Cool the wort!

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mossy

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Hey, just a quick question, I'm about to do my first partial extract brew, I don't have an immersion chiller, I was just going to chill the wort with some ice water in the sink but I just realised that the boil kettle wont fit in the sink. Is it ok to just leave the lid on the pot and let it cool down on it's own or it there anything else I could do.
Thanks.
 
Or find one of those plastic dish pans that'll fit the BK. My 5G BK will fit my sink,so I put it in,fill the sink with ice,& then top off with water. It'll cool down a bit quicker this way. And keep the lid on. You don't want nasties settling into it.
 
Just letting it sit with lid off will take quite a while. I second what those above me have suggested. If you have bag ice set it on top of one and one or two on the sides? You can dump ice directly in the wort in place of your top off water though there is a risk of introducing some nasties to your brew though I have done it many a times with no problem.
 
I used to buy those plastic dish pans to change oil with. They're shapped like the bowl of a 2-bowl sink. About the same size too. They could also fit an ale pail for a swamp cooler that fits in smaller spaces.
 
Thanks for the suggestions, it'll be the bath tub today and I think I'll get one of those ikea tubs for the next tim. Thanks again.
 
I stopped at a thrift store and got a big tupperware tub, about 70 qts for about $3 and it works pretty well for chilling the wort as I can bring the water level to the level of the wort. If water is all I have it will warm up and need replaced a couple times but in the winter I dump snow into the water and the process of melting the snow chills the wort pretty fast.
 
... in the winter I dump snow into the water and the process of melting the snow chills the wort pretty fast.
Great minds think alike, and all that. Another thing I do is stir the pot of hot wort into a good whirlpool before covering it and chilling. In my mind, this accelerates the heat transfer, although I haven't conducted a rigorous controlled scientific experiment.

Cheers!
 
Or use the "no cool - aussie method" and don't cool it all for a day or two or three.

There's a +umpteen page thread around here somewhere about it.

Just a thought.
 
You have to top it off with water so why not do what I do,I boil some water a couple days before brew day then put in 2 litre drink bottles and freeze them,take a knife and split the bottles and put the ice in the fermentation bucket and dump the hot wort on top and stir the crap out of it and top it off with cold water.My last batch went from boiling to pitchin temp in ten minutes.
 
A few days before I brew i do my yeast starter and cooling ice. For me a wort chiller is somewhat of a over kill and just another chunk of brew equipment to clean. I boil several quarts of water in a pot with a lid and let it cool. I pour the cooled (sanitized) water into 1 quart size sanitized Tupperware tubs and freeze. To cool my wart I drop one or more quart size chunks of ice into the hot wart and it cools within minutes. With defined sizes of chunks of ice it is easy to calculate how much water to put onto your fermenter/carboy.
 
I chill the wort in an ice bath,& have a few gallon jugs of whatever water I brewed with chilling since the previous day. Gets down to mid 60's quick. So quick this last time that I got some cold break in the FV. 1st time for that.
 
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