Beer Forum

I just put a water softener in my house and then realized it will affect my beer. Anyone know if I should bypass the water softener when I am brewing. I have really hard water.

If it's the kind that you add salt to, I don't think you should brew with the softened water. IIRC, those softeners replace Ca and Mg ions in the water with Na. Ca you need for mashing and yeast health. Na not so much. I would bypass for brewing water. If you're concerned about too much hardness in your water you can dilute with distilled or RO.

Repeat after me....hardness-good, alkalinity-bad, hardness-good, alkalinity-bad, hardness-good, alkalinity-bad, hardness-good, alkalinity-bad....

If your water is really hard, then the amount of sodium in the softened water could be astronomic. My municipality softens the water supply with giant versions of ion-exchange softeners. Out of the tap, I can get up to 250 ppm sodium. That is not good for brewing.

mabrungard wrote: Out of the tap, I can get up to 250 ppm sodium. That is not good for brewing.

Or your health either.

ajdelange wrote:

mabrungard wrote: Out of the tap, I can get up to 250 ppm sodium. That is not good for brewing.

Or your health either.

Its funny how EPA and even the World Health Org have conveniently overlooked the health effects of high sodium content in drinking water. EPA has no stated limit and WHO has a grudgingly implied limit of 250 ppm. At my house, that means that if I drink the 8 glasses of water a day I'm supposed to, I'm taking in an extra 1,500 mg of sodium. Not a good health measure.

For those of you that have ion exchange softeners in your house, a really good idea that benefits you is to plumb your softener so that it feeds the water heater ONLY. That is the one component that needs the protection afforded by the softener. You use less salt too.

I brew with ro/spring water. My well water is quite high in alkanitity. Since I switched to 50/50 spring/ro water, my beers are way better. In fact, the difference is incredible. The reason I use spring and ro is that the spring has a high level of alkanitity in it. I asked for a water report and everything is good except for that. I have gone to 75% ro and 25% spring with good results also.

A couple years ago another brewer in our club and I each brewed a Pliny clone using the same recipe on the same day. The only difference was that I used a 50/50 blend of my hard tap water and RO water and he used the softened water from his kitchen tap (his pre-softener water chemistry the same as my tap water). Mine won a fist full of medals in various competitions. His ended up being poured down the drain. It was really nasty due to the water.

Wayne

Agreed. Avoid the softened water. I was able to get my hands on large amounts of both softened and RO water for brewing. The taste difference was startling. I dumped the softened water and cut my "bad" tap water with RO.