Hopefully this is the right section for this...
We moved into a new house back in August, since then I have made 4 beers, a Pumpkin Stout, Black IPA, a Christmas Ale (Belgian), and a Vanilla Porter. Up till moving I had around 35 batches under my belt and had always used tap water and never got any off flavors, carbonation problem, under/over attenuation. Since moving I have had each of those problems an I'm trying to figure out why and the only real change is the water. It's possible I have a wild bug in my fermenting buckets but I think I do a really thorough job of cleaning and sanitizing so for now I'm ruling that out.
The pumpkin stout ended up under attenuating and I had gushers, seems like after bottling it started fermenting again because I had to move the bottles to a fridge after 4 days of carbonating, and the foam overs got worse as time went on. The Black IPA for the most part had no issues except the last few bottles ended up gushing a little bit, but that finished at 1.010 which is where I expected. The Christmas Ale hasn't had any issues yet, i'm about half way through those bottles, if anything it's a little "grainy" tasting but that could be the recipe and the yeast used. The Vanilla Porter I rushed and to me has a very slight sour note to it, not everybody tastes the sour so maybe it's just me...
Anyway, I know everything in the house goes through a water softener, we have two outside spigot's and i'm 99% sure one goes through the softener, the other I can't map the line all the way due to it being inside a ceiling so I can't tell if it goes through the softener or not. Is there a way to test pH or any other way to tell if it's soft water or not without taking it to be tested?
We moved into a new house back in August, since then I have made 4 beers, a Pumpkin Stout, Black IPA, a Christmas Ale (Belgian), and a Vanilla Porter. Up till moving I had around 35 batches under my belt and had always used tap water and never got any off flavors, carbonation problem, under/over attenuation. Since moving I have had each of those problems an I'm trying to figure out why and the only real change is the water. It's possible I have a wild bug in my fermenting buckets but I think I do a really thorough job of cleaning and sanitizing so for now I'm ruling that out.
The pumpkin stout ended up under attenuating and I had gushers, seems like after bottling it started fermenting again because I had to move the bottles to a fridge after 4 days of carbonating, and the foam overs got worse as time went on. The Black IPA for the most part had no issues except the last few bottles ended up gushing a little bit, but that finished at 1.010 which is where I expected. The Christmas Ale hasn't had any issues yet, i'm about half way through those bottles, if anything it's a little "grainy" tasting but that could be the recipe and the yeast used. The Vanilla Porter I rushed and to me has a very slight sour note to it, not everybody tastes the sour so maybe it's just me...
Anyway, I know everything in the house goes through a water softener, we have two outside spigot's and i'm 99% sure one goes through the softener, the other I can't map the line all the way due to it being inside a ceiling so I can't tell if it goes through the softener or not. Is there a way to test pH or any other way to tell if it's soft water or not without taking it to be tested?