Brewing with packaged drinking water in India

Why the water jar is a good place to start

Borewell water in much of India is hard, salty or both. Municipal water changes with the season and often carries chlorine. Neither is ideal for a first beer.

Packaged drinking water, the 20 litre jars and the one litre bottles, is usually made by reverse osmosis and then disinfected with ozone or UV. What comes out is low in minerals and low in chlorine. For brewing that is a good thing. You cannot easily take minerals out of water at home, but you can add them in with a kitchen scale.

So think of the jar as a blank page. On its own it will make thin, slightly flat tasting beer. With a few grams of the right salts it will make almost any style well.

What is actually in the jar

Brands differ and batches differ. Some plants strip the water almost bare. Others blend a little raw water back in or dose minerals for taste. The label may print a total dissolved solids (TDS) figure. Some also list calcium, magnesium and pH.

Treat the label as a guide rather than a lab report. A pen style TDS meter is cheap and tells you more than most labels do. If the jar reads low, roughly under 100 ppm, brew with it as if it were RO water. If it reads well above that, ask the supplier for a water report or switch brand, because you cannot tell which minerals make up the number.

Smell it too. A clean jar smells of nothing. A plastic or musty smell, or a jar that has sat in the sun on a delivery van all afternoon, is not one to brew with.

How much water a brew day needs

A 20 litre all-grain batch uses more than 20 litres of water. You lose some to grain absorption, some to boil-off and some to the trub left in the kettle. For a brew in a bag batch, plan on about 30 to 32 litres, which is one jar and half of another. Extract brewers need less, roughly 24 to 26 litres.

Order an extra jar. You will want clean water for rehydrating yeast, topping up the fermenter and mixing sanitiser. Running short at the boil is a bad way to discover your boil-off rate.

Adding calcium back

Yeast and enzymes both need calcium. It helps the mash reach the right pH, helps yeast settle out at the end of fermentation and helps the beer clear. Near-zero water gives you none, so the first job is putting some back.

The two salts that do most of the work are gypsum (calcium sulphate) and calcium chloride. One gram of each in ten litres of soft water adds roughly 50 ppm of calcium between them, with about 56 ppm sulphate from the gypsum and about 48 ppm chloride from the calcium chloride. Most beers are happy with 50 to 100 ppm calcium.

A simple starting point for 30 litres of jar water:

• Pale lager or a delicate wheat beer: 2 g gypsum and 2 g calcium chloride.
• Pale ale or IPA: 5 g gypsum and 2 g calcium chloride, for a drier, sharper hop finish.
• Brown ale, porter or stout: 2 g gypsum and 4 g calcium chloride, for a rounder malt body.

Weigh on a scale that reads to 0.1 g. A teaspoon of gypsum weighs very differently from a teaspoon of calcium chloride, so spoons are a guess.

Checking the mash pH

The mash wants a pH of about 5.2 to 5.6. Very pale grists in soft water can sit at the top of that range or just above it. Darker malts are acidic and pull the pH down on their own, so a stout in jar water usually lands fine.

Test ten minutes into the mash with pH strips made for the 4 to 7 range, or a meter if you have one, on a sample cooled to room temperature. If a pale beer reads high, a few millilitres of food grade lactic acid will bring it down. Add a little at a time and test again.

This is where most homebrewers stall. Knowing the salts is easy. Knowing how much the grist itself shifts pH and adjusting before the beer tells you something went wrong, takes practice on real batches.

Chlorine, Campden tablets and when to skip them

Chlorine reacts with compounds from malt and yeast to make chlorophenols, which taste of plastic or antiseptic and show up at tiny levels. It is one of the common beer off flavours in tap water brews.

Ozonated packaged water normally has none, so most of the time you can skip treatment. If the jar smells of a swimming pool, crush half a Campden tablet into the full brew day volume. One tablet treats about 75 litres, so half is plenty. Use it on the hot liquor before mashing in.

When packaged water is not the answer

For a pilsner or a pale lager, soft water is what you want. The jar gets you there cheaply. For most other styles it is a base you build on. If you brew often, an RO unit at home gives you the same blank page without the jar deliveries. Our guide to RO water for brewing covers that route.

Whatever water you choose, write the salts into your brew log. When a batch tastes better than the last one, you want to know whether it was the hops or the two extra grams of gypsum.

Common questions

Can I brew with packaged drinking water straight from the jar?

You can, and it will make beer, but it is usually too soft for good flavour and mash pH. Add calcium salts such as gypsum and calcium chloride before you mash.

Is natural mineral water better for brewing?

Not usually. Mineral water carries whatever minerals its source has, often more bicarbonate than pale beers want. It also costs more. Soft packaged water plus measured salts gives you more control.

Do I need Campden tablets with jar water?

Usually not, because most packaged water is disinfected with ozone or UV rather than chlorine. If the water smells of chlorine, half a tablet treats a full 20 litre batch.