Adjusting water chemistry is extremely prevalent in brewing. For example, if you've ever had a hazy IPA, part of the softer bitterness comes from high levels of chloride in the water. The cost of common brewing salts (gypsum, calcium chloride, etc) is a small fraction of a penny per beer.
I'm guessing that the beer brewer you spoke with was talking about the cost of buying distilled or RO water, as opposed to the cost of the water adjustment itself. It's probably a lot more economical if you're cleaning and reusing graywater, vs. trucking in distilled water, or running municipal water through an RO filter and essentially paying twice for water treatment.
I don't know why you were downvoted, I came to write the same idea.
The brewer paid for the energy required to clean the saline of unwanted energy, and the shop owner pollutes the saline by adding unwanted energy back into it, incurring an additional cost for the brewer as he must expend more energy to also remove the energy added by the shop owner.
Looks like most of the people saying it's too expensive are talking about filtering the stuff out of water at or near the point of use. What's the cost to reduce the amount of these chemicals getting into the water in the first place?
> To avoid the chlorine, fluoride, and other additives found in modern tap water
You should be able to get a water report from your municipality, listing any treatments they perform. Chlorine and similar can be removed with Campden tablets, available at your homebrew store. I've never heard of fluoride causing a change in a fermented product. I know plenty of breweries that just use fluoridated city water.
Note the special lid on that mason jar for allowing off-gassing. Fermenting in a mason jar with a standard lid is a recipe for exploding glass.
I'm not sure what to make of the fermentation time here. Meads are usually fermented longer, older recipes tend to have very short fermentation times. Especially older, low gravity recipes.
If you don't want to play the guessing game on fermentation time, buy a hydrometer or refractometer.
I wish they would spend some of that money on removing limescale from the water.
Hoestly, the savings for the economy in terms of wasted electricity from scaled up kettles and the reduction in chemicals needed to remove the near instant buildup of limescale would be worth it 10 times over.
Mostly my comment was because I saw an expensive and complicated home gray-water contraption that seemed to aim for 100% recycling of gray-water. I figured there was cost-savings to be had by aiming for a lower recovery rate.
Yes, probably needs some disinfection, but should vastly reduce the filtration load.
It's expensive, but distilled water will fix that. Cheaper is filling it up from an RO filter (not as low in minerals as distilled, but probably "good enough")
I’ll check out the book but while I wait for shipping, could you share what you do with the RO water? Do you put your own mineral and salt profile into it, or just use it as pure H2O? I have an RO filter and build my own water profile for my homebrew beer, hadn’t started down that road for coffee yet.
The slag issue can be solved by using demineralized water, and reverse osmosis water filter, which remove almost all minerals, can be had for pretty cheap these days.
I’d wild-ass guess that it’s using a cheaper water treatment? If you don’t want your water going green on the shelves, you need _some_ solution, and I’m guessing a dab of chlorine or similar both achieves that and makes the water taste weird.
Yes, and it would improve the taste. If you like San Pellegrino, you can get a similar taste at much lower cost by adding "Burton Salts" (a blend of salts meant to imitate the water of Burton on Trent, which is famously well suited for making pale ales, widely available from brewing suppliers) to soft water.
And people have made spreadsheets to help with cloning specific mineral waters with the exact blend of salts, e.g.:
Because it costs more money, takes more time, and requires more knowledge about the state of things. I haven't a clue what you mean by chlorination. You're probably right, but it's not obvious.
Have you checked to see what treating your water would cost? Chemical water softeners are relatively cheap. This one[1] costs roughly $0.30 per load of laundry. If it doubled the wash lifetime of your shirts you're throwing away a ton of money by not doing it.
I'm guessing that the beer brewer you spoke with was talking about the cost of buying distilled or RO water, as opposed to the cost of the water adjustment itself. It's probably a lot more economical if you're cleaning and reusing graywater, vs. trucking in distilled water, or running municipal water through an RO filter and essentially paying twice for water treatment.
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