Tap water – help!

[peebee]

Why the headline "bad example"

Sorry if I misinterpreted your post. But if I did, I imagine others did, so my "correction" was worth saying? @Fireside Ales Homebrewery summarised my reasoning very well.

I thought I'd get earache for this:

... And for the rest of the UK: The paranoia exampled in the OP is born of American brewing scribblings ...

But this wasn't anti-American sentiments; I'm sure the old-hand American brewers are quite happy to at last be discussing homegrown paranoias rather than reading the paranoias imported from over here when we had the monopoly of home-brewing literature.

 

[RawAbility3]

I have found an amazing app that will calculate what you require in your water to achieve the water profile you want.
Have a look at the grainfather app.

From there, you can have access to many recipes or build your own. They have a water profile section where you enter all your water parameters that you would obtain onli e from your water provider. Select the style of beer you want and it will then give you in 0.1g of what chemical is required to achieve that profile.

Hope this helps

 

[An Ankoù]

You should read Gordon Strong's (of BJCP fame) recipe books (not "Brewing Better Beers" the other one). He uses RO water for everything, sticks a quarter teaspoon of 10% phosphoric acid in everything, occasionally a bit of gypsum or the contents of the blue wrap in a Smith's crisps packet and that's water chemistry dealt with. He does say his local water is undrinkable, but it does make for uninteresting reading. Some of the recipes are worth casting an eye over, in fact, but I wouldn't recommend "BBB" it's like having a therapy session.

 

[uDicko]

Regardless of the water chemistry, the water companies like to "purify" it with chlorine or chloramine to kill off any nasties from the reservoir or from water treatment plants or to purge the pipes of stuff like legionnaires' disease and other joyful stuff. As brewers, we don't need this as all the water is boiled to within an inch of its life, but if you boil these additives with hops the chlorine combines with the phenolic content of the hops to give a distinct flavour of mouthwash. As said above, tap water is generally fine except for this little detail. A bit of sodium metabisulphite or half a campden tablet in you mash and sparge water knocks this on the head in about five seconds flat.
But don't worry, you'll know if you had chlorine in there as the beer will be irredeemably undrinkable.

Said this very early on. Your beer will be fine if you have gotten rid of the chlorine / chloride from it.

 

[Crappyfish]

Sorry if I misinterpreted your post. But if I did, I imagine others did, so my "correction" was worth saying? @Fireside Ales Homebrewery summarised my reasoning very well.

I thought I'd get earache for this:


But this wasn't anti-American sentiments; I'm sure the old-hand American brewers are quite happy to at last be discussing homegrown paranoias rather than reading the paranoias imported from over here when we had the monopoly of home-brewing literature.

Always here to learn.
Thanks for your explanation.