Accidental no-chill

Did my first all-grain BIAB this weekend, went off a lot easier than I expected it would. Hit the mash temp spot-on, maintained it nicely, got all but one liter of wort out of the bag by gravity and hit the SG within 0.001.

Boil was, to say the least, interesting. Using an electric urn (3kW element) and had thermostat give an electrical fault which took two drainings of the wort to resolve. Finally got to the boil and all went well until the chill phase. My trusty immersion chiller popped a solder joint where the hose connector goes on, luckily no water sprayed into the wort. But I ended up doing a no-chill.

So here's the situation, targeting 23l fermenter volume with 38.5l mash-in volume, 6.5kg grain bill. 25g Southern Promise hops (10.5%) for 60 minutes and 45g Cascade(5.5%) at 10 minutes. Supposed to have been a rapid chill, but instead took a slow cool, nearly 3 hours to 40C. I got 1.061 OG in the fermenter at pitching of the yeast (US05) and she's fermenting nicely.

I did chill from 95C at the end of the boil to 85C with a few sanitized ice bricks, but that was it for the chilling.

How much extra bitterness do you experts think I've ended up with. Recipe aimed for 35.7 IBU. One lives and learns with this hobby.

I'd say to recalculate ibu as if you had boiled all your hops for maybe an extra 3 minutes.

Are you saying the temperature of the wort was 40°C when the yeast was pitched? That is quite warm for any yeast.

flars said:

Are you saying the temperature of the wort was 40°C when the yeast was pitched? That is quite warm for any yeast.

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No, it was 40°C before I drained from the urn into the plastic fermenter and got the wort off the hot break and hops. Didn't want the fermenter to warp from the heat. I pitched at 23°C the next morning.

bruce_the_loon said:

No, it was 40°C before I drained from the urn into the plastic fermenter and got the wort off the hot break and hops. Didn't want the fermenter to warp from the heat. I pitched at 23°C the next morning.

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Just an aside here but if you have a white HDPE bucket for a fermenter they can handle boiling wort without any problem. I've emptied the boiling wort into mine a few times and just put the lid on and ignored it until it reached pitching temp some 36 hours later.

You might not notice extra bitterness because that last addition is a flavor and without the intense boiling the alpha acid to isoalpha conversion is limited and the sense is that the bitterness is much more refined. It is basicly a long steep ,which I find cascade hops do really well in, guess I love cascade. sounds like a tastey beer.

Thanks for the info, I'll report back once I get a properly mature bottle or two in a glass.