I had not seen a side by side experiment so far so I went ahead and did one with a Special Bitter. It was a ten gallon split, with the exact same starter split between the two of them. I was trying to keep this as consistent as possible between the two of them, the recipe was as follows:
Amount ItemType
16.00 lb Pale Malt, Maris Otter (3.0 SRM)Grain
1.00 lb Amber Malt (22.0 SRM)Grain
1.00 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 40L (40.0 SRM)
2.00 oz Challenger [6.30 %] (60 min)Hops
1.00 oz Challenger [6.30 %] (30 min)Hops
1.00 oz Challenger [6.30 %] (6 min)Hops (supposed to be 10 min but I missed that addition
)
Thames Valley ale yeast
I ran the first half through the plate chiller, aerated and pitched at 65. The other half I just ran directly into a keg and gave it the exact same treatment once it was down to temp. There was quite a bit of break in the bottom of the keg, so I racked off the top of that and it was perfectly clear. Then I aerated and pitched the other half of the starter and fermented it at the exact same temp.
It's been a few weeks now and I have been drinking on these trying to get a feel for any differences that might be there. I have taken this and done side by side tests with my BJCP club and our regular homebrew club meetings to get other peoples opinions. One thing to keep in mind is that there was some bitterness differences to be expected since the no chill sat at much warmer temps for an extended amount of time. Anyway, here is what we have observed so far.
1.
Chill Haze - Complete nonsense, the clarity on these two beers is identical. This didn't surprise me at all because it has been common knowledge that cold break is a function of how cold the wort/beer gets, not how fast it gets cold. Now if you are doing lagers or a certain style of beer that you don't want cold break in the fermenter for you may want to think about racking the wort off of the coldbreak. With an immersion chiller you can leave the cold break in the kettle, with no chill it all comes to the fermenter and it would require another rack before pitching to remove it. This is something that most people don't care about and even commercial breweries end up with all their cold break in the fermenter because they use plate chillers, just something I thought I would mention.
2.
Contamination - Not an issue if you are careful, which you need to be even with conventional chilling. I used a keg, which functioned similar to the "cubes" others have used in that you can put 212F wort directly into it and roll it around to sanitize all the surfaces. So in some ways there is less chance of airborne organisms falling in, but if they do somehow show up before you pitch they would have quite a jump start on the yeast.
3.
Bitterness - This one people already take into consideration and reduce bitterness when formulating the recipes. Strangely enough the bitterness on these two beers was not that different. In fact, about half the people who tasted them blind thought the chilled version was more bitter. People perceive bitterness differently and in this case there was not enough difference for people to pick up on which was which based on that alone. BTW this beer was about 38 IBUs calculated by Beersmith.
4.
DMS - This was not detected in either beer, but I am still going to call it inconclusive due to the malts used in this beer. This was a standard 60 min boil with no special steps taken to reduce DMS, but it's not a style that it would easily come through in anyway. In my opinion another experiment with a pale lager would be necessary in order to pass judgement on this. If I had to guess I would say with a 100+ min boil you could get enough SMM converted that it wouldn't be an issue though.
5.
Flavor/Aroma - The most noticeable differences were found here, many of which can be considered good or bad depending on your personal preference. The aroma in the chilled ale was much much cleaner, there was some hop aroma and a pretty clean bready character from the malts. The aroma in the unchilled beer was somewhat muddled and it was very difficult to pick up any hops or to distinguish what sort of malt was being featured, my wife thought it was kind of musty and uninviting. The flavor has less differences but there was some, they were just more difficult to identify. Most people who drank them blind found the chilled version to be more "crisp" with a much smoother finish. All in all the one that everyone said they would prefer to have a second pint of ended up being the chilled version. That is not to say the unchilled version was not good, everyone said the differences were very small and that they likely wouldn't have been able to tell had they not been side by side.
6.
Environmental Impact - I think this has a lot more to do with where you live than anything. I live in Northern Indiana and if you drill 30ft anywhere you hit water, I'm not concerned with drying up my well and the water is cold enough that my wort gets chilled very quickly. If you live somewhere with water restrains it might make more sense for you to apply this method. You can use less hops to achieve the same level of bitterness, so there is less ingredients involved. If you are doing a pale style this may require a longer boil, which uses more fuel and puts off more carbon. In my case the extra propane is way more expensive than the water needed to chill. On the other hand you don't need to buy a chiller...so on and so forth. People could go back and forth with these all day and I think they kind of balance each other out. Brewing isn't a very green hobby to begin with so I think it's good for everyone to take their individual situations into consideration and make the most responsible choice they can.
I had thought about entering these into a contest to see which scored higher, but at different contests there would be different panels which would sort of defeat the purpose. None of the comps I have on my schedule to compete in allow two entries in the same category, so I think I will just stick with a blind triangle test between myself and the other 4 BJCP judges in my local club.
My personal
conclusion is that this can absolutely be an effective way of making great beers. On my system it was actually more work for me to not chill that it is to chill. I have my methods down and they work for me, so I will not be switching to no chill. I really like chilling and pitching immediately, it gives me a piece of mind and I don't have to be constantly monitoring the temp of my wort to see if I can pitch yet. There is good and bad about both methods, and on a homebrew scale they can easily balance out. But don't think the pros are going to start doing this, the bigger your batch sizes get the less practical no chill would become. I would be very surprised to see anyone brewing 1bbl+ size batches using this method. All in all I think it might lend itself to some styles and brewing systems more than others, so I don't think everyone should throw out their wort chillers. However, for a lot of people, for a lot of different reasons this might be the most economical choice and I can't find any reason to tell them not to use it. If it gets more people brewing beer then we should all be happy...after all it got me to brew a bitter that have been enjoying immensely and otherwise wouldn't have gotten around to making.
If I forgot to comment on a certain area that you guys are curious about be sure to post. I still have about half a keg of each of these left so the experiments can continue!
Side by side No Chill results
Linear Mode
