Determining if water is softened

[bolus14]

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?

 

[eluterio]

I don't think I have ever heard of soften water causing the issues you are having. I would first start off by boiling of your metal equipment making sure you kill everything. Its a little extreme but its a good place to start. Then I would go and get some distilled water or ro water and pbw the crap out of all your non metal equipment. I mean all of it, from your carboys, tubing, racking can, bottling wand, anything that touches your beer clean it. Again this is the extreme measure. I would take if out of 30plus batches I had no issues now I do I would clean everything or buy new tubing, wants, racking cane, bottles. this is just the steps I would take before I question the soften water.

Brew a beer using RO water instead of your soften water after you cleaned everything. If you wanted to take it one more step clean using RO water. If the problem is gone then I would brew with RO water again and clean with your tap water. If the problem doesn't expose itself again then maybe it was somewhere in your equipment that was infected.

Again this is extreme measures but I have done this and found that it was my racking cane causing me to have infected beers. It took several batches to figure it out but I was able to do a process of elimination.

If you don't want to go through this extreme clean everything with RO and pbw water that touches your beer after it has fermented. My 2 cents.

 

[mabrungard]

Softened water can make brewing results worse for several reasons.

One option for assessing if the exterior water taps have softened water is via a soap suds test. Using a bar of regular soap (not detergent), wet your hands and draw your fingers across the wet soap once and then rub your hands vigorously to see how well the soap foams. Using the softened water, it should foam better. If the exterior water and soap test does not foam up as well when the exact same contact with the bar of soap is conducted, then its likely that the water is harder.

This is only a qualitative test. It won't tell you how hard or harder the exterior water is. It will only give you an indication that it is harder.

 

[bolus14]

Interesting about the soap suds test, I've always experienced the opposite, fewer suds with softened water...

I was hoping there would be a better test that could be done, possibly some kind of density test. Will an object float more/less in softened water or if certain dyes/food coloring was added would the results be different...