Changes to water treatment

[Tubetec]

Back in the old days ,particularly after heavy rains you would sometimes get a smell of chlorine from mains tap water ,this is a precautionary measure usually but also if any microbiological life is found  they blast the system .
Lately Ive found that smell is always there , it seems to evaporate after a short time.
Just wondering if anyone knows about water treatment systems and how things might have changed  in recent times .
I will be calling to see the manager of the local waterworks as soon as I can  to try and get some kind of official word about whats changed .

Any insights greatly appreciated.

 

[JohnRoberts]

In the US they are supposed to be routinely tested. In my small town I have received "boil water" notices in the mail, well after the fact, and too late to protect me if I actually drank my tap water.  : (I don't)

I have been brewing beer for decades and learned the hard way, that my tap water has enough added clorox (or equivalent) to kill my beer yeast. Microbes are microbes... I installed a reverse osmosis water filter and never looked back.

JR

PS: For some recent drama search the "Flint, Michigan drinking water crisis"... Acidic water leached lead out of aging plumbing contaminating the cities water supply. 

 

[Tubetec]

Thanks for that John.
A friend of mine brews his own ,so that might explain the variability of the yeast activity he's been seeing 
As I said normally there is no detectable odor ,at least thats how it used to be , now its always there.
If theres a change in policy country wide here the public need to know in order to be better informed and to make a better safer choices for their families especially the young. I guess most new build properties now have  filtering on the cold tap in the kitchen

If there upping the ppm's of chlorine based  chemicals in the water supply that information is in the public interest , yet another thing on my snag list for my local elected representatives .Im going to take such pleasure from  cornering and slapping the p!ss out of them , in a verbal and metaphorical sense of course  ;D

 

[JohnRoberts]

Thanks for that John.
A friend of mine brews his own ,so that might explain the variability of the yeast activity he's been seeing 
As I said normally there is no detectable odor ,at least thats how it used to be , now its always there.
If theres a change in policy country wide here the public need to know in order to be better informed and to make a better safer choices for their families especially the young. I guess most new build properties now have  filtering on the cold tap in the kitchen

If there upping the ppm's of chlorine based  chemicals in the water supply that information is in the public interest , yet another thing on my snag list for my local elected representatives .Im going to take such pleasure from  cornering and slapping the p!ss out of them , in a verbal and metaphorical sense of course  ;D

For home brewing with unreliable tap water it may be worth buying bottled water... I bought a lot before setting up my own RO capability.

JR

 

[cyrano]

PS: For some recent drama search the "Flint, Michigan drinking water crisis"... Acidic water leached lead out of aging plumbing contaminating the cities water supply.

That's not what happened.

That's how they tried to cover it up.

Lead wasn't the only contaminant. It started when the city changed supply, for financial reasons. They knew very well the water was heavily contaminated with various chemicals and bio-contamination. It was covered up for years, leaving the youth of Flint with a very dark future, because of lead-poisoning.

Old lead tubes are relatively harmless, if the water quality is OK. These tubes will not simply dissolve. The lead in Flint's water was already present in the river, caused by very bad industrial pollution. Pollution bad enough to kill live stock that had been drinking water from that river.

According to a recent EPA report, more than 4000 towns in the US have water worse than Flint. Lead poisoning being the main, but not the only problem.

The link between lead poisoning and violent behaviour has always been denied in the USA, from the very beginning, when over half of the workers from one of the first plants that added lead to gasoline became violently insane.

Remarkably, we've known for many centuries that lead is deadly. Yet, the MD that rediscovered it in 19th century Britain, was discredited by his peers and ended up in an insane asylum. Look up "cider disease" if you're interested.

I worked in water treatment for a number of years, until the company was taken over by a Dutch company.

What the water company supplies, is drinking water. What you buy in plastic bottles, is exactly the same, unless marked "Mineral water".

Nestlé understands. They've been buying wells allover the world, while these are still cheap. They already own >20% of established wells suitable for drinking water production.

There's a major drought in the USA atm, if I'm not mistaken.

 

[cyrano]

Chlorinated water is harmless, if dosage is right. It evaporates easily.

If there's a clear smell, the water company's dosage system isn't functioning properly or they are disinfecting pipes, in which case they should warn you.

In Africa, it's common to overdose if they know bacterial water quality is bad. Unfortunately, it doesn't really help.

 

[Tubetec]

Good informative posts as usual Cyrano,
thanks again.

 

[scott2000]

Look up "cider disease" if you're interested.

Do you have a link? I can't seem to find anything....

 

[cyrano]

It's mentioned in the Wikipedia article about lead poisoning:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning

Apparently, "Devonshire colic" was a better name as a search phrase.

 

[PRR]

My town does not put chlorine in water. My town does not supply water.

ANY town water which does not smell of chlorine is very suspicious. Even IF the well was pure, there's always stagnant water in the tanks and pipes. (There are alternates for chlorine, and Cl filters for your tap, so a Cl-free water MAY be safe, but you gotta find out.)

We drink a bottled "spring water" which no longer comes from the spring but a town water system. I can find the official report for the town my bottle-water comes from. Bacteria is consistently zero, and industrial chemicals are so unlikely they have a waiver, but the Chlorine byproducts are right at the suggested limit. (I think my bottler must let the water air-out before bottling.)

I get my tap-water from my own well. I toss bleach in it a few times a year. We don't drink it so much, but it has a HIGH iron content, which oxidizes to a brown taint in tub and washer. (I guess the Chlorine binds the iron even better than Oxygen; also there is an iron-loving bacteria endemic in these waters.)

 

[JohnRoberts]

My town does not put chlorine in water. My town does not supply water.

ANY town water which does not smell of chlorine is very suspicious. Even IF the well was pure, there's always stagnant water in the tanks and pipes. (There are alternates for chlorine, and Cl filters for your tap, so a Cl-free water MAY be safe, but you gotta find out.)

We drink a bottled "spring water" which no longer comes from the spring but a town water system. I can find the official report for the town my bottle-water comes from. Bacteria is consistently zero, and industrial chemicals are so unlikely they have a waiver, but the Chlorine byproducts are right at the suggested limit. (I think my bottler must let the water air-out before bottling.)

I get my tap-water from my own well. I toss bleach in it a few times a year. We don't drink it so much, but it has a HIGH iron content, which oxidizes to a brown taint in tub and washer. (I guess the Chlorine binds the iron even better than Oxygen; also there is an iron-loving bacteria endemic in these waters.)

I live in downtown hickory so have city water and even sewers...  :

I did not appreciate chlorine smell in my water while I was brewing beer and having beer bottles explode because the yeast were compromised and didn't finish until weeks later after bottling...... Now after getting "boil water" notices weeks late I think the chlorine smell is not the worst thing that could happen... 

As a kid we had a lake house with a well in the basement... dumping clorox down into it was a rite of spring.  A shallow well near a lake is already a little dicey sounding. I think one winter a critter fell down in it and drowned.

JR

 

[Tubetec]

As I explained after heavy rainfall Ive come to expect a slight whiff of chlorine from my tap water .
Now its there all the time ,which signals to me an upping of the ppm added at the waterworks ,
if this is so its in the publics interest to be told this is the case .

I have a friend with a holiday cottage in a very remote part of co Kerry , its one of the few places left where water from the ground is actually drinkable unprocessed. Like many rural areas here in Ireland they have a private community based water scheme ,brand new state of the art ,no chemical crap added , micron filtered and high intensity UV light is used to neutralise any possibility of microbes , its built and run by locals ,many of whom own the heavy machinery required to lay the pipes by the roadside . The usual fee to the locals is 130 euros per year , although as far as I know a concessionary rate is available to the owners of holiday homes who have minimal usage , typically the house owner will keep the stop cock in the ground closed when their away .

Town water here is run by an abortion of an entity called Irish water , its hard to know if its state ,semi state or private for profit , the water they produce is not to EU specification , its flouridised and chlorinated . Same entity also handles sewage ,a new multi million euro sewage treatment works is only about 3km across the fields from me , despite promises promises promises from locally elected representatives ,Ive only seen water quality in the local estuary worsen in recent years commensurate with the rise in population . The so called sewage treatment works and infrastructure paid for by public funds actually handles the effluent from local chemical factories for years already ,yet adjacent to a local amenity park and community center theres an outflow pipe , after a rain storm hundreds of thousands of gallons of grey water(sewage mixed with surface run off ) exit .
As a child me and my friends played on and in the river ,building camps , rafting and boating , despite what the local elected representatives expound via media the situation is only getting worse , they ended up installing a solids trap ,that basically does its job ,but still allows finer silt particles through to the man made 'sh!t lagoon' , on occasion the solids trap gets full up then its truly like a scene from a developing country , and this town is held up as the benchmark ,we are very well represented numerically in the Dail (house of parliment equivalent) , still a sh!tty mess down by the river though .

Anyway I think its wise at this stage to start making my cups of tea from bottled mineral or filtered mains water  , I have 5 or more cups a day .

 

[cyrano]

My town does not put chlorine in water. My town does not supply water.

Over here, it isn't the town either. It's a specialised company that groups all the old local water coops.

ANY town water which does not smell of chlorine is very suspicious. Even IF the well was pure, there's always stagnant water in the tanks and pipes.

True in most parts of Africa and if you're out in the country. Or if you have a very sensitive nose  8)

Where I live is densely populated. No chance of stagnant water and very accurate and intense control systems.

Yet we had a case of legionnaire's disease recently. A privately owned reservoir turned out to be the source of the infection. It was only used for industrial purposes, until some bright fella decided it was cheaper to connect to for a new appartement building...

(There are alternates for chlorine, and Cl filters for your tap, so a Cl-free water MAY be safe, but you gotta find out.)

The alternatives all have serious drawbacks. Mainly price, as chlorine is an industrial waste product and as such, nearly free.

We drink a bottled "spring water" which no longer comes from the spring but a town water system. I can find the official report for the town my bottle-water comes from. Bacteria is consistently zero, and industrial chemicals are so unlikely they have a waiver, but the Chlorine byproducts are right at the suggested limit. (I think my bottler must let the water air-out before bottling.)

Bottlers know the public is very sensitive to smell. So they aerate a lot to get rid of the smell.

I get my tap-water from my own well. I toss bleach in it a few times a year. We don't drink it so much, but it has a HIGH iron content, which oxidizes to a brown taint in tub and washer. (I guess the Chlorine binds the iron even better than Oxygen; also there is an iron-loving bacteria endemic in these waters.)

Iron looks ugly, but isn't unhealthy.

Please, don't throw bleach in your well. Have the water tested once a year. If it is bacteriologically clean, it will probably stay so for eons. The only thing to watch for [over here], are nitrides. They can come from agriculture, if the farmer uses too much natural menure or artificial menure. And those probably are a lot worse than an occasional microbe as they tend to deregulate natural protocol in your body.

We used to have a well in the house. Very nice water. But it sanded up and we don't know where it's at, anymore. So we'd need to break a lot of stuff to get to it. Since there also is no access for a well drilling truck, we've abandoned the idea. Besides, groundwater levels are around 10 meters lower these days, it might be dry.

 

[JohnRoberts]

Reportedly there are concerns about another CO2 shortage (ironic?) hampering the commercial beer industry that inject it in to carbonate brews.

The CO2 is a byproduct of other processes and when those other processes shut down because of the COVID slow down, beer supplies could suffer... Sorry.

JR 

 

[cyrano]

No problem. Natural beer doesn't need added CO2...

 

[JohnRoberts]

No problem. Natural beer doesn't need added CO2...

No problem for me, my home brew beer is bottle finished by a secondary fermentation after I bottle it with added priming sugar***, but perhaps a problem for typical consumers drinking mass market beers.

JR

*** there is an alternate to adding priming sugar (called Krausening) where unfermented wort is added just before bottling to feed the secondary fermentation.  Some old line brewers may do this, but modern commercial lines filter out yeast before bottling to deliver a clear beer to consumers. If you beer has sediment in the bottom of the bottle that is live yeast and suggests it may have used Krausening. I recall buying Belgian tripls (last century) that had live yeast in the bottom of the bottles.

 

[cyrano]

These Belgian triples are nearly all filtered nowadays, to protect weak stomaches. But if they're brewed by monks, they all follow a centuries old recepy. So, second fermentation in the bottle, no added CO2.

 

[JohnRoberts]

These Belgian triples are nearly all filtered nowadays, to protect weak stomaches. But if they're brewed by monks, they all follow a centuries old recepy. So, second fermentation in the bottle, no added CO2.

One time (last century) I carried three Belgian tripls back home with me after a visit to frankfurt for the musik messe trade show. Friends who knew me, would bring me some good biers while attending the show. I pitched the live yeast from the tripl's sediment into a double strength batch of my own home brew wort.... 

It was excellent BTW.  8)

JR

 

[Tubetec]

Looks like Lidl has its range of Belgian brews coming into stock this week , 6 x330ml ,
15euros here in Ireland ,£10.99 (12.65euros) in the UK 

 

[cyrano]

Unfortunately, all of those are industrial "label" beers...