I've always heard about adding salt to water with ice will make the ice melt slower and cool bottled/canned drinks faster (something to that effect). Has anyone tried this with success? Any thoughts on whether it would be something try with the ice bath to cool wort?
Cooling wort...has anyone tried this?
- Thread starter drathbone
- Start date
Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:
HeavyHandedBrewing
Well-Known Member
It works in my cooler when I am trying to quickly cool down a warm beer in the middle of the summer (not like that is a problem now that I have a kegerator!). In all honesty, I dont know how much difference it makes, but it can't hurt.
Salt has worked great for me in other ways. Many regulate fermentaiton temp with
the vessel of choice stuck in a cooler and frozen water bottles. If you add salt to
the bottles as well they last longer, cool to lower temps and you will notice the cooler's
water freezing onto the bottles. Salt is also very cheap even in bad economic times.
Should be a great solution, no first hand experience yet though.
the vessel of choice stuck in a cooler and frozen water bottles. If you add salt to
the bottles as well they last longer, cool to lower temps and you will notice the cooler's
water freezing onto the bottles. Salt is also very cheap even in bad economic times.
Should be a great solution, no first hand experience yet though.
It couldn't hurt anything. I actually thought about trying it on the batch I made last weekend just to see if I noticed any real difference. If you've ever made or seen anyone make home made ice cream, rock salt is added to the ice that surrounds the ice cream mixture, while it is mixing.
Give it a shot and report back...or maybe I will, if I brew this weekend. The only real reason I didn't try it last time was because I didn't have any rock salt and didn't want to use up all of our table salt or kosher salt.
Give it a shot and report back...or maybe I will, if I brew this weekend. The only real reason I didn't try it last time was because I didn't have any rock salt and didn't want to use up all of our table salt or kosher salt.
bonzombiekitty
Well-Known Member
Adding salt to the water with ice would make ice melt faster because the melting point would be lowered. The result of this is that you get more liquid that is below the freezing point of water. Which is a good thing because you can move that liquid around easily allowing a better transfer of heat. With pure ice, you'll have roughly 32 degree water touching the sides of the pot, with salt+water, the liquid touching the pot will be colder than than that.
It'll work, but is it really worth it? I dunno, I haven't tried. You'd need a fairly large amount of salt to really make a difference.
I can get a 25lb bag of table salt for about $4 at my local sams club. So sure, it'd be worth it to me if it works.
When I used to use an icebath I added salt all the time. And yes it seemed to work faster than when I didn't add salt. There's been several discussions about it.
For my last two batches, I have done a partial boil, around 2 1/2 or 3 gallons in a 20 qt pot. I use regular water in the sink and drain a few times, gently swirling the pot to bring the temps down to about 100-110. Takes about 20 minutes. I then add about a cup of ice cream salt and ice. If I swirl the pot gently in this mixture it seems too cool the wort down to 70 in about 10 more minutes. Works well.
Similar threads
