I've heard that if your tap water is drinkable, it's suitable for brewing. I went from buying bottles of spring water to using tap water for my beer making. Several of the last few batches have had a bizarre taste. Ruling out sanitization practices I can find no other explanation. My tap water tastes fine to me, but could it be the cause?

What would be the recommendation for an inline water filter?

Is the taste somewhat medicinal? Or perhaps metallic? The most common is the medicinal.

Muni water is treated with chlorine or chlormines to protect the supply from infection. Chlorine used to be the preferred method, but chloromines are replacing them because they are more stable and last all the way to the tap. This is unfortunate for the brewer because both will bind with malt components and effect flavor. The yeast interact with this to make unpleasant phenols that are perceptable at VERY low levels. In the ppb category!

They both can be reduced with a charcoal filter. They also both can be reduced by adding 1/4 of a campden tablet to 5 gallons. Chlorine is evaporated by a 20 minute boil, chloromine doesn't break down that way.

Kev.

I think that a sediment charcoal filter is the way to go. Its easy and cheap and it doesnt take out the valuable minerals that yeast feed on

Josh wrote:I've heard that if your tap water is drinkable, it's suitable for brewing. I went from buying bottles of spring water to using tap water for my beer making. Several of the last few batches have had a bizarre taste. Ruling out sanitization practices I can find no other explanation. My tap water tastes fine to me, but could it be the cause?

What would be the recommendation for an inline water filter?

Are you brewing extracts or all grain ? Extracts will show no ill effects for me as far as the water if it tastes good . If you are batch sparging , the water becomes more of a factor .

RO is obviously the best way to go if the water is the problem .

Actually RO is not the way to go.

If the problem is related to chlorination then either an activated carbon filter or as Kevin points out campden tables will remove the chlorine/chlormines.

RO and deionized water both will remove minerals from the water while still leaving the chlorine/chlormines levels more or less the same.

Activated carbon filters can harbor bacteria so one should get one impregnated with silver which tends to prevent such problems.

Distilled water would be safe to use for brewing but since it basically lacks all minerals one would need to adjust it for brewing purposes with mineral salts.

Ah yes, Water in my beer, the most common and argued topic of beer geeks with a chemistry backround.
Here it is in a nut shell:
Your municipal water is loosly regulated by the local government and they put out a "water purity report" on an annual basis. This is a good guiline to go from, so I stronly urge you to contact your water company and get one. Keep in mind that these figgures are monthy averages and not to be considered clinical data. It will give you an idea as to what form of titration might be the best for you. The water from your tap is going to be at 7ph. This is done many ways to insure that the city's pipes don't rust or burn. How they get it to 7 ph depends on the source of the water. Here in Philadelphia we get ours from the rivers (mostly). They changfe their titration methods depending on the time of year. We just had a lot of winter weather and the streets are being salted daily. This salt get into the water and the chemists at the treatment plant adjust for the higher salinity of the river water. This is a minor problem for them but a bigger problem for Us brewers. The calcium content remains about stable for us in philly (40 to 70 ppm) but the salt content varies widly. Thr\erfore we cannot use gypsum in our mash or sparge water because it will do nothing for the ph and add more salt than we want and cause the phosphates to drop out and leave the yeast undernourished.
Ok, I'm getting long winded here, (Got to switch to decafe).
To the point. Get a water purity report from your water company and check for the calcium 50 to 100 ppm is good, Carbonate <50 ppm, Iron and lead PPB or less is good, magnesium, 10 to 20ppm good over 30ppm bad.
A good filter unit is very useful in most homes. I have a Home depot/lowes unit for $30 that has 90 day an active carbon filter cartridge, that is attached under my brew water sink. the cartridges are about $5 each and rips most of the bad stuff from my water, but leaves me with unknow quantities of major brewing ions.
A simple $35 digital ph tester (ph papers are about usuless for most darker brews) and some latic acid ( dangerous stuff) or lemon juice or citric/asorbic to or gypsum or burton salts and a few batches of water for testing can give you a basic starting point for your mash/wort titration. Talk to your local homebrew store owner to see what your water might need. the basic mash should be about 5.2 ph and the sparge water should be about 5.7ph, depending on the style of beer of course.
I have been playing with 5 star's 5.2 ph stabilizer for the last few batches and been having some very good results and clearer beers. This is a phosphate buffer that works well with my prefiltered water.
If this seems too much for you; get an account with great bear or some other bottled water company and get a regular supply of 5 gallon spring waters dellivered to your door. This will cost you an extra $5 per batch, but the research I've done on 4 or 5 companies make exelent brewing water for the all-grain and extract brewers

Barryshomebrew. You have a pretty good writeup there but I beg to differ as far as pH is concerned. All municipal water supplies do not deliver tap water with a pH of 7 to the faucet. In fact, ours is at 8.6

I second the notion on using activated carbon filtration or campden tablets. Chlorine and Chloramine are nasty components for brewing. If you know that your city uses chlorine and not chloramine, letting the water sit 24 hours is an effective means to remove chlorine too.

8.6!!! thats really bad for your pipes, not to mention the city's infrastructure. I could see 7.6 but wow. Has it always been that way or is it as recent develpoment? I see you like aquariums, so I assume you have a ph meter and it's calibrated. With water like that I'd prolly get the bottled stuff for my brews.

I started thinking about that again. That pH reading that I got was from Ward Labs. The pH could have possibly changed in the few days that it was out of the tap. As soon as I find my test strips again I'm going to test it. 8.6 just seems HIGH. I think that's almost the pH of most antacids.