Nice article, btw. Not too techy, enjoyable to read and very informative. Here's my problem, ,,, I've been making bread for many years (sourdough, yeast and otherwise). I recently moved to iron river in upper peninsula Michigan and I can't get my yeast to proof properly. Starting with an unopened 2 lb block of red star dry yeast (2 years out of date) and then buying a jar of red star quick rise and a jar of Fleischmann bead machine yeast (both new) and I can't get them to activate properly. The red star regular yeast just sits there and the other 2 yeasts take over an hour to start foaming. I am very careful about the temperature (95 to 105 ish) of the water and I have a proofing setting on my oven. It doesn't matter what type of bowl I use and I've tried with or without sugar. It took 5 hours to make cinnamon buns the other day which turned out fine but holy smokes, that's too long. So my question is this,,,,, have you folks ever encountered a problem with city water? I feel like I've ruled everything else out and I'm fairly methodical in my methods. The water here is very hard (probably something to do with living in iron river) but maybe there's something else in the water that's killing the yeast. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Mike I believe it was Dick Cavett who said "if your parents never had any kids, chances are that you won't either.

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