Adding Wort to Ice instead of cooling

Yesterday I was watching A Samuel Adams video on how to homebrew and instead of cooling it in ice water or with a wort cooler the dude ladels it onto a chunk of ice. Is that really efficiant and sanitary?

It's been done. I've heard of using ziplock bags to freeze in, then sanitize them just before opening and dumping the ice.

if the water was boiled first, and the freezer is kept clean (so no wild spores could fall in the water and be transferred) then yeah, its a feasible method.

there are even some pretty gnarly formulas for determining how much ice you need to bring a volume of wort down to a specific temperature, which allows partial volume boilers to strike a balance with wort and top off ice to reach the 5 gallons and roughly 70F.

what you definitely do not want to do is go buy ice at a grocery store or snag it from an ice machine. god knows how sanitary that stuff is.

That sounds like a massive hassle I think I will sitck to my brew kettle in a bath of ice

I've just gotten back into brewing, and had limited experience previously but on my first or second brew I froze a gallon of boiled water in a sanitized plastic jug. When the boil was over, I "Star San'zed" the outside of the frozen jug, then (with a sanitized knife) cut off the plastic and dropped the ice block in. The beer turned out nicely. I've since bought a wort chiller, so haven't used that method again.

Rick

I fill up 4 gal jugs with PUR filtered tap water and place them in the freezer for 4-5 hours prior to brewing. I use them for top off water. Just open the lid and pour.

At 5 hours there are a lot of small ice chips, but they've been in a closed container so there's no risk of freezer contamination.

Been using the same jugs for years now...