Help! Anyone have experience with ion-exchange softened bore water - High in sodium.

[Steve Popham]

I recently moved to an area with bore water, after only ever brewing with city water and having to boil off the chlorine, I thought "great" I'll have natural, soft, water. Not so!

5 days into fermentation of my first, much anticipated, batch, I was chatting to the neighbour about whether the bore water was treated and he informed me that it was treated with a "salt filter", I have since learned that that means that the mg and ca are basically swapped out for sodium chloride.

(feeling really stupid that I didn't ask first, I have never heard of salt filtration).

So I as I understand it, this is going to make my mash less efficient (it did, I got 58%) and make the beer taste salty (I tasted a sample and think sea-water, yuk).

The house has a carbon underbench filter fitted in the kitchen, but I am unclear as to whether this will remove the sodium. I don't want to buy pure water, cost of brewing is a big issue for me.

There are some facts on sodium in water that I can't find the answer to.

- The water does not taste salty to me, why does the beer taste so much so? What chemistry is happening here? (I have a bunch of brewing books but none explain it). I once read that if the water tastes good, it should be good to brew with, that does not seem to be the case.

 - Does a carbon filter remove sodium?

- If so should I build a water profile based on pure (RO) water? (assuming that the ion-exchange removed the mg and ca and the carbon removed everything else?).

- If not, and I had to (heaven forbid) move to extract brewing, would it follow that the impact of the sodium on the final beer would be halved (being that I would use half the total volume of water).

- Is there any way to reduce or balance the sodium with other water additions? or remove any other way?

- And finally, is there anything I can do to save my current batch? or is it destined for the slugs and snails?

Cheers,

[Gareth G]

If you can't get your water to work, and you don't want to buy it, you could always buy several water containers and fill them up at work or a friends house (assuming they have decent reticulated water).

[Steve Popham]

Yes, thanks, good idea. I have a couple of 20L cubes. I could probably even just dilute the total with a portion of good water.

[Tim Westbrook]

interesting read. Gives some details about flavour, if not chemistry. 

http://byo.com/stories/wizard/article/section/121-mr-wizard/1689-wo...

We had softened water growing up, I never realized how much sodium is contained in this water.

Can you get to the supply before the "filter" ? Maybe you could use unsoft version of your well water. 

Good luck

[Steve Popham]

Good article, thanks.  I don't the the 11 neighbours that share the supply would appreciate me tinkering around at the source and it may be too high in ca and mg (although could boil some off).

I did try boiling off a few litres of both the sodium bore water and the water that had gone through the kitchen filter, interesting that both samples left a chalk like residue in the pot, which was not very salty (more chalky), so that is odd.

I have also made 2 identical hopped DME starter batches, one with each type of water. The one with the likelihood of having more sodium seems a more rounded bitterness the other seems sharper and a little sour (which is more to my taste I think). Neither seem salty and I did boil the water down from 6L to 1L to accentuate any difference.

Of note though is that the one with "less" sodium appears to have a better fermentation (perhaps due to the sodium in the other killing yeast?).

I'm going to drink it no matter what so I think that I will use roughly half of each and add a pinch of chalk & epsom in.