Brewing Education: How Important is Water Quality?

Welcome back to our ongoing educational series on home brewing your own mead. Today we are taking a look at the single largest ingredient used in mead and how it can affect the brewing process and taste of your final product: Water.

Water constitutes the vast majority of what makes up your mead and can therefore have a significant impact on how well your yeast performs to how good your mead tastes after fermentation. First off you obviously want to have clean water, nothing visibly floating in it and no noticeable coloration. Many home brew recipes call for the use of distilled water, which is usually cheap and widely available and will not be a bad choice. Distilled water has no contaminates and no chemical additives which means there is no chance of something in your water interfering with your yeast and causing it to stall or die; but there are some beneficial minerals in regular water that helps yeast grow and establish strong colonies to begin fermentation which means you lose that advantage as well.

Next is the option of filtered water. This option can be a little iffy since different filters remove different things, and what you are mainly trying to limit in your water is chemical contamination, specifically chlorine since it is harmful to yeast and in higher quantities can cause bad flavors during fermentation. Most commercially available water filters will produce water that is adequate for brewing, however the single type of filter system most brewers are currently flocking to is the reverse osmosis (RO) filters. RO water is definitely high quality water for brewing, but the drawback is that in order to create a gallon of RO water, you typically get 4-6 gallons of waste water which can be quite wasteful and expensive depending on how big of an operation you may be wanting to start.

Lastly is well water and/or tap water. If you do not have any access to other types of water then this will work, but it is not recommended for reasons stated above. The chemical additives can be harmful to the yeast and produce "icky" flavors in your brew, and they can also compete with the yeast for nutrient resources which could end up starving out your yeast. With the availability of bottled water and distilled water in nearly every chain grocer this should only be used as a last resort.

There are additives, nutrients, and other agents that can be introduced to your brew to help improve water quality and boost the strength of your yeast strain. Coincidentally that will be the subject of the next Brewing Education article, and will be the kickoff for what we are dubbing the intermediate level of brewing education.

Until then stay safe and remember to love one another!

~ The Forge Meadery