulphate.

Having said that, if I really wanted to try to emulate that (even if it ISN'T the water they really brew with - which I fully appreciate), it would appear to be cheaper and easier for me to go and buy 50L of cheap superstore value brewing water, and start from there, adding calcium and adjusting the alkalinity as appropriate.

What's more, any money spent on an RO filter, would buy a metric shedload of CRS, Gypsum, etc, etc.....so from a financial perspective it's a non starter.

It's still quite interesting to me theoretically though - and this thread, plus the other one is only adding to my knowledge of water- which can't be a bad thing!

Sorry if it's been done to death already!

[vanish]

I neartly bought an RO filter a while ago, Mainly for the tropical fish that I keep. I spent quite a lot of time reading up on these things. And yes as mentioned before you can find a pletora of information on fish keeping sites; an excellent one is http://forum.practicalfishkeeping.co.uk/
These guys who us RO filters for thier fish either use a ready made (bought) solution which they add to the filtered water, or more simply add a calculated amount (dependant upon what your local water perameters are) of un filtered water. Obviously this would be then adding back some of the undesirable which you had already removed, but they should by now be at a considerably lower level.
You can fork out some serious cash on these RO's but I found a place that sold some real good 5 stage filters with pumps, which are necessary if you have lowish water pressure. They also have a tank which holds either 1 gal or 5gal, I can't quite remember. Anyway thet're about a ton. The TDS tester (which test how the membrane and flters are performing are about £15) I'll dig out the link which is on my other PC and post it up here.

[vanish]

Here's that link I mentioned above http://www.watercoolerhq.co.uk/scripts/ ... ategory=14

[andybiochem]

Hi,

I have a 5-stage reverse osmosis (RO) unit that I bought for a hobby unrelated to brewing (hydroponics as it happens, chillies mainly).

Since I started brewing in Nov 09 I've been experimenting with using pure RO water and tap water for brewing.
Taste-wise I'm not seeing much difference between the two, and I live in a "very hard" water area - East Riding of Yorkshire aka Humberside.

The water out of the tap has a total dissolved solute of ~350 parts per million. This is very high. Where I used to live (Bolton), the water was 90ppm out of the tap. After filtering through my RO unit, the water comes out at ~10ppm... so we're not talking about a completely clean slate here. With a DI resin unit, water should come out as 0ppm, but I don't own a DI filter so can't say from experience.

Waste from the unit is somewhere between 50-60% (i.e. collecting 20L RO water uses 40L tap water), and I collect the waste to put on the garden/rinse brewing equipment/etc.

[mentaldental]

The water out of the tap has a total dissolved solute of ~350 parts per million. This is very high. Where I used to live (Bolton), the water was 90ppm out of the tap. After filtering through my RO unit, the water comes out at ~10ppm... so we're not talking about a completely clean slate here. With a DI resin unit, water should come out as 0ppm, but I don't own a DI filter so can't say from experience.

Waste from the unit is somewhere between 50-60% (i.e. collecting 20L RO water uses 40L tap water), and I collect the waste to put on the garden/rinse brewing equipment/etc.

I have a DI filer on my unit and my TDS is usually 1-2 (from about 260). When the DI needs replacing this may go up to 5 but then the machines I use the water in then shout their tits off so I change the DI granules.

Your waste sounds low. I though the usual was about 4 times the output. My waste goes to drain: not very green am I?

[andybiochem]

Your waste sounds low. I though the usual was about 4 times the output?

I'll check it again this Brewday (Sunday), when I initially bought it it filled 2L of waste in the time it took to give 1L RO water. Perhaps extrapolating this up to 20L is a little innaccurate.

My unit has a huge pump that force-feeds the RO filter, I believe that improves efficiency over tap water pressure?

I might 'migrate' away from the RO unit for beer though. The tap water where I live makes me gag, but the last brew I did all-tap-water is pretty damn good: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=31366