another thread about cooling the wort

i just brewed my first batch the other day, and it is now sitting in the fermenter. To cool the wort, i placed the metal brew kettle in my sink where i had a couple of pounds of ice piled up and around with salt sitting on it (just like you said in the other post on wort cooling). However, I stirred vigorously to facilitate the cooling process (convection versus conduction). will the aeration that the stirring caused hurt the final product, or am I on the right track?

Aeration while the wort is hot can potentially cause staling in the long run. Once the wort is cool (I think Papazian says below 90 deg. F.) then aeration is fine. Perhaps less vigorous stirring would help cool the wort down while minimizing aeration while the wort is hot-- no splashing or bubbles. The main thing is to increase the amount of hot wort contacting the cool side of the kettle, so as long as the wort is moving, then it will aid cooling.

At this stage, it's not a concern at all. If you're super concerned about hot side aeration, wait for it to cool down under 140F or so before you start stirring, but honestly HSA is really more of a commercial beer production concern, not something homebrewers need to worry too much about.

After the Wort is boiled, the oxygen has been removed by the boiling process. The heat of the Wort doesn't allow for much oxygen to dissolve into it, so you are probably ok. For homebrewers, mashing in, followed by lautering, are where you should be concerned about hot-side aeration.

Hotside aeration is another one of those brewing bogeymen that is only of concern to large commercial breweries brewing lagers (think BMC where any flavors, off or otherwise are considered a no-no.) It is really nothing a homebrewer needs to stress about.

What you did is the same as whirlpooling your hot wort to clump it all in the bottom of your kettel...Use the search feature an look up whirlpooling...

In other words you did nothing different than many of us do on a regular basis while cooling our wort...It will be fine....I rock mine back and forth every now and then, and even lift it out of the sink to swamp out water, and my beers are fine.

If you took an electric egg beater and beat your wort into a froth, that might be a different story...But remember, your beer Needs Oxygen anyway....

so don't sweat these brewing issues that you hear about, or read about...most of them are only of concern to large scale brewers, not us humble homebrewers....They just get repeated over an over like that old game we played as a kid called "telephone," until they become the stuff of nightmares for beginning brewers.

I wrote a blog about this a few weeks back....I wish some people would read it before they jumped in and posted certain things in threads like this... https://www.homebrewtalk.com/blog.php?b=50

My bigger concern would be that you didn't sanitize whatever you used to stir the wort as it was cooling.....Either keep a spray bottle or bowl of sanitizer handy and sanitize each time you remove the stirrer...or, I usually just leave my brew paddle in the kettle from boil all through the cool cycle....that way it stays as sterile as the wort is....

I just wiped my counter down with sanitizer and set the spoon right on it. That is probably the lazy mans way though.

newbrewr4fun said:

I just wiped my counter down with sanitizer and set the spoon right on it. That is probably the lazy mans way though.

Click to expand...

That works!

I usually lay out a couple of paper towels and spray them with sanitizer.