Cooling the wort

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Duder

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I'm brewing my very first batch and am concerned that my wort is not cooling fast enough. Immediately after the boil I placed the wort on my back deck in a pile of snow. It is 3 degrees F outside. After 40 minutes the wort temperature is down to 120 F. Is this taking too long to cool, what am I doing wrong? It seems that in 3 degree F air and a pile of snow that the wort should cool much faster. Do I have anything to worry about? Thanks for any help,
Duder
 
If you don't have a wort chiller an ice bath is the next best thing, with frequent change outs of the water...Usually 3 changeouts get me down in under 45 minutes to the temp I want....I also add salt to the ice bath to make it colder. The problem is that you melted the snow around the pot and unless more snow is moved against the pot, nothings going to happen....if you have a plastic tub fill it with snow water and salt and place it in there....when the water around the pot feels hot, swap out the water...also swirling the water around the pot with your hands helps...it moves the hot water away from the pot and lets colder water in....

Cooling the pot with an icebath or a chiller works as a heat exchanger...and just setting it in the snow wont exchange the heat fast enough.
 
When it comes to cooling wort, faster is better. There are a number of reasons for this including infection prevention, and cold break formation. However, beer as been made where it has taken hours for the wort to cool.

Stirring the wort will greatly increase cooling time, as will continually repacking the snow around the pot. One of the problems with the snow method is that it metls, and pulls away from the side of the pot.
 
Should I be concerned about any undesirable bacterias forming in the wort, given the longer cooling time. It seems that if it's been sitting in 3 F air that there is not a lot of bacteria that may contaminate the wort to begin with.
 
You should only be concerned if you've had the lid off the entire time. If the lid is on, nothing's going to get in. Also, temperature doesn't matter when it comes to bacteria. They're still there, they're just dormant in the cold. Do the above advice, and you should be fine.
 
Duder said:
Should I be concerned about any undesirable bacterias forming in the wort, given the longer cooling time. It seems that if it's been sitting in 3 F air that there is not a lot of bacteria that may contaminate the wort to begin with.

Don't worry....if your pot was covered you're fine...if your pot was uncovered and no birds pooped in your pot...then you should be fine...;)

Despite what you might have read...it's really hard to ruin your beer. And since it's 3 degrees it's highly doubtful anything really bad nasties are flying around out there. Just get it cool asap and pitch.
 
Done and done... I definitely kept the lid on and there are definitely no birds flying around in this cold. Thanks for all the help... much appreciated.
 
As weird as this sounds, snow is actually an excellent insulator. Not only is it melting and pulling away from your pot, but there is so much air in it that it acts to insulate your pot as well. The best way in your situation would be to get a large tub with water, put your pot in it, and just add handfuls of snow to the tub o' water and stir it around your pot. Water will absorb the heat from the pot, and throwing in the snow will act to cool the water back down. Swirling your pot around would also speed up the cooling process.
 
I was going to make a new thread but I found this one and figured it'd be just as easy. I have a couple of specific questions regarding long wort cooling times. I'm trying as hard as I can to decrease the total time used in the process and I've really got it all down, except cooling the wort. It's the most frustrating part for me! Granted, it takes me about an hour to get it down to 70 degrees and that's not too bad, but I've heard of a couple of things that might help, just need opinions about it: One option is to Let it sit overnight with a lid on it and pitch in the morning. Another is to use less water in the boil, bring extra water to near-freezing point, and add that water to the wort after the boil. I've heard that can bring down temps 100 degrees in a half-hour. Opinions?
 
I think the time is still longer than it could be. I would suggest a couple of options.

1.) Fill a tub with a snow water slurry. You could even add some salt to speed up heat transfer, but I would try to keep it as simple as possible. The only downside to the tub would be the water will heat up fast, and you'll be changing your snow slurry several times to get it cold.
2.) Once you get down to around 150F, you could pour the wort into your fermenter. Then, just put a sanitizer soaked cotton ball in the airlock to avoid sucking back liquid and then bacteria. Let the cold air outside cool it the rest of the way down to pitching temp.

I battle cooling issues because I live on the Gulf Coast. My brew from last week made it down to 87F after going through 10 minutes of 25'-30' of counterflow chiller. I was using an immersion chiller combined with an ice bath, but that was never less than a 45 minute process to get into the 80's. It's just too hot down here. BTW, I've never had a bacteria issue with the open top for the cooling time. It's a good practice to cover it, but again if nothing flies in it, you're fine. Even if it did, it would still be fine. I've had things like leaking hose fittings and whatever else drip into the pot while cooling. It happens. I've never had a bad beer that I'm aware of.
 
Quick question on this thread. I've searched through all the other threads with this subject, but haven't seen anyone suggest, or make comment on this method:

In extract brewing, most of us are doing partial volume boils. How about boiling some water before making the beer, thus sanitizing it, and putting it in the fridge, covered. Then, when the brew boil is done, putting that water (presumably pretty cold by now) directly into the wort until the pot is nearly full (if you've got a 5 gallon pot, you'd presumably get to about 4.5 gallons in the pot, and would transfer about 4 gallons of that to the fermenter). Everything I've read says you want to get the wort down below 140 as quickly as possible to prevent DMS formation. Wouldn't this method pretty much guarantee you of that? And it would be damned near instant. Granted, you would have to be careful not to aerate before it has cooled, and would probably still need the ice bath to get down to 60, but it seems to me a good way to get the cold break done.

If I'm way off, please educate me before I try this out. Thanks!
 
NavyRob said:
Quick question on this thread. I've searched through all the other threads with this subject, but haven't seen anyone suggest, or make comment on this method:

In extract brewing, most of us are doing partial volume boils. How about boiling some water before making the beer, thus sanitizing it, and putting it in the fridge, covered. Then, when the brew boil is done, putting that water (presumably pretty cold by now) directly into the wort until the pot is nearly full (if you've got a 5 gallon pot, you'd presumably get to about 4.5 gallons in the pot, and would transfer about 4 gallons of that to the fermenter). Everything I've read says you want to get the wort down below 140 as quickly as possible to prevent DMS formation. Wouldn't this method pretty much guarantee you of that? And it would be damned near instant. Granted, you would have to be careful not to aerate before it has cooled, and would probably still need the ice bath to get down to 60, but it seems to me a good way to get the cold break done.

If I'm way off, please educate me before I try this out. Thanks!

DMS is not a problem with extract brewing because it has already been removed in the process of making the the extract

Ideally though you chill the beer as quickly as possible using either an immersion chiller or a counter flow chiller.

To the dude in Ohio- your ground water should be quite cold now so if you had a chiller it would only take like 10-15 minutes to chill the wort. I'm in Chicago, ground water is 53 and using a CfC I chill 6.5 gallons in about 10 minutes!

As already mentioned, the ice bath is the next best way to handle this
 
Snow is a great insulator. It would be better, I think, to leave the glass outside, with no snow around it. I did the same thing: cold here in the mountains, put the hot wort outside, in a glass carboy, with a strong wind in sub-freezing temps. It cooled down pretty fast.
 
WI_Brew_boy said:
Just a noob question? Why would you not want to airate the wort before it cools?

Aerating hot wort can cause oxidation. Oxidation causes long term off flavors that do not age out. I believe the taste associated with oxidation is somewhat like wet cardboard.
 
Aerating hot wort can cause oxidation. Oxidation causes long term off flavors that do not age out. I believe the taste associated with oxidation is somewhat like wet cardboard.

That's another one of those things that's blown waaaay out of proportion. It's one of those worst case scenarios that Palmer stuck in his book and every noob on the planet took as cannon and started repeated.

You'll find that many of us who use immersion chillers begin stirring the wort immediately as well as moving it up and down and creating quite a bit of o2 in there. And our beers turn out fine, not instantocardboard or whatever you hide under your bunks laying awake night worrying about.

HSA for homebrewers is waaaayyyyy paranoia...another thing that made the leap from commercial breweries of tastless lager that has to have a long shelf life and absolutely no flavor (good or bad) otherwise.

Hot-side aeration may be demonstrated in medium and large commercial breweries because the brewing equipment is so big that splashing is a really dramatic event. Think of liquid flowing through a six-inch pipe at 400 gallons per minute and cascading 12 feet through the air before hitting the bottom of a tank. (Maybe, see video below.)

But to the home brewer it's only a bogeyman....

I love the quote about the Basic Brewing experiments on Maltybrew.com

Hot-side aeration…myth?

I listened to a great podcast from Basic Brewing Radio yesterday on hot-side aeration. Everyone seems to debate whether or not this is a concern for homebrewing. The podcast covers an experiment done by some homebrewers in Austin where they try hard to cause HSA in a small batch.

I was never too concerned about HSA in my brewing and now I think I’m even less concerned.

FYI, here are the basic brewing podcasts on it...

March 16, 2006 - Hot Side Aeration
Charles, Chris, James and BrianWe travel to Austin Homebrew Supply in Austin, Texas to taste the results of Brian Warren's experiment in Hot Side Aeration. The experiment produced some very surprising and interesting results.

Click to listen

June 22, 2006 - Two Homebrew Experiments
froth_sm.jpgWe hear from two homebrew experiments: William Tope, a high school student from Houston, Texas, delves into whether alpha acid levels of hops affect fermentation rates, and the Hot Side Aeration experiment continues with Brian Warren and John Holder.

Click to listen

November 2, 2006 - HSA Experiment: Final Chapter
Andy Sparks and James Spencer join Brian Warren and John Holder in Denver to taste the last round of samples in the Hot Side Aeration experiment. We also get feedback about the experiment from John Palmer.

Click to listen

Most of those who "claim" it are brand new brewers who "think" they know somethings wrong with their beer when it usually it's just green beer, and later when they taste their beer again, weeks late they usually come back and say the beer is fine. An equal number have blamed an off flavor on diactly or even autolysis, until we point out certain facts about those different things, and again a few weeks later they usually post their embarrassment at being so freaked out back then.

We're not saying you don't practice good brewing techniques, of any types, just that most of those things that new brewers panic about, that they read about in books is worst case scenario stuff, misunderstood conjecture that has been handed down over the years as "canon" with little or no validity, something that is of more worry to commercial operations or lager breweries, or myths that have been disproven in light of modern brewing science, that was based on OLD brewing info.

And in reality our beer is a lot more resililiant than most new brewers believe, because at their stage of brewing they understand just enough to be dangerous.

It takes a lot of abuse to ruin our beer...and even the "day to day" mistakes that we make is often NOT enough to ruin our beer. Its pretty hardy stuff.

If you read the stories in here, of "mistakes" that people have made here, you will come to realize that a lot of stuff happens in the normal course of brewing, and the beer still manages to survive, so if you make a mistake, you don't need to immedietly panic and assume your beer is ruined.....

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/wh...where-your-beer-still-turned-out-great-96780/

And a lot of stuff can be corrected with time anyway.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/ne...virtue-time-heals-all-things-even-beer-73254/

In years of brewing and in helping panic new brewers I've yet to find cases where it wasn't a false alarm in just about anything any new brewer has claimed, and that is the case for the dreaded HSA, Autolysis, and 99.95% of the new brewer infection threads as well.

I'll save you the bother of searching, but here's a few of those new brewer HSA panic threads...

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/hot-side-aeration-so-im-idiot-71873/

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/who-afraid-hsa-76779/

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f13/hot-side-aeration-71806/

HSA is something that get's discussed by commercial brewers in journals, and some overzealous homebrewer then starts worrying about it, and it get spread into the HOBBY community, with little understanding...and then people brewing thier first beer start threads worrying about it...

So don't sweat your new brewer head about HSA....or anything, you beer is much hardier than you think...

And if you still are worried, then watch this video of a commercial brewhouse...

You think they are concerned about HSA? :D





The only time we have to be concerned with oxygenating and getting liquid cardboard is when fermentation has started. Oxygen + Fermented Beer = Liquid Cardboard.

Man, we haven't had an HSA believer on here in a couple years...thought that one was dead and buried.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Quick question on this thread. I've searched through all the other threads with this subject, but haven't seen anyone suggest, or make comment on this method:

In extract brewing, most of us are doing partial volume boils. How about boiling some water before making the beer, thus sanitizing it, and putting it in the fridge, covered. Then, when the brew boil is done, putting that water (presumably pretty cold by now) directly into the wort until the pot is nearly full (if you've got a 5 gallon pot, you'd presumably get to about 4.5 gallons in the pot, and would transfer about 4 gallons of that to the fermenter). Everything I've read says you want to get the wort down below 140 as quickly as possible to prevent DMS formation. Wouldn't this method pretty much guarantee you of that? And it would be damned near instant. Granted, you would have to be careful not to aerate before it has cooled, and would probably still need the ice bath to get down to 60, but it seems to me a good way to get the cold break done.

If I'm way off, please educate me before I try this out. Thanks!

This is pretty much the Mr Beer method for 2 1/2 gallon brewing. they boil 1 or 2 quarts of water. Add the sugar enhancer, pull from the burner add the liquid hopped malt. Put cold water into the fermenter and add the wort, pitch the yeast into the already cool wort. I actually got to the point in the past where the wort was a bit too cold with almost ice water. I never bothered with boiling the cooling water and never had a problem. My own well water not store bought too. Not sure if everyone's water would do the same. I did some checks with a cup of boiling water and added cold water in various states of cold and amounts and took temp readings to get the proper cold water/wort mix to produce the desired temp from the boiling point. I don't have the calcs handy as I have been using a wort chiller for a while now and do not do that method anymore although in a pinch I would do it if circumstances dictated.

What I have never seen in the various stuff I have read and meant to ask but never did as it was all just working. If you tried this with unhopped extract (or AG) and used your own hops, I assume that you would need to add your own boil time (60 minutes) not only for sterilization but also to get the chemical actions, reactions from the wort and the hops. It would seem to me that Mr Beer is doing some/all of this in making the hopped extract but I have no firm info on this. I defer to any of the more knowledgeable on here for that one.
 
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