Do Campden tablets bring Cl levels down to zero?

I think they only affect chlorine and chloramines. Id be interested to hear what people say as a recent batch I bottle conditioned seems to have a chlorine related off flavor and my wards lab water report seems to make no mention of testing for chlorine/chloramine levels.

http://beeradvocate.com/community/threads/has-anyone-used-campden-tablets-to-remove-chlorine.30689/

 

adding campden to remove chlorine will up your chloride levels as the chlorine is reduced (as in redox rx) by the Na you get chloride

 

residual chlorine in drinking water is supposed to be <4ppm or mg/L, so at most you'd be adding that much Cl- and Na/K (depending on type of campden) depends on how many tablets you add

each tablet is generally 0.44g of K-meta of which ~17.6% is K, so for each tab your getting ~75mg of K (assuming the tab is only k-meta and no binding agent/filler/etc)

for Na-meta (older type) its 12% Na per tab, = 53mg Na (again assuming its all Na-meta and its weights 0.44g)

BTW 1tab/gal thata is always said to be the rule for adding to must/wort to knock down yeast and kill bacteria is quite excessive and you can easily get away with 1/3 as much

for your use, they say 1tab treats 20gal, now Ive never run the numbers myself to see if this is true, but assuming it is adding either 75mg K or 53mg Na to 20gal of H20 is like pissing in the ocean as far as water adjustments for beer flavor

 

Chloride (the ion) and Chlorine (the neutral atom) are different. Campden will get rid of the chlorine. It will not reduce your chloride.

To increase Na, add table salt or baking soda. Table salt will also increase chlorides and will not affect pH. Baking soda will not increase chlorides, but will increase pH.

 

Yes. If you want to reduce Sodium or Chlorides, you have three choices...
- Mix with distilled/RO water
- Build from purchased RO/Distilled
- RO filter your own tap water and build from there.

If you know your tap water's profile (or even if you don't, for options two and three), there are spreadsheets that make it easy. Here's mine, which contains utahbeerdude's water models...
BrewCipher

 

Hmmmm. Seems I've been using too much campden. Luckily I guess it wasn't tooooooo much, or my yeast wouldn't work at all. From now on, 1/2 a tablet / 10 gals H2O sounds like what I should have been using.

 

Not sure if there is confusion on this point, but plant-like flavors and chlorine are different animals. Plant-like flavors are sometimes described with the term chlorophyll, which is of course the green pigment in plants. I'm not sure if chlorophyll is really what people are tasting when they say they get plant flavor, but it could be. However chlorophyll has no chlorine in it. Both terms derive from a Greek word meaning green (green pigment, green gas: no chemical relationship, just coincidence). I've never heard of brewing water characterized as having plant-like flavor. Are you drawing water directly from an over-enriched lake that is full of algae?