H20

My local tap water is fine. A charcoal filter or a Campden tablet to deal with the Chlorine is all the special treatment it needs.

 

It depends on where you are at in CA, as mineral content varies. The water in The Bay Area is pretty soft from the Sierras. The water in SD is hard and alkaline, with a fair amount from the CO river. Sierra Nevada does only some treatment of their water, Stone has an RO system to make mineral free water, then blend it with the main feed water to get to a target content.

You could buy Reverse osmosis water of distilled (more$) and use that water if you are doing extract brews like most for the first batch. Follow Mike's advice on chlorine removal. You add a pinch of gypsum for an IPA, but that is more advanced and I would avoid it until you get farther along. When playing with water chemistry it is good to have an understanding of the chemistry, the water salts, and a way to measure small amounts in the fraction of a gram range.

 

water is something that must be addressed if you intend to make authentic versions of classic styles. water is also just about the very last thing a new brewer needs to be concerned with. you do not need to do anything to your water. it is cheap, clear and good. the only thing you may consider is campden or a carbon filter to knock out the chlorine. a cheap-o Brita filter will work for a while. hell, just boiling and letting your water stand overnight will take care of most all chlorine issues.

first, learn how to brew. then work on becoming a good brewer. water chemistry applied to brewing is cool stuff but you are putting the cart way before the horse.

if it helps to know, the vast majority of breweries use municipal water with light treatment. its not like they buy a pristine plot of land and drill for an artesian water source. they turn on the faucet just like the rest of us.
Cheers.

 

If brewing with malt extract use distilled or RO is the cheaper option if your grocery store has a dispenser. You won't need to add anything to it or worry about off flavors from your water. That's one less variable you have to consider if you end up with off flavors. I've used spring water and distilled. Distilled seems to give me a better finished product.

 

For the purposes of getting your feet wet with this beginner kit, just go to your local everything store and get 'drinking' water or 'spring' water. these have been purified in different ways (sometimes reverse osmosis, sometimes ozonation, sometimes other ways) but will basically be clean of chemicals that you want to avoid and have enough mineral character to give the beer what it needs. It's like 79 cents a gallon.
Do not use distilled water, as was suggested above.

 

distilled water can not be used for all grain brewing but it seems unlikely this beginner kit is all grain.
DME and LME already have all the mineral content that is needed. using distilled water with DME or LME is acceptable and arguably the best way to brew beers that require soft water. pils for example.

still, tap water with a carbon filter is a great choice for starters. many bottle water brands are in fact using municipal water passed through a carbon filter. its not magic brew water because it came from a jug bought at the grocery store.
Cheers.

 

I will jump on this ,too. I said use RO or distilled with extract, as the extract was mashed with an appropriate mineral content. If one is adding spring water, don't just use a random water, as those can have very different mineral contents.

A good rule.
Distiller or RO is fine with extract.
All grain needs minerals appropriate for the grist. Tap water of usually OK with chlorine or chloramine removed. RO and Distilled are clean slates if one wishes to build the water for the grist and style. Water adjustment is one of the last things a brewer should tackle.

Edit - I use RO water for all grain, salts are added using Bru'nwater to calculate the grams/gallon to hit the targeted ppm for the brewing ions.

 

The Ruddles brewery used mains water and unfortunately the water company had a habit of switching its supply from one source to another.Eventually they took the heroic step of building their own pipeline from the new Rutland Water reservoir.Water quality and consistency is that important.

 

I'm assuming this is an extract kit (as opposed to all grain), and in that case I think the best water to use is the bulk RO water sold at your local megamart, usually for about 30 cents a gallon. Using tap water brings up issues with chloramines and other disinfectants your city may be using. Bulk RO water is cheaper than distilled or spring water, and it'll work great.

BTW, if you're buying a discounted kit, make sure the ingredients are reasonably up to date, especially the yeast. I see people selling kits sometimes on craigslist who say things like "this was a christmas present that I never used," which often means the ingredients have been sitting in somebody's garage for eight months, which is ... less than ideal. If it's one of those kinds of deals, do yourself a favor, write off your $5 investment, and get a fresh kit.

 

Do you have any breweries near you? You could ask them how they treat their water. As a homebrewer, I always used city water, but we have good water here, other than having a very high pH. I adjust with lactic acid to fix that problem, and since we are low in calcium, chloride, and sulfate, I use Calcium Chloride and Calcium Sulfate to adjust my water. For an IPA, I keep my Sulfate to Chloride ratio 3:1. People will probably suggest for a first time brewer that you don't bother with water adjustments, but using brewing salts is very easy and can really make a drastic difference in the final product.

 

I'm going to agree and disagree with you here. Yes, you can brew great beer without treating water at all. That said, water adjustments are so easy and they can help you take your beer to the next level, so IMO there is no reason that a new brewer should decide off the bat to not worry about it. At the very least, he can adjust the water based on other brewer's suggestions and figure out why they were important later on once the rest of the brewing process makes more sense.

 

My thoughts... assuming you won't knowing what's in your tap water before you brew, and considering that this is an all grain kit, and that it's an IPA, here's what I would do, in order of best to worst...

- Use RO or distilled water, adding 1.5 tsp of Gypsum and 0.5 tsp Calcium Chloride per 5 gallons of water. This will likely give you a reasonably decent mash pH and also flavors appropriate for the style. (Also, it's better to measure salts by weight, and to measure actual mash pH, and to work out the initial additions according to your specific grain bill using a mash pH calculator, but none of these things are likely to happen with a first batch, so I won't even mention them.)

- Treat your tap water with campden tablets to get rid of chlorine/chloramines, don't add any salts, and hope for the best.

- Use your tap water without removing chlorine/chloramines, don't add any salts, and hope for the best.