I am looking to further improve my home brewing skills by adjusting water profiles...its been a little intimidating up to this point, but I think it's something I need to do to take my beer to a better level. I was looking through Zymurgy's May/June edition and ran into this smart digital water testing smart brew test smarter, brew better. Basically, it's a device that will pair via Bluetooth to your smartphone and give you the water's chemistry... Has anyone used this or know of anyone to have this? Is this worth the almost $200? From what I can see, the product looks to be pretty nice. Thanks in advance and cheers!
Looking at that link, it appears to be focused on testing swimming pool water, all of the basic tests are there (alkalinity, ph, chlorine, copper, calcium hardness). I test my pool water with basic titration kits (keep adding drops until the color changes), my guess is the photometer is tracking the changing colors of either strips or liquids. I don't think there is too much here for brewers. At that price, I would buy a RO system and build my water from scratch.
I looked a little more at the site. It is a photometer that reads color changes in strips. If you can buy those strips, you can eyeball the color, but I'm not sure there are strips for things like sulfates or calcium and given my experience with ph strips, I would not trust the results. Here are the instructions for "sulfate" https://www.dropbox.com/s/v8iz9jmta424lke/iDip Instruction Manual_Sulfate.pdf?dl=0 It looks like you pay $5 for each chemical test you want to perform. Then, you have to buy the strips as well. The beer version/kit is $309. That buys a lot of RO water from the store or a nice RO system.
Yea, true. After doing more research, I think I'm just going to buy me an r.o. system. Now I just have to decipher through hundreds of them to see what will best suit my needs.
Wardlabs also does a brewing water report. W-5A looks like it would do pretty well. It's a snapshot of what your water is like coming out of the tap and will get you in the ballpark for about $30. http://wardlab.com/FeeSchedule/WardLabs_FeeSchedule_Web.pdf#page=10
I did a bit of research a year or so ago (stuff kept coming up so I haven't pulled the trigger yet). This appears to be a very good deal on an RO system http://www.bulkreefsupply.com/brs-4-stage-value-ro-di-system-75gpd-2.html (although it is out of stock right now). My impression is brewers don't need "deionization" or "DI" so you can skip that as you look.
I am a fan of this company: http://airwaterice.com/drinking-water-system/water-cop-5-stage-ro-50-gpd.html. I purchased their 75GPD unit for my reef tank water needs and would use them again if I wanted a pure drinking water option. Right now, I simply by-passed my DI as you do not need to do that for drinking water.
Ward labs had a great interview on either dr homebrew or brew strong a few months back. The homebrew kit is just a scaled down version of the pro kit. But honestly, if you don't have temp control for fermentation I would invest in that first.
