H2O The Main ingredient

Beer is traditionally brewed using 4 ingredients, Water, Malt , Hops and Yeast. The 4 are in order of volume.

The water we consume goes pretty much unnoticed as it just comes from a tap and is always available. It hydrates us, we wash in it, water the garden and flush the loo with it. But in brewing it is such an important part of a good beer it needs to be understood.

You can brew beer with any potable water source, but the beer qualities and flavors will change depending on the mineral contents, Chlorine, dissolved gasses, trace elements, pH and many other factors. Optimal pH determines enzymatic action, hardness and sulphate to chloride ratio can enhance hop and malt flavor. So knowing a bit can change a lot.

My brewing water in the Blue Mountains comes via the Orchard hills water treatment plant who source their water via pipes from Warragamba dam that sources it's water from Lake Burrragorang catchment. That catchment covers areas such as Wollondilly shire, in the Macarthur region and upper Blue Mountains, Rivers such as Cox's, Wingecarribee, Wollondilly, Kowmung and their tributaries all flow into lake Burragorang and eventually flow out of the tap in my brewery.

Sydney Water does analysis on a regular basis,

( Quarterly ) and publish the results for anyone interested and even have a test result designed for home brewers with the parts per million of relevant minerals and pH. etc.

Although this can be helpful to anyone with the knowledge to read it, it only shows the water on the test day, as it leaves the plant and not as it comes out of my tap.

After the plant it can go through plastic, copper, galvanized iron and even asbestos pipes before it enters someone's brew house.

Brewers can be a fussy lot and with good reason, to achieve certain styles of beer , especially those traditional ones brewed from specific regions, it is often important to use the water profile of that particular region. If you want a Perfect Czech Pilsner, like that from Pilzen in The Czech Republic, you need to mimic the soft waters of the Radbuza river in Pilzen.

Commercial brewers can brew a Heineken in any one of a dozen countries and get the same result, knowing what water profile they need.

Most All grain beer recipes have water profiles attached, but to calculate the salt and mineral additions you must first workout your own source water profile , then add or subtract accordingly in parts per million. A little addition of meta bisulphate or campden tablet will remove chlorine and chloramines from the brew water but what other invisibles are in there we wont know unless we do a water analysis of each batch on brew day. Any lab can do this for a few hundred dollars and a weeks notice. Hardly viable for a home brewer.

This is where a reverse osmosis water filter comes in. This will strip 99% of all minerals and salts out of the water, and Pfas too if you believe their recent advertising, and leave a clean slate to build whatever profile you want.

Its a whole science in itself.

The downfall though of reverse osmosis is that it wastes a hell of a lot of water to keep a small purified portion, about a ratio of 3 or 4 to 1 You really need some way to store and reuse the excess somehow, like running it through a counterflow chiller on brew day and then using it to wash the brewery later.

Brew Love Andrew.