Chlorine in ChCh water

[Reebs]

Now that Chlorine is being added to ChCh water (presumably in all supplies) is there anything special I should be doing to eliminate it when I brew?

 

Not really spent much time previously manipulating water chemistry when brewing but recent down events got me thinking about it.

 

Anyone presently do anything, do I even need to wory about it?

 

Cheers

Reebs

[Ralph]

yeh... boil it.

 

For 2 reasons. Some water in Chch has shown coliforms on testing, so you want to make sure you kill that by boiling and boiling will drive most of the Chlorine out of the water meaning you wont get so much in your brew.

[denimglen]

Put all your brew water in a container and add half a crushed campden tablet.  Stir.  Let sit at least 10 minutes before use.  Done.

 

That will remove free chlorine and chloramines also.

 

Charcoal filtering is a possibility also but much slower and won't remove chloramines.  The upside is that it will remove other crap from your water that campden won't, so using both isn't a bad idea.  Personally I use campden only.

[David Upex]

Where do you get campden tablets from?

[Pilgrim]

Any home brew shop that sells supplies for winemakers should have them. They are used to kill the yeast and thereby stop fermentation at the right FG.

[James P]

I go out to Kaiapoi to get my water now! :)

[Bren]

Did you have some luck with this? I've held off brewing so far as the water tastes pretty terrible (at least compared to the normal goodness) but I'm finally running out of beer now... worrying ;)   Just wondering how people are getting on with it?

[Dougal]

A laboratory tech friend tested it for me and found that we have 4.8mg/litre here in St Albans. The upper limit is 5mg, so it's quite noticeable. Acocrding to another friend at the Council only the central city supply is currently chlorinated- none detectable at Canterbury Uni where I work. Not sure how big an area the central supply covers.

I'm using Sodium Met to do the same thing as campden tablets, but I'm not dead sure how much to use. A couple of post earthquake beers have been unnaturally estery and I'm getting a bit paranoid that it could be the water.  

[Reebs]

I'm in Papanui and the chlorine is noticiable on some days, others not.

I used campden and gave it the full beans when boiling so hopefully no lasting effects.

First post-22 Feb brew is smelling great - although that could be the 100g dry hopping overpowering everything else.

 

[Ralph]

I too have put down a few brews since the feb quake, and have campdened the water as well as boiled it. No noticeable chlorine taste in any of the beers. 

 

I would have thought that slightly overdosing with things like Sod. Metibisulphate would not have much effect on the taste? I assume if there is slightly more active compounds than necessary that they just react through and leave reagents that are ok in the solution??

[Dougal]

This link in Brew Your Own on removing chlorine is useful. I worked out that I need about 0.6g of sodium met for every 30 litres of chlorinated water.

[Quinn]

Im out in Belfast and havent really noticed any change in the taste of the water.usally i use boiled water anyhow":)

 

[Chris Mills]

Sodium metabisulphite sounds like a pretty intense kind of water treatment. I would have thought it would matter if it's chloramine or chlorine that is in the water. You should check as the process is different depending on which is being used to treat the water.

How about this from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloramine

Removing chloramine from water

Chloramine can be removed from tap water by treatment with superchlorination (10 ppm or more of free chlorine, such as from a dose of sodium hypochlorite bleach or pool sanitizer) while maintaining a pH of about 7 (such as from a dose of hydrochloric acid). Hypochlorous acid from the free chlorine strips the ammonia from the chloramine, and the ammonia outgasses from the surface of the bulk water. This process takes about 24 hours for normal tap water concentrations of a few ppm of chloramine. Residual free chlorine can then be removed by exposure to bright sunlight for about 4 hours.