Do you use tap water for wine making ?

[Bovillia]

I read somewhere in a book...or on here...or both, who knows, that tap water is fine because the yeast you buy is made to working it and the nutrients in the yeast are there to make sure its ok, no matter what kind of water you put it in. Just my $.02

 

[GaDawg]

BTW, my first 2 wines with only charcoal filtration taste great.

If what you did with your first 2 wines worked, don't change it

 

[bstnh1]

I use store brand bottled spring water. At 50 cents a gallon I don't want to take a chance on tap water or spend even more money on trying to remove chlorine, iron and other junk. I've never had a problem with the spring water.

 

[bstnh1]

Ernest and D.J, my view on using well or tap water is it depends. If your well or tap water doesn't contain significant levels of contaminants such as microbes, chlorine, or iron, you'll be fine. However, some well or tap water does contain these things and for those wine makers bottled spring water should be used.

For me, I'm willing to waste $3.00 or less to avoid the problem.

Agreed! Iron in the well water will really mess things up. And most of the time you can't see it, smell it or taste it unless there's a huge amount. For the sake of $2 or $3 I'll stick with good old bottled spring water.

 

[richmke]

Although I would much prefer the gallon jugs for convenience, i noticed that the 1/2 liter bottles at Sams Club are the cheapest per gallon.

 

[vernsgal]

on all my kits I have used tap water filtered through a Brita (charcoal) and they have all turned out fine. It depends on where you live and how much chlorine they use. Now when we move, the water there has been under a boil water advisory for 7 years so I doubt I'll be using that

 

[olusteebus]

I feel like I am cheating if I use tap water here in Alabama. After all, the water tastes like wine here!

 

[Geronimo]

You should know your water profile. Chlorine/chloramines can be mitigated pretty easily. Otherwise you want neutral (pH 7) without a lot of hardness.

Bottled water would be great, but distilled water is a mistake.

Just like with cooking, better ingredients help make a tastier product.

 

[Johngottshall]

The 2 grocery stores near me sell bring your own jug water for .25 cents a gallon I bought A 4 gallon jug of water from Sam's club for 4 bucks and use that jug my tap water smells terrible and taste just as bad so I use bottle water I like my wines and to ruin with that american water service would be a crime.

 

[Geronimo]

We used to have brewery water from artesian wells for free! They tore down the old brewery last year

Our tap water is excellent though, so I don't hesitate to use it. I won a couple blue ribbons for my Pilsners using it, and that's saying a lot!

 

[GaDawg]

Don't ya'll think it's a personal chose? I think if you use your tap water to cook with and you drink it, it's probably OK to make wine with. If you will not drink it, I wouldn't make my wine out of it.

 

[Bartman]

Don't ya'll think it's a personal chose? I think if you use your tap water to cook with and you drink it, it's probably OK to make wine with. If you will not drink it, I wouldn't make my wine out of it.

I totally agree with this. We have had the discussion before about whether to use well/tap/bottled water, and it all depends on what each of those is like/which is available to the winemaker. Some favor their tap water (like me), while others can't stand it; the same is true or well water - some well water has contaminants in it that makes unacceptable for winemaking (or drinking generally).

As long as you aren't using distilled water, use what you like and have readily available (at the right price); you might even want to experiment with different waters to see how it changes the wine.

 

[Geronimo]

Yep, just like cooking with wine. Some people save the nastiest crap you ever tasted for cooking. Like that's going to fix it? What did that chicken ever do to you?

 

[dburling]

I purchased a water filter called Zero Water for home use. I recently made a batch of Dragons Blood using the filtered water an it came out great. The cook thing about this filter is that it comes with a meter which reads total dissolvable solids in your water. My filtered water still reads Zero (hence the name) after almost 3 months of use. We were averaging about 2 cases of water per week to give you a reference of how much water we have sent through it to date.

My tap water tests out at 150+. So I feel confident that using this filter has to be helping out.

 

[Geronimo]

When you're talking about brewing beer, water is a MAJOR factor no doubt. But with wine, you really aren't supposed to need to add water, so no one knows for sure what it means. It can effect the pH a little (for those 10L kits it could be significant). Save it to say that with 16L and 18L kits it won't matter nearly as much.

 

[bstnh1]

Use water with a high iron content and you'll wonder what happened. I stick with bottled spring water. Better to spend $2.50 than to toss out $100 worth of ruined wine.

 

[Norske]

Use water with a high iron content and you'll wonder what happened. I stick with bottled spring water. Better to spend $2.50 than to toss out $100 worth of ruined wine.

Can you expand on this more? What does happen with a high iron content?

 

[bstnh1]

Can you expand on this more? What does happen with a high iron content?

Using water with a high iron content can leave you with weird flavors and a permanent haze - not good!:

 

[Carter1932]

I stumbled on this information from Tim Vandergrift, Technical Services Manager for Winexpert. It pretty much answers this thread's question in full.

Since kit wines are almost all intended to make 23L and they start off at between 7.5L to 16L depending on the type of kit, they require the addition of 7.5L to 15L of water. Since the water was originally remove from the grape juice by some method of distillation it would follow logically that the only thing that should be added back would be a variant of distilled water – as pure as chemically possible. After all, no minerals or trace elements were removed, so water with minerals and such would alter the character of the wine.

This turns outs to be one of those things that while technically true, it’s also completely unimportant. It turns out that unless your water tastes or smells absolutely horrible or is contaminated with bacteria or high mineral counts, it’s just fine to use in making up wine kits.

Two of the most common concerns about water:

1. Chlorine added to disinfect municipal (city) water is a sterilant. It kills yeast and smells like a pool – icky.

It’s natural to assume that because you can smell chlorine or chloramines in your water supply (the additive is essentially the same as household bleach) that it’s going to affect the wine. What actually happens is this: all juices used in winemaking, be they kits or even fresh grapes, contain sulfite compounds. They’re present on all grapes. When added to a solution containing chloride ions (the form the chlorine takes in water) sulfites bind to the ions instantly, forming stable chloride salts such as potassium chloride or sodium chloride.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s common table salt. If you bind out 100% of the chlorine in municipal tap water with sulfite, you’ll wind up with about two grains of table salt per 23L carboy. That teensy amount won’t have much effect, especially when it’s mixed into a wine with a Brix of 25 and a whole lot of acid, sugars and solid material. So, there are no worries from municipal water treatment.

2. The pH of water varies a lot, so it’s better to add distilled water (with a pH of 7.0) to make sure the pH of the kit isn’t thrown off.

pH is a numerical scale running from 1 to 14. Right in the middle, 7 is considered neutral, neither acidic nor alkaline: pure water at 25°C is pH 7.0. Above 7 is alkaline; below 7 is acidic. Because wine contains a lot of acid, it generally has a low-ish pH, somewhere above 3 but below 4. A ph of 3.4 is a pretty sweet spot for most wines.

In a solution containing other ions (like a kit wine), activity and concentration will not generally be the same. Activity is a measure of the effective concentration of hydrogen ions, rather than the actual concentration; it includes the fact that other ions surrounding hydrogen ions will shield them and affect their ability to participate in chemical reactions.

So it’s not just the amount of acid in the wine kit that affects the pH, it’s a bunch of other junk in solution as well. This is sometimes referred to as buffering. Kit wines tend to be heavily buffered, partly because they contain very high levels of solid material and partly because the effects of concentration and pasteurization include some bonding of acids and sugars and some release of ions.

And water isn’t. And that’s why the pH of tap water is pretty much inconsequential – there’s almost nothing there to release hydrogen ions. When chemists calculate the pH of a weakly acidic solution, they usually assume that the water does not provide any hydrogen ions. Add the wimpy tap water to highly acidic, heavily buffered kit wine and POWIE! the water will meekly do as it’s told, and get swamped in a tsunami of acids and dissolved solids from the kit.

In the thirty years I’ve been making wine from kits I’ve never used anything but the water that came from the tap, and never given it a second thought. If it’s good enough to drink, it’s good enough for winemaking. But if you’re unsure go ahead and use bottled or filtered water: it can’t hurt your finished wine and will give you good exercise lugging around water bottles – always good for building up a thirst!

 

[Norske]

Thanks Carter for this info. What are the opinions on using well water that goes thru a water softener?