[yso191]

Chlorine (bleach) will also give a bandaid phenolic to beer.  Are you on city water that chlorinates?  If so, you will need a charcoal / carbon filter.  Sometimes a public well will have issues that they resolve by chlorinating the crap out of the water.  Also, since you mentioned using bleach to sanitize, be sure there is no residue.

Thanks. I only used bleach for fermenter sanitation on one batch that tasted good (no bandaid phenolic flavors).  Reports are somewhat inclusive for my area, but, I believe my tap water contains chloramine.  Carbon/charcoal filters won’t remove chloramine. I treat my mash and sparge water with Campden tablets to remove any chlorine and/or chloramine.

Not to argue, but yes a carbon filter will remove chloramine.  A quick google search produced this top response:
https://www.purewaterproducts.com/articles/removing-chloramines

[tommymorris]

Chlorine (bleach) will also give a bandaid phenolic to beer.  Are you on city water that chlorinates?  If so, you will need a charcoal / carbon filter.  Sometimes a public well will have issues that they resolve by chlorinating the crap out of the water.  Also, since you mentioned using bleach to sanitize, be sure there is no residue.

Thanks. I only used bleach for fermenter sanitation on one batch that tasted good (no bandaid phenolic flavors).  Reports are somewhat inclusive for my area, but, I believe my tap water contains chloramine.  Carbon/charcoal filters won’t remove chloramine. I treat my mash and sparge water with Campden tablets to remove any chlorine and/or chloramine.

Not to argue, but yes a carbon filter will remove chloramine.  A quick google search produced this top response:
https://www.purewaterproducts.com/articles/removing-chloramines

Sorry. I guess I misunderstood.


- formerly alestateyall.

[Robert]

I think the operative thing there is that it takes way more carbon (multiple stages) run with a very long contact time (tricklingly slowly) to get chloramine down to an acceptable level.  So for all practical purposes, carbon filtration is not effective on chloramine.  If you're going to go to that trouble, might as well just RO it.  Or stick with metabisulfite.

[Buckeye Hydro]

Treatment of tap water w/ chloramines with carbon is practical and common.  Just put a couple of these systems in commercial breweries this past week.

Russ