My New Water

[bigdan]

My wife and I just bought a house and are settling in, so now I'm trying to set up the new brewery. I finally have a good space for it. I moved from city water to a well. With the city water I didn't need any water adjustment but now I am pretty sure I will. I am wondering if I need RO or if there are other options. I am also looking for recommendations on good RO systems just for brewing water and enough for 15 gallon batches. I took the water sample pre-softener. Here's the report:

pH 7.5
Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) Est 228
Electrical Conductivity, mmho/cm 0.38
Cations / Anions, me/L 4.4 / 3.9

Sodium, Na 3
Potassium, K < 1
Calcium, Ca 79
Magnesium, Mg 3
Total Hardness, CaCO3 210
Nitrate, NO3-N 1.9 (SAFE)
Sulfate, SO4-S < 1
Chloride, Cl 4
Carbonate, CO3 < 1
Bicarbonate, HCO3 223
Total Alkalinity, CaCO3 183
"<" - Not Detected / Below Detection Limit


Thanks for any help.

[ajdelange]

As you are probably already aware, this water is quite alkaline. Hardness saves many an alkaline water but, while you have enough of it to crust up the shower head, you don't have enough to offset the alkalinity enough. Base malt only mashes would probably come out with pH near 5.9 or so and some sort of action will be necessary to get mash pH into the right range. Probably the simplest thing to do is simply heat the water to near boiling, aerate it let it cool and decant the water from the precipitate. If this goes he way it typically does you should wind up with alkalinity reduced to about 50 ppm. You can also soften this water with lime but that gets a little involved

I, for one, have concluded that RO water is a good way to go but this has been prompted a current hypothesis of mine that the best beers are made with soft water regardless of style. This hypothesis is under test and will be for quite a while I expect but I really like the results I get with soft water. Keep in mind that RO units remove only a percentage of what they are confronted with. This percentage is typically in the 90's - even at the high end of the 90's but supposing it's 95% you would still wind up with hardness of about 4 and alkalinity of 3.6 which should be pretty good for brewing if you dose in a little calcium chloride.

As to sources of RO units - there are many. I had 2 GE units that I got from Home Depot for a bit over $200 I think. I believe the current model in that series will produce up to 10 gal/day so you would have to collect water for a couple of days before you brew but I did that for years and while it was a bit of a pain it was a workable system. If the membranes will take it you can put a booster pump in front of the system and increase the output.

There are lots of other manufacturers too and I expect it's one of those situations where dozzens of manufacturers buy the membranes from a handful of suppliers so systems and system performance should be pretty much the same.