New way to cool All grain batches

I've been an extract brewer and recently did my first all grain batch by using the Brew in a Bag (BIAB) process. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the process here is a explicaton, with pics, of something similar to what I did. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/easy-stovetop-all-grain-brewing-pics-90132/

It went over pretty well, but the biggest problem is chilling the wort. As we all know this is the most dangerous time for contamination. With exact brews over half my final volume would be ice cold top-off water and I could chill the wort from 160deg-75deg in 2 minutes.
With all-grain I had to do an icewater bath, which is wasteful and cumbersome, and stir constantly, which is an additional risk and quite boring, and I still ended up putting in a litte top-off water, which hurt my effeciency.

Here is the idea: (5ish gallon batch)

1 Mash the grains as normal with about 3 gallons of water.
2 When the mash is done, do a dunk sparge at 170 with 2.5-3 gallons of water let soak for 15-20 mins.
3. Start the boil with the 3 gallons of mashed wort and proceed with hop schedule as normal.
4. After the grains are removed from the sparge water, bring the sparge water to a boil for a few min to kill bacteria from the grains that are now in the water.
5. Allow the boiled sparge water to drop to 175 and put in a cold water bath for a short while and then in the freezer. (all done with a sanitized lid on the container)
6. When the mashed wort is done boiling take off burner and allow to cool to 160. When it does, take the now chilled sprage water and add to the vessel. It should equalize to around 80deg very very quickly.

The way I see it this solves many problems:
A. You don't need a wort chiller and in fact it will probably work quicker than a wort chiller.
B. No potentially effeciency killing top-off water is needed to chill.
C. A five gallon batch can be done w/o a 7 gallon capacity vessel, just two 3-4 gallon pots.

The biggest problem is of course risk of contamination. I know barley is loaded with bacteria this is how sour beers work. If wort is left to is own devices it will mold within 24hrs. Will this short boil be enough to kill all of this bac and will the sparged wort be safe from contamination in the freezer? (with the lid on, of course)

I really hope this will work. What does everyone think?

Doubt you could chill the sparge water fast enough without a blast freezer. I suspect your hop schedule would also need adjustment from other recipes.

^^^^ This

You'll need to adjust your hop schedule because of hop utilization issues. Plus, if you've ever put something with that kind of thermal mass in your freezer at anything around the temps your suggesting you'd know that it won't work and your gonna end up with a warm freezer. Do yourself a favor and get a wort chiller, you'll never regret it.

rjschroed said:

^^^^ This

You'll need to adjust your hop schedule because of hop utilization issues. Plus, if you've ever put something with that kind of thermal mass in your freezer at anything around the temps your suggesting you'd know that it won't work and your gonna end up with a warm freezer. Do yourself a favor and get a wort chiller, you'll never regret it.

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Or better yet use two wort chillers

And adding a couple gallons of 170f water to your freezer is a good way to wreck your fridge/freezer, or thaw everything in it in short order.

Immersion chiller is definitely the simplest way to chill with full volume boils, cheapest as well. Counterflow chillers are probably better overall but more complicated to put together and more expensive.

Go put an immersion chiller together, it'll cost you maybe $50 to do it yourself with 3/8th soft copper pipe and a couple garden hose ends and compression fittings, but it'll work wonders providing you have a tap and a drain of some sort near your brewing area.

I would have to agree with the immersion chiller. I was brewing off and on and when I got back into brewing it was the best investment I made after a larger brewpot. Not that I would recommend but I have even heard of people just covering the wort if they are brewing at night, and let it cool by itself and pitch yeast in the morning. I have doen that myself, but don't advise.

I agree there's no way a home freezer is going to chill that amount of liquid in the time the main wort is boiling, and that an immersion chiller is a better solution (even though I'm still ice bath chilling myself but I've never seen anyone say they were not completely thrilled with thier IC once they switched to it).

Another option if you still want to try this is you could do the chilling of the sparge wort in an ice bath while the main wort is boiling - should easily be able to cool it to at least 50º during that time and I don't see and reason why it needs to be stirred during that time. You could even use what's left of the ice bath on your main wort.

Another thing to consider is that there are advantages to doing a full boil. One is hops and not just the utilization factor but also the max IBU factor. I saw another thread here recently discussing this where it seems the max possible IBU for any wort is somewhere between 60-100 (and lots of disagreement about what the exact limit is), so if you do a half boil and have that at say 60IBU, then add the other half water, the final IBU will be around 30. This probably would be less noticable in low to mid IBU beer's if you're already compensating for reduced utilization with more hops, but it could come into play if you were trying to make something at the high end of the IBU scale.

I think DMS might be a potential problem with all grain partial boils as well. I don't claim to understand it completely but I've seen in the wiki where 100 minute full boil is recommended to prevent DMS flavors, so to me it follows that anything less than that there is greater potential for DMS. Might be worth researching, or least be aware of if you try out your method.

I'm all for people finding what works best for them so if you try this, let us know how it turns out.

Not boiling the sparge wort for a similar period to the main batch could lead to issues, like DMS and no hot break.
That said, a creative idea to solve your problem, but less than ideal.
If you try this report back your results.
Cheers.

I think a wort chiller is your best bet. You don't want to lose your full boil, then you lose hop utilization and character. Plus refrigerators are the most bacteriologically active environment in your house. I wouldn't risk my batch in one. That said, I like the idea in principle, if you try it ,please post results.

Counterflow chiller, homemade or store bought, will chill as fast as you need. Plus you can boil and hop as has been done time out of mind.

I can answer one question you had. 165F will kill the bacteria. If you can get it to 165F you got no worries of bacteria at all unless they come in later after it has cooled. And I like my chiller set up. I use a tupperware container with drain holes in it about 4 inches up from bottom. Drop my kettle in and dump bags of ice around it. I then stir it and just leave it for 30 min. The whirlpool from the stirring puts the trub in the center and it is cooled to 70F.

Thanks for all the input. I think the majority opinion maybe right. If I was going to do it, I would definitely do an icewater bath for the sparge water and then maybe the freezer once it was down to room temp, although the icewater bath would probably chill it faster anyway.
The only thing that worries me about this is the fact that I was hoping to avoid the risk of contamination that allowing a pot of wort to chill in an ice bath entails. By allowing the sparge water to sit at temps below 160 for even longer than the full wort normally would have, I seem to only be increasing that risk. Perhaps the fact that the sparge water contains considerably less sugar than than the regular mashed wort would reduce the risk, I don't know.

The only way it looks like I would be able to try this would be the following: Take the sparge water vessel and put it in an icewater bath (I have sink big enough for 2 pots) let it cool as much as posible. Put the boiled pot in the ice water and once it reaches 180 or so throw them together. (hopefully this temp will kill any bacteria that may have formed in the sparge water. This should equalize at close to 80.

This would still chill the wort quickly, avoid most contamination issues and forego the use of a 7 gal pot. However, I would be left with hop util and DMS issues. Btw, if DMS issues have anything to do with the water supply I tend to use purified water for my beer if that make a difference. And as far as hop util goes, I have done several extract brews were over half of the final volume was top-off water and the type of hop flavor expected from the amount of IBUs in the beer always matched. In other words, if I put in enough hops for 40IBUs in a 5 gal batch but only boiled 2.5 gal and added 2.5 gal of top-off water, the final product definitely tasted way more like 40 IBU than 20. I could be wrong on this, idk.

I think you are worrying to much about contamination. If everything is clean I see very little opportunity for bugs to set up residence. This is beer not nuclear engineering. I think the saying is RDWHAHB

The other option of course is just to No-Chill your wort

Or you could boil the whole batch together then split it into separate pots and cool each separately. Say one in the bathtub the other in the sink (unless you have a double sink). Then combine them back together. Or then again you could boil separately and hop separately and not combine until they're ready for the fermenter.

I just upgraded my 20 yr old immersion chiller made out of 25' of 3/8" tubing because it was way too slow for the larger batches I do nowadays. I just bought 75' of 3/8" tubing and made a new chiller. Now I can chill 10 gals of boiling wort down to 70f in 10 to 15minutes, depending on if it is winter or summer out. Works for me!

bwomp313 said:

Or you could boil the whole batch together then split it into separate pots and cool each separately. Say one in the bathtub the other in the sink (unless you have a double sink). Then combine them back together. Or then again you could boil separately and hop separately and not combine until they're ready for the fermenter.

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This is a really good Idea that solves most of my problems, Thanks.

Also, I'm sure I will get a wort chiller at some point, its just right now money is a bit of an issue and I'm not terribly handy. The idea of me trying to make one sounds a bit scary.

Cimerian said:

I think you are worrying to much about contamination. If everything is clean I see very little opportunity for bugs to set up residence. This is beer not nuclear engineering. I think the saying is RDWHAHB

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Good advice.

I got my boiling wort, 5.25 gallons final volume, down to 66 degrees this weekend in 16 minutes with my standard 25' copper IC. You're not going to top that adding cold water and there's no way your fridge will cool it to where it would need be in 60 minutes.


Rev.

amcclai7 said:

Also, I'm sure I will get a wort chiller at some point, its just right now money is a bit of an issue and I'm not terribly handy. The idea of me trying to make one sounds a bit scary.

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When you do decide to get a wort chiller try to build it. Not only will you save $30-40 but it's really simple. I just built one for half the price as my LHBS sells them for.

Get a coil of copper tubing; I bought 25 feet of 3/8 inch for $22. Since its already coiled it doesn't take much work to get it in the shape you want. I also had to buy three hose clamps, $0.99 each, 10 ft of vinyl tubing, $4.99, and a barbed garden hose fitting, $8.99. I bought everything at Home Depot.

It took me about 20 minutes to assemble and I was able to chill 5 gallons of wort from boil to 76^ in 25 minutes.

aryoung1980 said:

I was able to chill 5 gallons of wort from boil to 76^ in 25 minutes.

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Typo: 15 minutes not 25

I have 25' of copper coil. I put it in a bucket of ice water, sanitize the coil well, and drain my boil kettle into my fermenter. I need 3 bags of ice and a drain on the bucket to make room for more ice.

Homemade conterflow chiller, 200F to 70F as fast as you can drain your kettle.

One of the best things we did to dramatically reduce chill times (in Florida) is to use our homemade Counter-Flow chiller, AND the old home-made immersion chiller we used to use back when we did small 5-gallon DME based recipes. We run tap water through the immersion chiller, while circulating the beer and ice water through our CFC, closed loop, with the chilled beer going back into the kettle at first
We drop 14 gallons by about 10 degrees per minute from 210 to 130. Then we put a "thru-mometer" at the output tube of the CFG, and that 130 wort in the kettle is between 60 and 70 by the time it hits the thru-mometer, and on into the carboys.

I know this is an old thread but what if you do an extended boil before adding the hops?

You could, for instance, boil 7 gallons down to 4 gallons then add hops as normal, then have at the end around 3 gallons.

Would this work? or is there a chance or scorching the wort? How detrimental and or feasible would this be?

I was wondering myself.