Aerating my wort before pitching advice

I'm brewing a Porter and using Wyeast London Ale liquid yeast. Once done brewing, I transfered my wort into a sanitized bottling bucket, place the lid on top of it without snapping it on (to keep airborne bacteria out) and placed it into an ice bath to cool. Once I received 73F I pulled out and siphoned it into my glass carboy. During siphoning I used the splashing technique to aerate. I checked my O.G. (1.053) and pitched my yeast.

Any recommendations for next time? Or any errors I made?

Is there a reason you didn't just put your brew kettle in the ice bath? Seems like that would be easier than transferring hot wort.

As long as your brew kettle does t have a glued disc attached to the bottom, I would recommend placing the brew kettle into the ice bath. The metal will transfer heat much faster than the plastic.

Your aeration technique is pretty ineffective. If you want to get a high concentration of oxygen in your wort, your going to have to shake the bejesus out of it for several minutes or pump oxygen in. I strongly reconnect the oxygen systems from Williams Brewing as they a fairly inexpensive and make oxygenation very easy.

Some splash aeration techniques work better than others. An O2 system for ales is nice, but not necessary.

According to Owen Lingley of Wyeast, vigorously shaking the carboy for 45 seconds is as good as it gets.

hercher said:

Is there a reason you didn't just put your brew kettle in the ice bath? Seems like that would be easier than transferring hot wort.

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+1

Transferring to the bottling bucket is an unnecessary step and another chance at contamination. I would find a way to ice bath in the brew kettle or build a DIY immersion chiller. You can make one for under $40.

For better aeration on the cheap, here's what I would do. Get a kitchen strainer and a funnel. Set the funnel in the top of your carboy and the strainer on top of that. Run the wort through the strainer. From personal experience, that's about as good as you can get without pumping 02 into the wort.

I know a guy who dumps the wort back and forth a few times through a paint strainer, but I would be terrified of infection.