This article first appeared in Yankee Brew News.
In his keynote at the Rhode Island Brewers Conference in October 2025, Steve Lawson of Lawson’s Finest Liquids told the crowd that, despite popular belief, their beers are not brewed in Vermont, but in Connecticut at Two Roads Brewing.
Before brewing a single batch at Two Roads, Lawson took home a sample from Connecticut to get a basic water chemistry analysis. He found it was very similar to what he used in Vermont. “It’s an urban myth that we ship water from Vermont down to Two Roads to brew…. It’s a really nice, soft, clean water, with a low mineral content.” (Quote source: Hop Culture’s “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Lawson’s Sip of Sunshine.”)
When I heard this, I just about fell off my chair. Why?
Consider what we associate with Vermont and its natural resources: clean, natural, wholesome. The connotation is that the beer in Vermont must have a leg up when it comes to quality water used, right? So does the opinion of the beer change when the water resource is different than expected?
Consider this: in 2016, six breweries from Massachusetts worked with a local water treatment company to brew beers made with water from the Charles River, an 80-mile waterway that runs through the state and is known locally as “that dirty water.” The cause was noble, but would you look at your beer differently if you knew it came from the Charles? Probably.
Around the same time as the Brewers Conference, I visited three breweries in Massachusetts (which I will not name), all of which had beers that tasted off to me. It’s easy to assume one place needs to clean their lines, but all three? The question struck me: Was it the water in the area? Sure enough, while visiting Tragmar Ale Works in Bristol, Rhode Island afterwards for a palette cleanser, and chatting with the guys there about it, the water came up as the likely culprit.
Water makes up to 96% of beer. Beer drinkers can name hop varietals or identify certain strains of yeast as they sip, but most have no idea where their favorite brewery sources its water. Why is that?
Water isn’t just a neutral backdrop for the other ingredients. It’s the foundation of beer, influencing flavor, mouthfeel, fermentation, and even the style of beer itself. Arthur Guinness, who founded his brewery at St. James’ gate because of its excellent water supply and his original lease on the building included special water rights in Dublin.
What do breweries do for water in New England? Some develop around areas with plentiful freshwater freshwater sources: springs, wells, and aquifers, like Oxbow Brewing Company in Newcastle, Maine. Others like Bent Water Brewing Company in Lynn, Massachusetts, are located one block from the Atlantic Ocean, where rivers feed the reservoirs and the water quality is one of the highest in the region.
A good majority, however, work with good old tap water, or municipal water. The biggest issue with municipal resources, however, is the presence of disinfectants like chlorine or chloramine in the water, and the problem isn’t only in New England; when I reached out to my friend Jared Tuttle of Liability Brewing in Greenville, South Carolina, he told me they have the same problem.
For breweries, the solution is typically a reverse-osmosis (RO) system, which removes nearly all dissolved minerals, salts, and contaminants from water, providing a “blank slate” base for brewing. But it doesn’t stop there: brewers then can build up the water chemistry from scratch using calcium chloride or gypsum to suit the exact style of beer being made, from soft water (low mineral content, suited for Pilsners, Helles, and light lagers) and hard water (rich in calcium and magnesium, ideal for stouts, porters, and dunkels). But how many brewers actually do that, I wonder? And even with RO, is brewing still different state to state, somehow?
Hunting for more information, I was incredibly lucky to get to talk to Brian Dwyer of Pivotal Brewing in Bristol, Rhode Island who gave me so many great quotes that I have to print it (mostly) verbatim:
“I’ve brewed in a lot of states. I started in New York City brewing, which has really soft, great water, the same that makes New York bagels so good. Then I moved up to Maine, and the water was similarly soft at Allagash. Then I moved down to Austin, Texas to run a brewery, and that’s where I first took a deep dive with water, because the water there is heavy with limestone. It was a totally different brewing experience. In Texas, you have two choices: boil your water or put in a reverse osmosis system to build it up for zero.”
“Eventually, I moved back to Rhode Island and back in soft-water land, which is what I was used to. We still do carbon filter treatment [at Pivotal], but with coconut husks: it does a better job of filtering out chlorines than carbon filter, and there’s no impact on allergens.”
“My focus is on cloromenes, which a lot of people overlook. It’s super volatile, and tends to vaporize quickly, which is why cities use it in water treatments. Cloromones are what we are looking to strip out. Everyone always talks about chlorine, but really, you want to strip out both. When you detect chlorine in a beer, it’s probably chloromines you’re tasting: the flavor, not the compound.”
“By and large, if you have a good filtration system, it shouldn’t be a problem. But people pop in a filtration system and never think of it again, as long as they are recharging the filters.”
“Brewers don’t like to think about water because it’s not comfortable or sexy, so they add the same 50 grams of calcium chloride and never think about it again. There’s a big joke among brewers: of The Brewer’s Association series of books (Yeast, Water, Malt, and Hops), the book on water is the one you do last, because it’s the most headache-inducing and dense. But that is the pinnacle: grasping the Water book.”
I could easily write more about this topic (and I might another time!) But to sum up, I’ll share what my 75-year-old-mother mother texted me when I excitedly shared my findings for this article, and which made me feel somewhat foolish: “Well, I love to bake, and I know water makes a different in recipes. I guess making beer is no different.”