The Best Water for Brewing Beer – Q&A

When people first start brewing beer, they want everything to be absolutely perfect and it’s totally understandable. I mean, if you’re not careful with things like proper sanitation and water temperature, a lot of things can go wrong and spoil your hard work. But one question that comes up often is about the most basic ingredient: water.

Which kind of water is best? Do I need to use filtered or bottled water? Should I boil the water before brewing with it?

These are questions we get all the time so I thought it would be good to clear the air and get a few things about water and brewing beer straight.

Tap Water For Brewing Beer

The good news is this: If you are new to brewing beer and already bogged down with 15 other details, rest assured, you can still brew great beer with water from the tap. We have been using tap water for years and the beer we brew can satisfy the our pickiest beer loving friends. If you’re concerned about it, you can boil it first but we don’t find this step to be necessary. At the end of the day, if it’s ok for drinking it’s ok for brewing. But homebrewers tend to be tinkerers and we like to make sure that we have accounted for and fine-tuned every detail, and this includes the water. So I just described the way you like to brew, read on because you can certainly go deeper than “just brew with tap water.”

Bottled Water for Brewing Beer

While it might seem logical that using bottled spring water would make sense for brewing, there are care few things to consider. We want to emphasize that if you do brew with bottled water, make sure you buy spring, not distilled, which has all of the minerals removed from it.

Just like tap, spring water should be good to go right out of the bottle. That is unless you are making a type of beer that demands a specific water chemical profile like a British Ale. If you are brewing extract you won’t need to do much of anything, maybe add some gypsum of CaCl2 for taste but that’s it. If you are brewing all-grain you should test the water so you have a sense of it’s profile.

Fair warning, some people don’t like brewing with bottled water at all. They feel that it’s hard to know what’s in them so they stay away entirely. Out of convenience we don’t share this opinion but it’s out there. This leads us to the next option: reverse osmosis (RO) water.

Reverse Osmosis Water for Brewing Beer

Some brewers prefer reverse osmosis water because it’s considered a clean slate and is relatively inexpensive. Lately, what we have been doing is thinning out our tap water with reverse osmosis water. Probably about a 50:50 ratio. When blending water like this, you’ll need to experiment and build up your water profile over time to discover what works best for your local area. Having your tap water tested can be helpful for this. Ward labs does a tap water test for about $30 and it’s very accurate. Just remember that your tap water profile will change over as the weather changes and can vary depending on how your city treats it to make it safe for drinking.

The Bottom Line

As you can see, you have a lot of options and it really depends how detailed you want to be about it. If money and time are at a premium, don’t sweat it and just use tap water. You can still make awesome beer. The fact of the matter is that unless you are trying to replicate a a certain water profile for a specific beer, or have discovered some problem with your domestic supply (and brewing all-grain) then you just don’t need to worry about it.

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How Many BTU Do I Need to Brew Beer?

A question that comes up a lot when home brewers are looking to purchase a propane burner for boiling wort is how many BTU do I need to get the job done? If you’ve spent any amount of time looking at burners, you’ll quickly see that the BTU output can range from 50,000 all the way up to 200,000+, so it can be confusing when trying to determine what you really need.

For the purposes of this blog post, let’s assume you are trying to boil a 10-gallon stockpot or wort. We know that that average household stove ranges anywhere from 7,000-9,500 BTU, and this simply isn’t hot enough to boil 10-gallons in any reasonable period of time.

So lets take a look at what we will need. With a little help from Wolfram Alpha, we can figure out what we will need at a minimum.

First we need to see how much energy is needed to boil 5 gallons of water:

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Through this calculation, we see that it will require 48200 kJ (kilojoules).

Since we are looking for BTU, we need to convert kJ to BTU which we can also do with Wolfram Alpha:

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After running the conversion, we see that the result is approximately 45,000 BTU.

While these exact calculations are nice, they don’t necessarily translate to real-world scenarios. Here are some more rough approximations that we have found to hold true.

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5 gallons of wort will require at least 55,000 BTU 

10 gallons of wort will require 100,000 BTU

15+ gallons of wort will require 200,000 BTU

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Here is the basic gist of it: Any commercially available propane burner will be able to handle a 5-gallon pot or wort. As you go bigger, if you will want it to boil in roughly the same time, you will need to go hotter. The BTUs of burners, roughly speaking, make the jumps outlined in bold above so when you go up 5 gallons, make the jump to the next BTU tier.

 

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