January 2015 Water and its importance for brewing

First and foremost we have to agree upon the fact that having proper ingredients is very important in order to be able to make a good brew. Now,  of course contaminated water will still be drinkable and not all that dangerous if you boil it since that will kill off most of the bacterias. I say not all that dangerous, there could still be things left that are not healthy. However it has been proved that if you take water from a duck pond and examine it you will find that its is very bad to drink it, although if you boil it and make beer out of it, no traces of the dangerous parts are left. I would not recommend doing this yourself but it does prove that drinking beer made from dirty water is possible.

It might give a bad flavour to your brew and if not boiled long enough or if there are other things in the water than just bacteria then the quality of the water will still matter when brewing. This is a major reason why breweries ended up in the location where they did, the access to clean water was vital. Now people of that time might now know about bacterias or microspoic contamination but what they did know was that if the water smelled bad then it's not good for drinking. They thought that it was the smell that caused it, that is not really the case but since they avoided bad smelling water they also avoided the worst contaminated water supplies which in turn lead to healthier brews.

It is not uncommon to see breweries being placed outside the cities, there could be several reasons for this. First they would be alone to have access to the water supply, secondly the water inside the cities or very close to it was usually contamined in one way or another. And consider this, if people started getting sick from what you were selling, how long would it take until no one was buying from you? So the drawback of having to transport the finished product was better than not being able to produce anything at all.

But there is a problem also with the brewers themselves, they did produce quite a bit of waste and it's not unheard of that the brewers were the cause of contaminated water. This leads us back to the fact that they might not have known what really caused the contamination. Or perhaps they simply did not care, factories and companies today are aware of the reasons for contamination but they still do it so we cannot exclude that possibility entirely back then either.

Some cities however realized the importance of clean water and added fines to people that contamined the water, there are brewers who had to pay as well but it's hard to know the impact of these laws.

This goes for the big breweries, but people at home them, that brewed for household needs? We can easily assume that they had to use the water closest to them since it's not possible to think that they could carry water long distances. Boiling it however made it cleaner (or in some cases, less dirty and contaminated...) which meant that the condition of the water made less difference than if they had drank it as it were. Yes, it could still be having a bad taste to it, yes it could still be contaminated but at least not as bad as if you didnt boil it. 

To conclude this, the water was very important when it came to brewing. Having access to clean water was a neccessity for the big breweries which meant that they had to place the buissness where they could. Shipping barley was easier than shipping water. For the brewers at home, they had to be content with what was closest.