3 ms·

You don't need reverse osmosis to filter out PFAS -- activated carbon will do it.

• d4v3 1y ago
  Activated carbon will remove the larger chain PFAs, but is not as effective as removing the smaller ones. From the paper: > Conventional water treatment employed at municipal drinking water treatment plants have been shown to be nearly ineffective at removing PFAS. This can leave the burden and cost of implementing more sophisticated water treatments to brewers unless public water suppliers implement tertiary treatment to remove PFAS from finished water prior to distribution. Anion exchange and activated carbon treatments have been shown to more effectively remove longer-chain PFAS and PFSAs but were less effective in removing PFCAS and the alternative shorter-chain PFAS and PFECAs. Reverse osmosis treatment showed significant removal of PFAS of different chain lengths in drinking water, but can be prohibitive due to high operational costs and energy usage. In areas with known contamination, beers from macro- breweries were less likely to have detectable PFAS than craft beers brewed at a smaller scale, potentially due to more effective and expensive filtration of tap water at larger breweries.
• ch4s3 1y ago
  This isn't correct in the general case. In the specific case of brewing, if you're filtering at all it makes sense to use an RO system so that you can then do mineral adjustments from the RO base water.I'm not aware of any brewers outside of homebrewing using charcoal filtration.
  • d4v3 1y ago
    Actually, especially for smaller breweries, carbon filtration is extremely common. It still removes chloramines, pesticides, and other off-flavor compounds, and is much cheaper than an RO system. It's true that it won't change the hardness of the water, but if you have naturally soft water you can just add minerals, if needed for the style