Low colour pale ale.

[Matt in Birdham]

My water calculator advised CRS and Gypsum for pale ales. My pale ales upto now have always been "OK" but nothing outstanding whereas any darker ale I've produced has always been really drinkable! But with my water this is really how it should be as the darker malts help with acidity in the mash.

I'm really looking forwards to playing with my water to see what differences It can make!

Have you been brewing without the CRS up until now? I think you will definitely notice a big improvement if that is the case (and you start using it). With water as hard as yours you'll actually end up with 100ppm odd each of chloride and sulphate, plus whatever you had when you started. If you weren't treating your water at all you likely had a very high mash pH for your light beers, whereas your dark ones would have been less of a problem - which seems to fit with your experience.

[Mr. Dripping]

As others have said, you really do need to reduce the alkalinity down to 30ppm for pale beers and bitters with a small amount of crystal malt.
My local micro use lager malt for their palest beers.

[Battleaxe]

Sorry to temporarily hijack your thread. My water is really soft, but I've read that a stout is suited to hard water. If I want to make a stout (which I do, very soon), do I need to do something to make my water harder? Maybe you could show it a few Muay Thai moves Battleaxe

You can find your water report on your suppliers website, I just used this and "the other forums" water calculator to get a rough guide of what to add to achieve better water for what I was trying to brew, dark ales are better with water that is high in carbonates "Harder" but I'm assuming this would only envolve simple additions to achieve an acceptable mash PH/water profile.

Unfortunately Muay Thai is weak against water hardness!

[rpt]

Please don't confuse hardness with alkalinity. Hardness comes mostly from the calcium and magnesium ions and is actually a good thing in beer. Alkalinity comes from the carbonate and bicarbonate ions and is generally a bad thing as it raises the mash pH. Confusingly, they can both be measured in ppm as CaCO3. Very hard water isn't necessarily highly alkaline since the hardness could be from gypsum (calcium sulphate). This is why Burton brewers can make great pale ales even though the water is extremely hard.