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Author Topic: Boiling strike water to remove chloramine  (Read 3911 times)

Offline blair.streit

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Re: Boiling strike water to remove chloramine
« Reply #15 on: April 19, 2016, 02:51:19 pm »
AJ and I say that boiling for chloramine removal is ineffective...but only in the fact that it takes a LOT of energy to drive off chloramine. It works, but its not a good use of your time or resources.
Thanks for cleaning up my poor paraphrase. As we're all keenly aware just after tax day -- ineffective and inefficient are not exactly the same thing :-)

Offline toby

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Re: Boiling strike water to remove chloramine
« Reply #16 on: April 19, 2016, 03:07:19 pm »
I don't think Band Aids smell like they used to anymore.

A lot of them are fabric these days anyway, so don't have the same chemical/plastic smell they used to.

Offline zwiller

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Re: Boiling strike water to remove chloramine
« Reply #17 on: April 20, 2016, 08:30:46 am »
I struggled with chlorine awhile when I first started.  Back then, Charlie didn't really get into that detail and no web forums… I was fortunate the LHBS guy knew his stuff.  I still remember tasting the results of my first carbon filtered homebrew vividly.  Incidently, my beers didn’t not display the typical band aid/medicinal off flavor.  It was kinda a faint smoky, stale type flavor and I think that made it harder to diagnose. 
Sam
Sandusky, OH

Offline Stevie

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Re: Boiling strike water to remove chloramine
« Reply #18 on: April 20, 2016, 09:06:29 am »
I don't always get bandaid, but I know what it is immediately when I taste it.

Offline blair.streit

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Re: Boiling strike water to remove chloramine
« Reply #19 on: April 20, 2016, 09:24:03 am »
I struggled with chlorine awhile when I first started.  Back then, Charlie didn't really get into that detail and no web forums… I was fortunate the LHBS guy knew his stuff.  I still remember tasting the results of my first carbon filtered homebrew vividly.  Incidently, my beers didn’t not display the typical band aid/medicinal off flavor.  It was kinda a faint smoky, stale type flavor and I think that made it harder to diagnose.
And I think over the last 20 years, a significant percentage of large water treatment plants have changed from using chlorine to using chloramine. In the chlorine days, leaving the water sitting for a little while, pouring between vessels and heating and/or boiling probably took care of a large part of the issue. Add in a little filtering and you were home free.

Now it seems like most places use chloramine and if you're not using Campden you have to be a lot more fastidious about how you deal with the chloramine or risk off flavors. I was able to detect significant chlorophenols in previous batches where I had used Campden in the mash/sparge water, but I had only filtered my 1L of starter wort which was then pitched into the batch. After tasting the starter wort and then tasting a subsequent starter where I used distilled water, it became clear to me that a little bit of chlorophenol goes a long way....

Offline blair.streit

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Re: Boiling strike water to remove chloramine
« Reply #20 on: April 20, 2016, 09:29:04 am »
I don't always get bandaid, but I know what it is immediately when I taste it.
Yeah, one of my brew buddies actually described it as "tart". At first I thought that meant my starter might be infected, so I saved some of the "tart" starter wort in a loosely covered container in my garage at ~80F for a week. I smelled/tasted again and no change, so I was pretty convinced it was not from microbes.

I don't have a good descriptor either. Medicinal/plastic-like get close. Chloraseptic too. But something about those just doesn't quite hit it on the nose for me. There's probably some kind of candy flavor that's close, but off the cuff I can't think of it. Maybe sour-patch kids?