Water is important for brewing¹. In Mid Wales, or in our part at least, we have really nice soft water, but not really similar to any famous brewing towns. But that’s ok, we can work with it.

According to my testing kit - eXact iDip Spectrophotometer², our water is as follows

Calcium 43 ppm (as CaCO₃)
Total alkalinity 54 ppm (as CaCO₃)
Chloride 12 ppm (as NaCl)
Sulphate 1 ppm (as SO₄)
Total high hardness 100 ppm
Magnesium hardness 57 ppm (as CaCO)
Residual alkalinity 34 ppm
Sodium 16 ppm (as Na)
pH 7.7

Using the Brewers Friend mash chemistry calculator, we get

[Ca²⁺] 17.2 ppm
[Mg²⁺] 13.9 ppm
[Na⁺] 16.0 ppm
[Cl^-] 12.0 ppm
[SO₄^2-] 1.0 pmm
[HCO₃^-] 63.1 ppm
[CO₃^2-] 0.1 ppm

So comparing this to famous brewing waters:

vs. Burton: Expecting to be much lower in sulphate here, and unsuprisingly, we're lower in concentration across the board. But additions of Gysum and Epsom salts would get us much closer, along with a few other things

vs. Pilsen: Traditionally super soft water. We're already quite soft, but a bit of AMS to remove some carbonate and perhaps a boil to precipitate some chalk and we may not be too far off

vs. Munich: Similar treatment to Pilsen, then a bit of Gypsum and some Chloride salts would get us close-ish

vs. London: Traditionally very hard, I expect quite a lot of additions if we ever want to do a London Porter or similar. Turns out this is quite difficult to balance, as adding carbonate (e.g. baking soda) in a large quantity makes it hard to keep Sodium levels under control. I might think about this long and hard!

Conclusion - it looks like I can do some alterations to get to what I want for various styles of beer

And if my iDip is accurate enough (big question), I can check that my alterations work as planned, and how my water supply changes over time, which has got to be better than hoping that it stays the same all year.

I'll get the water checked by another source too, to check I'm not being misled. The iDip is amazingly consistent with the results it gives (only ever about 1 ppm difference between technical replicates), but that's not necessarily the same as giving the right result!

I'll keep you posted

1 Citation needed?

2 Insane capitalisation strategy, models own