Hi Mr. Walker!

Happy New Year. May it stay happy for you and everyone well into the next year and beyond!

Bad water makes for terrible beer. The Logboat Brewery in terrible Columbia MOe, in a brewing industry publication, article, berated the water quality across the region, including rottenville Saint Louis (and county, and Saint Charles County), whether well or surface water. The MO and MI-rivers, by the time the MO gets to IA and well north of Sioux City, Iowa is terrible polluted and chock full of microbial nasties.

Open a cold water tap from these place and downstream you wonder whether the city water systems will add water to the chlorine (gas) or chloramine.

Also, in old, crappy cities, water mains were lined with lead so they would not rust. Explains why some old, crappy cities did stupid stuff. Like old Rome, that use lead pipes, sort cauing dementia and worse population wide.

In old crappy cities, like St. Louis, the aged water treatment and distribution systems uses phosphorus anti-corrosives. As the typically limy (calcium rich, with some magnesium), forms mineral scale inside these lead and steel pipes, the mineral scale limits lead intrusion into the water supply. The phosphorous compounds helps to sequester the lead obscured by the limy mineral scale inside the lead (well all) lined pipes.

The limy minerals and alkaline water from the tap also limit the bloom of the grain bill in the boils to make the wort. The same thing happens to the hops whether bittering or, more importantly, flavoring hops.

So all beer brewed in this region is bland, usually sweet, or weird. Save for more complex porters and stouts as sweet is easy brewing with such water.

You'll hear Saint Louis denizens go on how the original Bush of Anheuser Busch used his influence to improve the St. Louis water system so the beer they brewed, when it was a real lager, would be better. You rarely hear of the A-B brewery directly from the Mississloppi River. Like all things rotten St. Louis, MO, the water system is terribly aged, wasteful, and in no way a modern municipal water treatment system as some components approach a century of service. St. Louis is the city of entropy and neglect.

A-B had relatively unpolluted MI-river water up to the early 1900's. That water was better suited to the lagers, pilsners, and dunkels the Germans, Austrians, and like folks wanted. The water chemistry was similar for mineral profile.

Water chemistry changed with worries of rotting pipes and the newer lead line steel pipes, upending municipal water supplies for brewing.

Filtration methods then and now helped. Yet so-called craft breweries with reverse osmosis systems and methods to minic a regions water chemistry profile through re-mineralization don't help. St. Louis regional craft beer is bland, sweet, or weird. Yet the denizens of there or here, 100 miles away from the stupid arches thing, produces the same results.

Fill a quart container with well run tap water, loosely cover and let set for a day in cool place, and then drink it. Taste is awful

Spokane, WA or northern Idaho water is alright after doing the same. Most water systems out west are also no nearing 200-years of service in spite of water main replacement.

If collecting rain water, with the airborne man made pollutants going up, and like rain water going down, like bird flu in bird poop coming down, I'd want some method to purify the water before ingestion. Rain water collection may be suitable for water lawns and plants and as an emergency water supply, when unfiltered. Like private well water, after 160 or more years of industrial polluting ground water, maybe UV sterilization after filtration may help make it safe(r) to drink.

I read the same about NY-state water. May have a job to go to near Albany. Yet they want to pay me a St. Louis wage to live there, so maybe not. The water tunnels are concrete. And probably without coal fired electrical power plant water fly ash. The fly ash makes uncoated carbon steel rust faster, well, and breaks the concrete.

To WY-state, I want. What breweries do you like there, Mr. Walker? Also, what styles do you like.

Spokane has some of the best tasting tap water, yet now they add chlorine, and get very disinfected with chlorine surges. Too much bad microbial action from all the poops shoved into the ground and leaking sewers. e-choli and stuff.

The upper MI-state UP around there and into Houghton on the Keenaw peninsula had good water in the mid-1980s like upper WI-state. One wonders now.

Happy New Year! Well into next year!

Hope you wrist is better before and after surgery!

Yes, where is Uncle Old Duke?

The organized (gang) stalking syndicate afflicts me with fleas falling from man made holes in the ceiling. From residence to motel. I left the terrible s-hole residence in the rotting dump named Dogtown in the StL toilet. Since 2016 in perfect Kirkwood, MO.



Imagine as fleas and you are the target.

--
Beh.