I have been experimenting with no chill wort cooling recently. I have been putting the beer into a corny keg, hitting it with 30 psi and letting it cool down over night. The goal being to not waste water, not use my old (but effective) system of putting it in two canning pots in the tub AND to not buy more gear.
So far, so good, but it takes it forever to cool down. Like a full day. The time delay has not been an issue as I've been making a lot of malty beers lately. Also, I find frequently I have time to brew when my fermentation chamber is full and don't have time when its empty.. so it lets me stack up the pre-made wort in the fridge, ready to go when I have space to temperature control it during fermentation.
This method is great, but obviously becomes a problem when doing something hoppy because the wort stays at above 175 degrees for so damned long. The hops (esp the late addition hops) keep undergoing isomerization and overly bitter the beer.
Today I decided to brew an IPA and I was trying to think how to do this without messing around with the hop schedule too badly, which is the general approach for no chill.
My solution was to put the hot wort into the keg, seal it and place it in the bathtub on its side. I hooked it up to the CO2 and ran the shower over it with the tub plugged for about 30 minutes or so. I shock the keg once every minute or so to keep the wort circulated and the outside hot.
I managed to get it down to about 100 degrees in about half an hour or so and only filled the tub up about 1/3 of the way (finally a good use of the low flow shower head...). It helps that I live in Canada, its winter and my tap water is really cold right now.
I will report back if the beer turns out overly bitter, but that is quicker than I got the temperature down when using canning pots to make a decent IPA and seems to have cut it under 175 degrees inside of 10 to 15 minutes, while using a fairly minimal amount of water, which is awesome. Perhaps no chill is not an appropriate name for this, but low chill anyway
So far, so good, but it takes it forever to cool down. Like a full day. The time delay has not been an issue as I've been making a lot of malty beers lately. Also, I find frequently I have time to brew when my fermentation chamber is full and don't have time when its empty.. so it lets me stack up the pre-made wort in the fridge, ready to go when I have space to temperature control it during fermentation.
This method is great, but obviously becomes a problem when doing something hoppy because the wort stays at above 175 degrees for so damned long. The hops (esp the late addition hops) keep undergoing isomerization and overly bitter the beer.
Today I decided to brew an IPA and I was trying to think how to do this without messing around with the hop schedule too badly, which is the general approach for no chill.
My solution was to put the hot wort into the keg, seal it and place it in the bathtub on its side. I hooked it up to the CO2 and ran the shower over it with the tub plugged for about 30 minutes or so. I shock the keg once every minute or so to keep the wort circulated and the outside hot.
I managed to get it down to about 100 degrees in about half an hour or so and only filled the tub up about 1/3 of the way (finally a good use of the low flow shower head...). It helps that I live in Canada, its winter and my tap water is really cold right now.
I will report back if the beer turns out overly bitter, but that is quicker than I got the temperature down when using canning pots to make a decent IPA and seems to have cut it under 175 degrees inside of 10 to 15 minutes, while using a fairly minimal amount of water, which is awesome. Perhaps no chill is not an appropriate name for this, but low chill anyway
