City of Chandler water profile
I'm looking at a couple of programs for my Mac (Beer Tools Pro and Beer Alchemy). I was wondering if anyone knew where one could get a profile for the City of Chandler water.
Also, what are thoughts on using R/O water versus city water? I read somewhere that with R/O water, all the unique minerals might be depleted so you have to compensate by adding other minerals so you might want to just use tap water.
Thoughts???
Jerry
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Ken "Triple Hopped" Forrey on -
This is what Chandler has on their web site.
http://www.chandleraz.gov/Content/2009WaterQualityReport.pdf
There dosen't seem to be the type of things that we as homebrewers are looking for listed.
Although this is a good source to gather some information from Dr. Teff
http://www.azhomebrewers.org/wiki/images/9/91/Water_and_Brewing_Bee...
There is some information on Chandler water and water after RO treatment. This may be a good baseline for you to start with.
If you want to get a water analysis of your tap water and RO water from your home you will need to send off samples to Ward labs. Contact them through their web site. http://www.wardlab.com/
From what I have read and understand if you use tap water you need to treat it with camden tablets to try and rid your water of the chlorine and chloramine (not to sure if it will work on the chloramine). You can also use a carbon filter to get rid of the chlorine from your water.
Some people will use different parts of RO to tap water to get the different parts that they want in their brewing water and then there are others that would rather use RO water and then add a few brewing salts to buld thier water. No real right way.
For the Beer Tools Pro and Beer Alchemy just do a internet search and they each have a downloadable version for those programs. You may even be able to contact them and get a disc sent to you.
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Permalink Reply by Christian Chandler on -
I only brew with RO water. Brewer's Connection includes a free sulfate/brew salts mix with every purchase. They claim they spent a year formulating the mix. I've used it and it seems to work fine in my RO water. Otherwise you can use sites like http://www.ezwatercalculator.com/ to calculate what minerals and salts you need to add to your water.
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Permalink Reply by Ben Lipman on -
Here is the short answer from me: if you are brewing w/ extract, use RO unless you really know what you are doing. Extract already has the mineral content it was brewed with, no minerals leave during the drying/concentrating process so consider that stuff "ready to go" as far as minerals go. If you are mixing extract with city water you are most likely doubling up on some of the ions like chloride, sodium, etc that you really don't want any more of in your beer. So...extract, use RO, nothing else (maybe a touch of gypsum for really hoppy beers or a bit of calcium chloride for really malty beers but you are gambling since you don't know the mineral profile of the extract).
For all grain, using just RO is only suitable for certain styles like pils IMO, for everything else I use RO plus enough CaCl to get up around 50ppm of Ca; that is my standard "low mineral" profile. The grain was germinated with minerally water and dried, again, it has some mineral content in and of itself, plenty of Mg and some Ca so you really don't need to do much. Tap water will be very high in Na and Cl which is not appropriate for the flavors you want in many styles so very few styles are well suited for our tap water profile. If you really want to use tap water for some reason, you can easily dilute with some RO water to "cut" the minerals; if you do a 2:1 mix of RO to tap water you will divide each mineral down by 3 (240 ppm Cl --> 80ppm for example).
As to chlorine and chloramine, campden will treat both very quickly, in fact, almost instantly if you have crushed up the metabisulphate first and stir it in. Just leaving your tap water out over night will dissipate the chlorine pretty completely, it won't touch the chloramine but many municipalities only use chlorine. Be careful of using carbon block filters for this process, its effectiveness depends on the flow rate (must be a certain speed or slower) and the carbon will eventually get "spent" and stop helping you...in fact, dirty carbon might release some nasties back into your water...why not just use campden I ask out loud? It is so cheap and the minerals it adds (in the minute amount we are talking about) do nothing to harm your beer.
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