Water

• 02 April 2026
• water

Water treatment is far too complicated a topic for me to want to attempt to write a blog post about it - there are far better sources of information out there than me! So that's not what this is about. Rather, it's a brief mention of what our water profile is like around here in Reading, Berkshire.

When I started getting a bit more serious about water treatment I put together a reasonable profile using the information from the Thames Water website - you can get a PDF containing most of the info you need. This is the current one for "Reading East"

I plugged the numbers into a water treatment calculator, and went from there. I originally used the one on the Jim's Beer Kit website, but in recent years I've exclusively used the one in BeerSmith (my preferred brewing software). My results have been fine, but I wanted to confirm that the water profile I came up with actually matched what comes out of our tap, so I bought an "Advanced Water Report from Murphy & Son" from The Malt Miller.

The results were:

Table 1: Water profile for Reading, Berkshire, May 2025.

Interestingly, this is pretty close to what I had originally gleaned from the TW report, no more than a few ppm out in any of the values, but it's good to have proper confirmation!

As a comparison, in The Modern Homebrewer, Andy provides the profile he works from at Elusive Brewing, who are only about 7 miles away from our house:

Table 2: Water profile for Elusive Brewing, Finchampstead, Berkshire, as listed in The Modern Homebrewer.

Pretty similar, though there's more of a difference than I expected, especially given how close my previous numbers based on the TW report were to the values I got back from Murphy's.

Oh, and I remain as confused as ever between Alkalinity, Total Hardness, and Bicarbonate......

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