Brewing water parameters

Just wanted to dump this info somewhere, where I can easily retrieve in future. PUB isn't exactly forthcoming about the exact water parameters we have, so it can be frustrating when trying to dial in water profiles for brewing. Thankfully an industry friend helped me out on this. And as the brewery is somewhat near to my home, I'm going to just base it off the assumption that we get approximately similar water profiles:

Ca 21ppm
Mg 2ppm
Na 18ppm
Cl 28ppm
SO4 27ppm
Alkalinity (CaCO3) 36ppm

Granted, we're lucky that straight tap water in Singapore is fine for brewing. But tweaking it to achieve proper Ca2+ levels, mash pH and Cl-/So4- ratios do make a significant difference for some beer styles.

More importantly though, it's really the chloramines in our water that messes up the beer - I think RO/DI is probably overkill, but some metabisulfite added to the mash/sparge water will really help prevent phenol formation during fermentation. For the really obsessive ones out there, using sodium metab will also add some ions to the beer - 2.67mg/L of Na+ per every 1mg/L chloramine neutralized. But seriously .. there're probably more things to worry about on brewday than that tiny bit of Na/Cl/whatever else is generated during neutralization!

On a totally unrelated note - I'm still contemplating switching platforms. Google has been totally neglecting Blogger and I'm pretty comfortable working on Wordpress, but there is still a little bit of sentimental value here haha. Probably think about this one for a few more weeks before deciding.