subject: How Important Is The Water In Your Beer? [print this page] We humans are put together with a water content in the 70% range. Think thats a lot? Not when you figure that on the planet Earth there are around 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons (326 million trillion gallons) of water.
Beer beats em all. About 97% of what you drink when you flip-open a cold one is water. Thats why the source of the H2O is so damned important. Its sort of like knowing that 90% of all hot dogs are composed of chicken ears.
For many years, Coors touted that it was Brewed with Pure Rocky Mountain Spring Water. The defunct Olympia Brewing Company chose the slogan "It's the Water." Even the classic comedy group Firesign Theater took note as youll see in the following clip from their album Everything You Know is Wrong.
http://youtu.be/r0GBS2kOMEg
Thats Why its Yellow
As a home brewer, there are several things you need to choose your water carefully. Obviously, you dont want any bear piss in the mix.
The water has to be as clean as possible from any contaminants. Translated: You dont need any additional funky chemicals or biological weirdness in the fluid.
You need to know the mineral content of the H2O as that will tamper with the clarity, pH value, how the enzymes will react during the process and finally how well the water will play with the hops.
Keep it in the Road
Lake sources of water and the well you drink from shift to-and-fro from a quality standpoint. Too much iron or sulfur in the stream will really eff-up your final product. Your best practice is to throw-down a few bucks and buy some purified water. Or you can go banana frou-frou and buy some expensive bottled stuff from Italy. Bombardier, its your karma (another Firesign Theater reference).
Tap water has its up-and-down side. Youll usually not find any micro-junk of a biological nature in it. But you will come across chlorine. Unless you want to brew a batch of Clorox Red, you need to keep that in mind.
To rid the stuff from your spigot of chlorine can be done a couple of ways:
Get some Campden tablets, follow the directions and this should bust-up the chloramines into bicarbonates and calcium.
Fill up your glass jug with water, leave it open and let it simply sit there for a couple of days.
Think you can ignore the importance of dealing with the chlorine in your water? Bad move. The yeast will magically metabolize into something that tastes like a doctors office wall (dont test it by licking the wall at your medical professionals place of business, nutcake). The notes youll experience in your beer are called chlorophenols.
Balancing Act
What you need to be wary of are minerals in the water. Too much, bad. Just right and youve hit the Goldilocks spot.
Salt
Calcium
Carbonate
Sulfates
Zinc
Too much of these elements can turn a beer foul faster than you can say Huh?
Distilled water sucks because its bereft of the trace amounts of the stuff listed above. A simple rule to yet another matter is how hard or soft is the water? Soft is perfect for darker ales and lagers. The harder H2O gives pale ales and hoppy beer a true treat.
Warning: Stay away from any water source thats frequented by bears. As Stephen Colbert from The Colbert Report constantly reminds us theyre our number one threat. Heres the proof:
