What to do with water with 700mg/L alkalinity

[NickinWI]

This is my first post, but I've been reading so much - what a wealth of knowledge here. :rockin: Thanks to all of you for that, and I hope some day I can contribute in some small way!

Short background:
I was planning on brewing my first AG BIAB batch this Sunday and figured I would call my municipality for a water report just like JP recommends in How to Brew...

Come to find my alkalinity is at 700 mg/L, which is pretty much off the charts from what I can see. I ran Palmers calculator, ez water and the only way to fix it seems to be going with 90-100% distilled water....

I have just been using straight tap water for my first extract brews (no tablets for chlorine or anything), but I do have a water softener I could run. Not sure if that would help or not, and I'm not sure what my numbers are after softening.

My beer has tasted pretty good so far, but always had a weird VERY slight little sweetness to it that I couldn't really nail down. Wasn't sure if it was due to extract, but I've had the same flavor there across all styles. I've read through all the lists of defects and none of them really seem to match.

Dilemma:
What should I do for water?
1 - Use softened water?
2 - Just go buy distilled and add necessary salts/minerals I need per style?
3 - Add stuff to my tap water to drop the alkalinity?

Here is the local water report. This is specific to the municiple well that feeds my subdivision.

Thanks so much for any of your help/insight I thought I was fine since my water tasted pretty good, but I'm sort of guessing not...


Nick

 

[ajdelange]

It is seldom that I have to say it but this water is really unsuited to brewing. Iron is at 12 times the maximum desired level and alkalinity at about 14 times. To use this water, thus, you would have to dilute it by at least 13:1 with RO/DI water. At those levels there is little point in measuring out the 1 part in 13. IOW you might as well use 100% RO water. But even getting RO water would present its challenges. With water this hard you would need to soften before going into the RO unit and the unit would have to deliver 93% rejection to get the alkalinity down to 50. You'd want it lower than that for most beers - say 25 which would require 96% rejection. That's not that hard to get with a new unit but as the membrane ages you might drop below that. The implication is that you would need to monitor the performance of your RO system. That's not hard to do with a simple, inexpensive conductivity meter.

 

[NickinWI]

AJ, thanks so much for the feedback.

Makes me proud that the beer I've made thus far (extract) has actually been pretty decent tasting. I don't think AG would have turned out as well.

RO unit isn't in the cards for this weekend, but could be in the future, so thank you for the recommendation!

This sure is one all-engrossing hobby.... :cross:

I pulled the MKE municipal water report, and they are much better. Looks like I can get some MKE county water (from our duplex in MKE) add a few grams of gypsum and calcium chloride and away I go.

WIN!