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purified water use


daveflintstone

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Absolutely.

The mineral content, and any other impurities for that matter, will potentially affect the yeast. As such, can result in off or inconsistent flavors from one fermentation to the next. Those off flavors can then carry over to the distillate. Plus, there may be volatile contaminants that can carry over.

As in anything, garbage in = garbage out. Even though you don't *have* to be as anal as a brewer who's packaging the brew for sale, your final product will not suffer if you are.

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But if one is making vodka, does one need to be concerned with inconsistent flavors, since those will be removed during distillation and filtration?

In my mind, using regular water that will then be distilled will result in a product the same as using distilled water in the first place. Am I missing something in translation?

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Chlorine can inhibit yeast growth and form unpleasant flavor compounds known as chlorophenols, which taste like plastic resin or burning electrical wire.

All brewers remove chlorine from their water before brewing. You can boil the water for 30 minutes to volatilize chlorine then chill before adding yeast.

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If you are going to cook your mash as we do and at this elevation, 6100 feet above sea level, our water boils at about 180, and we use a direct steam injection method to heat with, should this not cook off any chlorine contained in the water used for mashing? We hold that temperature for 1/2 hour to make sure we are cooking all the starch out of the grains we can then we have to cool it down to 145 to add our malted barley or risk killing the enzymes we need to convert that starch to sugar. We then have to further cool it down to around 95 before transferring it to our fermentation tanks which at this time we cast our yeast. Within 3 to 5 days fermentation is complete. Our town puts in only just enough chlorine in to make it legal. The water we use to make our cut is first run through a activated charcoal cartridge then we use another activated charcoal filtering system before bottling. Everything seams to be working just fine here. Maybe I am missing something? Coop

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Depends on where you are.

In San Diego, the municipal water supply is abyssmal. Where I grew up (CO's Western Slope, though a decent distance from you, Coop) the municipal water was as good or better than that bottled for drinking.

There's no single answer that's universally applicable. Similarly, I'm a big fan of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Coop, if what you've got going on is making good spirit, I would see no reason to change.

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