As anyone in the brewing world will tell you, your water profile is a major key and ingredient for getting the beers you want to taste as they should. In March of 2011 I sent water samples out to Ward Labs in Kearney, Nebraska to get my water tested. It didn’t take that long for the results and wasn’t all that expensive either, I think I paid about $20 for the test in 2011. Once I received the B-and-E water profile I was able to put it into Beersmith but really didn’t know what to do with it. So it just sat idle and I continued to brew beer without any adjustment to my water.
The ‘Water Profile’ conversation was recently resurrected at my online watering hole HomeBrewChatter which got me to thinking about it all over again. I dug out the water analysis and along with this EZ Water Calculator was able to figure out what I needed to modify my mash profile to hopefully make better beer.
The question that comes up though is how much can a water profile change in 3.5 years. If your water is like mine and is piped in from the City of Milwaukee it could change a lot or not at all. One would hope that it doesn’t change at all. Well, we are going to find out. I’ll post the results of the test here once I get them. I also think I am going to do a test with and without modifying the water profile just to see how important the water profile really is.
If you would like to order a Homebrew water test use this link. All you really need is the W-6 Household test.
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