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Purifier & Water Quality Monitoring for Breweries & Distilleries
Your purifier decides the water every recipe is built on, and it drifts quietly. TDSBot measures its output every minute and flags a shift against your onboarded chemistry — before it reaches a mash tun.
Mash pH, alkalinity and the sulfate-to-chloride ratio all depend on water that's supposed to be consistent. TDSBot monitors your purifier continuously and flags drift against your onboarded water chemistry, so a shift gets caught before it changes a batch.
A distillery's mash and dilution water shape yield and final character just as much as brewing water does. TDSBot's continuous monitoring gives you the same purifier-performance visibility across every still and mash tun, not a once-a-week spot check.
Contract brewers, multi-site breweries, and operations running a distillery alongside a brewhouse need water visibility across every site without a manual check at each one. TDSBot's fleet dashboard shows every monitored purifier in one view.
We monitor our purifier's output continuously now instead of testing it on brew day. Knowing our water baseline is stable — not just checking it and hoping — has taken a real variable out of our process.
Five minerals decide how a beer actually tastes.
Calcium supports yeast health, enzyme activity, and helps lower mash pH naturally. Magnesium contributes to yeast nutrition in small amounts but turns harsh at high levels. Sodium adds roundness under about 30 ppm and turns metallic above it. The real flavor lever is sulfate versus chloride — high sulfate accentuates hop bitterness and dryness, high chloride builds malt sweetness and fullness. Most modern brewers work from this ratio directly rather than replicating a specific city’s historical water profile.
These are typical ranges, not hard ceilings — hazy and New England-style IPAs intentionally push chloride to 150–200 ppm for a softer mouthfeel, well above what a pale lager would want. Water chemistry targets follow the beer style, not the other way around.
Mash pH is the throughline for all of it. Targeting 5.2–5.6 keeps the starch-converting enzymes working efficiently — alkalinity acts as a buffer against that pH, which is why alkalinity has to be matched to the beer style, not held constant.
| Beer style | Alkalinity target (ppm as CaCO₃) | Sulfate:chloride character |
|---|---|---|
| Pale lager, pilsner | 0–50 | Balanced to slightly chloride-forward |
| Pale ale, IPA | 50–100 | Sulfate-forward, 2:1 to 3:1+ for crisp bitterness |
| Hazy, New England IPA | 50–100 | Chloride-forward, up to 150–200 ppm chloride for soft mouthfeel |
| Amber, brown ale | 100–150 | Balanced to chloride-forward |
| Stout, porter | 150–300 | Chloride-forward for fullness, balances roast acidity |
Anywhere batch consistency depends on water consistency.
Single sensor, dual sensor, or both —
depending on your filtration.
What TDSBot can tell you depends partly on what kind of purifier you're running. GAC filtration and RO both benefit from monitoring, but only RO has a membrane and a reject stream — which is where a second sensor adds real diagnostic value, not just a second data point.
A drifted purifier costs more than the batch it ruins.
A batch affected by unnoticed water drift means lost ingredients, lost brewhouse time, and — if it ships — a customer tasting something inconsistent with your usual product.
Hardware once.
Monitoring, monthly.
Same TDSBot hardware across every industry. Choose the plan that matches how you manage your operation. Hardware from $59 (standard) or $69 (display).
Larger flow meter sizes for brewhouse water mains, industrial RO systems and high-flow installations.
What the sensor sends,
and how often
All three plans measure every minute — what changes is how often data leaves the sensor, and which analysis runs on it.
Brewery water monitoring
— common questions
Know your purifier's performance
before it changes a batch
TDSBot installs in 15 minutes. Continuous purifier monitoring, inferred hardness and alkalinity from your onboarded chemistry, fleet visibility across every site.
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