I have these 2 55gallon rainbarrels and was just wondering. We are expected to get lots of rain this weekend (Irene) so i think the gutters will get flushed pretty well. Would there be any concern using for mash/sparge water?
You will have to add minerals, rain water will be very soft. It also may pick up some polutants but I’m not so sure that is a huge problem. Greg Noonan advised against using rain water because of polutants.
Yeah, don’t know that I’d want to brew with all the bird poop that’ll be washed off the roof.
I wouldn’t be concerned with pollutants unless you live in or near a major city.
Might not be a bad idea to filter just in case. Not only because of potential polutants but because of bird crap or whatever else was on the roof/gutters. And you’ll need to raise your Ca ppms up to at least 50 if you do nothing else for proper yeast flocculation.
How clean are the rain barrels? You might could also have something living in there.
Here in Chicago I wouldn’t touch the rain water. And my neighbor’s rain barrel is a mess. Good for watering the lawn I guess, but otherwise kind of icky.
I would definitely filter any rain water before using it for brewing.
I forget where, but a commercial brewery opened recently that was using highly filtered rainwater as their brewing water. They got shut down - even though it was highly filtered, it was considered ‘unsafe’ (from a legal standpoint).
Yeah, but lots of things we do in our kirchen, let alone homebrewery, would deemed “unsafe” by the health department.
Oh I know. I was just putting it out there as an FYI.
I still wouldn’t use rain water w/o filtering it first.
safe way of using it. run it from your rainbarrels through a submersible pump through your chiller …
Jester King Brewery in Austin and Garrison Brothers Distillery in Hye use rain water, when we get any rain, for their products. Of course it’s filtered.