Cooling wort with ice.

Hey everybody, absolute newb here. Brewed my first batch on Saturday.

Quick wort cooling question:

My mentor told to use 3 gallons of water for the wort then pour over two 7lb bags of ice in the fermenter for quick cooling.

Any problems with this method?

(Sorry if this has been asked before. My search on "ice" yielded no results)

Thanks,

Arturo

You'll get lots of people arguing with what I'm about to tell you, but I've done that many many times and had no problems whatsoever. Be sure when you do that you pick bags that, as far as you can tell, are un-opened, not torn, nothing.

Also, in my experience, 2 bags of ice is too much to cool 3 gallons of boiling wort... When I used a 16lb bag, our temp went back down to 50-something and we had to re-boil some of it to bring it back up to temp. In my experience, 3 gallons + 1 bag of ice + 1 gallon of room-temp water hits 80 pretty close. It might be smart to stick a little purified water into the fridge just in case you are still a little hot.

Crushed (standard) ice is better than blocks of ice because of its overall surface area. Muuuuuch faster melting.

We usually dump the ice in first and pour the wort over it. No significant thermal shock to the plastic fermentor, nothing melts etc.

Stirring with a sanitized stainless spoon will speed things along as the ice and wort mingle. Also helps with the aeration, maybe, sorta a little.

Otherwise, enjoy!

Someday maybe you'll graduate (like me) to an immersion chiller, or something greater down the road. Until then, just enjoy making beer.

kvh

I just fill the bath tub halfway with cold water. Then i turn the water off and wait till it stops dripping. I do not want faucet water in my beer!

Anyways, I hold my brew kettle in the water so that the heat can flow from the wort to the tub water. For a cheap icepack, i always put three 2L bottles filled with water (not to the top!) into the freezer. When i need to ice down the water, i just throw them in. They work marvelously and are reusable.

About the procedure you mention, i'm not speaking from experience. But if you're using a glass carboy, be very careful. If you shock the glass like that it can fracture.

The ice in the wort method MAY open yourself up to bacteria. I recommend that you put the pot in an ice bath to cool the wort (keep the lid on as much as possible). It will take about 15 minutes to cool the wort this way. You want to do whatever you can to keep bacteria out of your wort so your yeast can be the only thing in there doing it's thing.

I used ice when I did extract. FWIW, the ice I bought claimed it was sterilized water. I made some great beers and never had any prroblems. If you're using a bucket, jjust dump some ice in there and then pour your strained wort on the ice.

King of the Swill said:

The ice in the wort method MAY open yourself up to bacteria. I recommend that you put the pot in an ice bath to cool the wort (keep the lid on as much as possible). It will take about 15 minutes to cool the wort this way. You want to do whatever you can to keep bacteria out of your wort so your yeast can be the only thing in there doing it's thing.

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I use this method and have realized that the wort does not cool very evenly at all. I was taking a temp of about 80 near the side of the pot but it was still near 130-140 in the center. It may help to stir every so often.

RyanJE said:

I use this method and have realized that the wort does not cool very evenly at all. I was taking a temp of about 80 near the side of the pot but it was still near 130-140 in the center. It may help to stir every so often.

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You do need to lift the lid to let out some heat and also stir it every few minutes.

I stay away from ice directly in the wort just because most homebrew books I've read tend to say don't do it.

I learned last night how difficult it is to cool a wort once it is in a plastic bucket. I didn't have any ice and the tempt didn't drop nearly as much as I thought it would when I threw in three gallons of ice water.

Live and learn. Gonna have to try this ice thing some time.

a quick solution to all of this might be to take a gallon of spring water and freeze it inside of small zip-lock bags. Rip them open and dump them into your fermentor and pour the hot wort over that -

Clean water, clean ice, everyone wins!

kvh