BREWING WATER - DIME WATER CASE STUDY
Tombstone Brewing Company
At a Glance
Brewing has specific demands of its water. It is essential to keep the mash in the right pH range by whatever means, and the presence of certain minerals in the water does have an effect on the flavor and character of the beer.
Tombstone Brewery needed to go a lot further in water treatment. They needed a blank canvas on which to craft, what is now, over 200 beers.
Solutions for Breweries
- Reduce the TDS and chloride concentrations from the raw water to acceptable levels
- Remove bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms from the brewery’s water source
- Obtain chloride concentrations below 2.5 mg/L for optimal brewing
- Reduce the pH to enable precise pH control of the treated water
- Provide low TDS permeate as make-up water for cleaning solutions
Tombstone, Arizona
Tombstone Brewing Company is located in Tombstone, AZ once a booming mining town is best known for Wyatt Earp and the gunfight at the OK Corral. Within seven years of its founding, Tombstone had exploded from a population of 100 to 14,000 and a business district including four churches, a school, two banks, three newspapers, 110 saloons, and 14 gambling halls, on top of a large number of silver mines. In the mid-1880s, the silver mines penetrated the water table. A major investment in a pumping plant kept the mines open for a while, but in 1886 a fire destroyed the plant. It proved too costly to replace. In less time than it took to become a boomtown, it became nearly a ghost town.
“Our Dime Water system gives us a water profile with less than 3 parts per million of anything at all other than pure H2O. We take if from there—building whatever taste, mouthfeel, and aroma we want.”
Tombstone Brewery
Brewmaster
Water—too much or too little—has always been an issue in this colorful desert town. The joke is that the town had 110 bars because there was no water to drink. Currently, Tombstone gets its water from two wells and four springs in the Huachuca Mountains. In addition being drilled through soil and rock where silver bearing lead sulfite, copper, and zinc was once mined, the wells have high levels of natural occurring arsenic. Well-water is mixed with spring water to bring the concentration low enough to meet permissible EPA standards. This makes the water from the City highly variable.
Beer is 95% water. Tombstone has over 200 different beers and none of them are flavored with arsenic.
“We shopped around. It was clear that Dime knew what it was doing.”
Tombstone Brewery
Founder and Co-Owner
Tombstone Brewing Company knew its source of ever-changing water was going to impact its success. The team looked at a number of brewing water purification companies to figure out what options were available to them. It was clear that Dime understood the challenge presented by the company’s location and had the experience to solve the problem.
Why Dime Water?
Brewing has specific demands of its water. It is essential to keep the mash in the right pH range by whatever means, and the presence of certain minerals in the water does have an effect on the flavor and character of the beer.
Major national brewers tailor their product around their existing water supplies—in cities where they have adequate and very good water. These breweries remove the chlorine using either a carbon or a KDF filter to knock down the chlorine and the chloramines in the water.
Tombstone Brewery needed to go a lot further in brewing water treatment. They needed a blank canvas on which to craft, what is now, over 200 beers.
For optimal fermentation, yeast requires a proper balance of Ca (Calcium) and Mg (Magnesium). Absolutely pure water does not make good brewing, but after the pretreatment with reverse osmosis, Tombstone brewmasters add back minerals needed for each style of beer.
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