Brewpastor
Beer, not rocket chemistry
I have been reading "Brewing" by Michael Lewis. It is a good but very heavy read, full of molecular chemistry and solid backbone science for all this brewing voodoo we do.
Among the things that has caught my eye is a piece in his discussion of heat transfer and convection. The long and the short is that Stainless has a tendency to hold onto its heat, and is much more reluctant to let it go into wort then say copper. This is called wetting and stainless is not so good at it. He points out that mechanical convection or stirring greatly increases wetting, thus decreasing stainless' shortcoming and making for a much more rapid transfer of heat into the liquid and rapid boiling.
What this leads me to is wondering how much gain I would have by stirring my wort as it is coming to a boil. My larger batches (30+ gallons) can be slow to heat and anything I can do to speed up the process is welcome. I am aware of the dangers of hotside aeration but this can be avoided. I have in mind the use of one of my pumps for example.
My question is if any of you know anything more about this. I assume I will find the answer further on in the book, but that is a couple hundred pages away and so I don't know when I will get there.
Thoughts?
Among the things that has caught my eye is a piece in his discussion of heat transfer and convection. The long and the short is that Stainless has a tendency to hold onto its heat, and is much more reluctant to let it go into wort then say copper. This is called wetting and stainless is not so good at it. He points out that mechanical convection or stirring greatly increases wetting, thus decreasing stainless' shortcoming and making for a much more rapid transfer of heat into the liquid and rapid boiling.
What this leads me to is wondering how much gain I would have by stirring my wort as it is coming to a boil. My larger batches (30+ gallons) can be slow to heat and anything I can do to speed up the process is welcome. I am aware of the dangers of hotside aeration but this can be avoided. I have in mind the use of one of my pumps for example.
My question is if any of you know anything more about this. I assume I will find the answer further on in the book, but that is a couple hundred pages away and so I don't know when I will get there.
Thoughts?