Posted 17 April 2015 - 06:11 PM
One thing I meant to add to my "bullets" was the idea of futzing with the water in the first place. Many brewers start with extract where water can [often] be ignored. When those brewers get to all-grain, the topic of water often gets addressed much later and most brewers wonder why they need to look into it. There will always be some brewers who like to make APAs and IPAs and they just happen to have great water for those styles so they say, Why do I need to look into this anyway!? which is fine. But if you had very soft water and wanted to make an IPA and you didn't adjust your water, you might wonder what happened to your IPA. If you have high bicarbonate (or high sulfate) and want to make Czech Pilsners, you'll need to look at water or you're going to whiff a few times before you get a great beer. I mention all of this because darkmagneto is a great brewer and we do happen to have very good brewing water here (it really is... very modest on almost every number except the bicarb which is manageable) so he doesn't really need to dig that deep into this subject. He's already diluting with distilled, which he could probably stop doing by just neutralizing the bicarb with acid. There are puh-lenty of things that still make my head spin but I feel like I can design my water for any style I make now. Also, even though I neutralize the bicarb with acid now, I recently diluted 50% of the water on a batch with distilled because I wanted to make an ultra-soft Czech pils and get the 27ppm of sulfate lower. We'll see how THAT goes. Cheers Beerheads.
