Help with band aid bombs

For extract beers, you should probably use RO and not add any minerals. The minerals were (or should have been) added for the extract making process.

 

Well crap. I just brewed a Tripel with tap water. I am really hoping I am not likely to own this off-flavor. We are producing another batch soon so I will assess the water report and determine if I want to do some mitigation.

ETA: Water report does not record Chloramine, it appears like Chlorine can be used in our tap water. Hmm... not sure exactly what I could do with this information.

 

For chlorine, use campden tablets before brewing, just like for chloramines. Or, with chlorine you could let the water sit in the open air until the chlorine evaporates. (Not fast.)

 

I agree with this, I just want to add a little nuance on the rate of chlorine degassing. It is pretty slow at room temperature, but it is faster as the water heats up. If you bring your strike water to a boil then let it cool (either naturally or with an immersion chiller) before adding it to the grain, I don't think there will be any significant amount of chlorine left in solution. (This advice does not apply to chloramines.) The same goes, to a lesser extent, for heating the strike water to 170 or 180 or whatever. So I wouldn't worry too much about this batch if you (A) know for a fact that there are no chloramines in the water and (B) heated your strike water into the 170s or whatever before it hit your grain.

All of that said, it's cheap and easy to add a campden tablet, it works reliably for both chlorines and chloramines, and it probably has other benefits for your beer (sodium metabisulfite is used by "low dissolved oxygen" or "LoDo" homebrewers to reduce oxidation during the mash). So I would never advise relying solely on degassing to get rid of chlorine, but at the same time I wouldn't necessarily panic if I were in your shoes.

 

I don't have any direct experience with this, but most of the internet wisdom I've seen says to boil for either 15 minutes or for 20 minutes to rid a kettle of water of chlorine. I imagine the exact time needed probably depends on the volume of water, the concentration of chlorine to start with, vigor of boil, and kettle geometry. 170F-180F would be slower, though I don't know how much slower.

 

Was this a municipal water quality report? Or a lab test you had done? I take it chlorine was recorded? I ask because unless the test specifically looks for chloramines, they wouldn't be recorded (even if present).

 

honestly, I use tap water and I haven't had issues with band-aid taste (at least not that I couldn't definitively point to something else as the cause.)
I haven't used campden in my brewing water, only in ciders when I've made them.
That said, I am considering a Reverse-Osmosis machine and building brewing water from scratch.

 

This is a copy and paste repost of @Dan_K from above. Dafuq bots

 

Just heard about a major brewery (won't say who to save some embarrassment) but they were having troubles with an infection even after cleaning their plate chiller numerous times, they found out that they weren't cleaning the inline aerator/oxygen diffuser properly.