I live in the Western NC mountains and have a nice small creek on the backside of my property. What would it take to use that water for home brewing? I assume i’d need to send a sample to a lab for analysis? Plus, I would not be surprised if it had Giardia, etc in it. Is it worth it to try and filter and make this into brewing water? Seems kinda unique.
A bucket. 
The boil will kill anything in the water. Sending a sample to Ward would be best, but you could just try it too. People have done crazier things.
From my understanding surface water’s composition changes at least seasonally. I would also be worried about pollutants etc… Maybe just use it for chilling?
Makes a great chiller if you can set it up right.
Why do you want to use the water? What will you gain by doing it?
+1. I’d be concerned about pollutant runoff, too.
Simply to say that I brewed water from my back yard creek. Maybe it’s not a worthwhile venture.
Would pollutants be analyzed by Ward Labs?
I’m not sure, but I doubt it. Regardless, at least city water as well as store bought water (RO, distilled) would have pollutants and impurities removed. Might be a safer bet.
I bet it’s fine for making shine it’s fine for beer too. Probably better than storebought.
If you got livestock or agriculture upstream then there might be problems.
Mountain streams are mostly rain water run off or spring fed. Not many farm land on mountain tops. You may want to filter it, but probably fine as is. I have drank a lot of North Carolina stream water on back packing trips (via my Katadyn water filter) and it tastes very good!
I would still be afraid of the possibility of chemical pollution within the creek. The EPA has made a lot of progress in cleaning the waterways but if someone handed me a beer made with water straight from, say, the Cuyahoga River here in N.E. Ohio (which runs just a mile from my house) he wouldn’t appreciate my response. After all, it wasn’t that many years ago that the Cuyahoga caught fire.
With that said, there are a pair of videos on Youtube by Glenn who lives in, I believe, Denmark. He saw a documentary on ‘how beer saved the world’ and tried his own experiment. Using water from his backyard fish pond, he brewed a batch of beer. The point was to show brewing beer purified the (non-chemical polluted) water so as to be safe to drink. Back in the day, drinking beer was much safer than drinking water. His fish pond, however, was a closed system, unlike a creek where you have no idea what might have gone into that creek upstream.
Beaver Fever would be one reason not to.
I dont know about ANYTHING… I prefer that my tattoo artist not just boil the equipment.
Bamforth brewed a beer a few years back using Putah Creek water. Putah Creek runs through campus, and I wouldn’t call it clean. It’s not polluted as much as it tends to get stagnant. Couldn’t find the article
this is a good point. If you can be confident there is no chemical polution the beer making process takes care of everything else safety wise. that by no means means its good water taste wise for any given beer style.
I saw that video. Bamforth used water from a filthy duckpond. The beer was a hit.
Must be the same thing I saw.
Ok, then Duck Fever. But either way, using creek or pond water is going to end in you being a fan of one of these schools.
The point to all of that is why people drank beer in the first place. Most water available you didn’t even want touching your skin.
So apart from chemical contamination, heavy metals and the like I wouldn’t be afraid of pathogens from the creek as a source for your brew water.