After every brew I thoroughly wash, rinse, sometimes sterilize with SO2, rinse again and finally sanitize the carboy with a no-rinse sanitizer and let it air dry. Before I use the carboy for the next brew, I give it a quick rinse with cold tap water.
So much has been written about using tap water to rinse carboys and utensils. The recommendation is to use cooled boiled water.
If you use cold water, you will still make beer. However, you still run a higher risk of infection due to possible microbe load in the water. If you want to lower this risk and get more consistent results, rinse with cool boiled water, or better still, use a no rinse sanitiser as already recommended by others in this thread (I use StarSan with good results, Iodiphor is also good). One of the advantages of StarSan is it forms a foam which will kill microbes. It is perfectly safe to rack onto the foam.
The norm, using a kit brew, is to top up the carboy to 23 litres using cold/hot water to achieve the desired temperature.
So, if you use cold water from the tap, are you un-sanitizing the carboy as you make the brew?
I'm sure not too many people boil about 18 litres of water, wait for it to cool or use a coiled copper tube, hooked up to a tap, to cool the water.
That's going a bit overboard.
OK, now we are on a different subject, brewing liquor. Again, if you used cold water for top up, you will still make beer. Will it be consistently good beer? Maybe not. Again, you run the risks of increased bacterial load as indicated above (only substantially more so due to the increased volume).
The other issue is chlorination. If your water is chlorinated with gas, then boiling will drive off any chlorine. If you are unfortunate enough live in an area where the council uses chloramines, then the only way to get rid of these is filtering and perhaps treatment with Metabisulphites. The risk with chlorine is production of chlorophenols during fermentation (medicinal flavour) which has a very low taste threshold.
In the end, its all about risk vs return. If you are happy to accept a higher risk of infection or off flavours in your beer and believe that the methods to avoid the risk are too drastic given the likelihood, then go ahead and use untreated cold tap water.
You would be surprised how much misty saliva is around you when you speak. How many home brewers use a face mask when brewing?
I'm sure the Monks didn't boil any water to make their mead back in old times.
Saliva is only one worry. However, it's pretty easy to take measures that will prevent dust and falling particles (like saliva) from falling into the wort without using a face mask. I don't wear a face mask, but I do wear gloves when handling anything that has been sanitised.
Monks may or may not have boiled water to make their mead - I don't know, I wasn't there. However who is to say every batch they made was clean from infection?
I have always used ordinary tap water and always ended up with a palatable beer.
You have indeed been lucky. Either that, or you do have fermentation issues, but are not detecting them. Best way to confirm this is to enter competitions, or join a homebrew club and have your beer evaluated dispassionately by people with experienced palates. Mates are not always a good source of this feedback. I certainly don't trust my own palate when trying to evaluate my own beer, and try to get unbiased feedback whenever possible.
Sanitization is one thing, extremes are another.
One man's extreme is another man's minimum standard.
The problem with this debate (and I suspect the reason Bum reacted the way he did), is that there is no black or white absolute answer. As I have tried to indicate above, it is all about what level of consistency and excellence you are aiming for in your beer vs the effort you are willing to put it, and therefore what risks you are willing to accept.
Having read through the thread, the advice in the book is actually quite good. However, Bum was quite right to be concerned about the veracity of advice from a book of that vintage; there are some absolute shockers about.
The other simple step you can take to lower the risk of infection and off flavours in your beer is to pitch the correct amount of healthy yeast. The faster you can start a vigorous fermentation, the less likely it is for any microbes that may have been picked up to get a foot hold. The main weapons provided by the yeast are lowering of pH, consumption of fuel (sugars) and production of alcohol.
Hope this has been useful.
