Noob Question

[Gusmedic]

Hello all, my first ever batch is on its 5th day in the in the primary and I have a question for boiling/cooling my next batch. First off, this forum has been an amazing help to someone like myself just starting off. Thanks to everyone that takes the times and patience to help us noobs take our first steps. People are never made to feel like there's a bad question.
My first batch went awesome. I hit all my steeping temps and ingredient times perfectly and had the wort cooled to 70 F in 15 min with an ice bath. Having all this Illinois snow on the ground helps. Since that won't be the case for very long I'm going to make my own wort chiller.
I left my spoon in the kettle for the last 10 min of boil and it stayed in pot and then primary until the lid went on. I plan the same with wort chiller. My question(s) pertain to the kettle lid and whether or not it's needed after the boil. I read a lot about having a sanitized lid on as its cooling, but since the lid isnt present during the boil it's not sanitized. Do people sanitized their lids with the rest of their equip? With the spoon and WC sticking out of the pot after the boil and me being so active in cooling, I don't even see how I'll get a lid on or the need for one. Am I correct in this?
Sorry for the long read, but I wanted to lay out my technique to see if I'm missing something.

 

[HB_in_Subic]

I always leave the lid off of my kettle when cooling. The heat has to escape and if you leave the lid on it will take longer to cool. I have had zero infections (knock on wood) while doing this.

If you stir the cooling wort it will cool faster. Especially if you have a wort chiller. For me, I have to also do an Ice Water bath of the kettle to get it below 95F as my tap water is too warm. Again I stir the wort while in the Ice Water bath. It takes me 10 minutes to get from 95F to 66F.

 

[solbes]

Agree, I leave my lid off during chilling. In fact I only really use it during heating the wort. Its fully seated while heating the strike water. Then I give it a crack as I'm heating up to boiling. Once I reach boiling it gets cleaned and stored away.

 

[Yooper]

I don't even HAVE a lid for my boil kettle!

 

[ImNoExpert]

Yeah, skip the lid. It will only get in the way way once you use a chiller. Just don't sneeze into it and you'll be fine.

 

[BuffaloJohn]

I suffer from an extreme case of buginthewortaphobia. While I have never seen any signs of actually having a fly or spider try my wort at the end of a boil, I tend to cover my kettle with the lid at the same time as adding the wort chiller. I spray it with a little starSan and let it sit ajar over the in and out tubes of the chiller. If the StarSan doesn't sanitize it, I'm pretty sure that the steam from the aggressively rolling boil will. Be careful here as the addition of the lid can cause a boil over.

I choose to do this as I usually brew in the garage or just outside of it. I have seen baby spiders come down from the above structure and blow around quite close to the kettle. I have seen flies come close in the summer. fruit flies might even seek out your sweet wort. In the late fall/winter when I'm making a warmer than normal spot, it seems to attract anything still living. It reminds me that my father once told me that 50,000 spiders will fall on one square yard of land each year. I tried to research this to find out if it's fact or myth and learned:

There are more insects in one square mile of rural land than there are humans on the entire earth.

A housefly can transport germs as far as 15 miles away from the original source of contamination.

62 degrees Fahrenheit is the minimum temperature required for a grasshopper to be able to hop.

Per published estimates a mean of 130.8 living spiders exist per square meter

What can the lid hurt?

 

[Allergic2hops]

I was given a wort chiller for Christmas (very cool gift!), however I noticed that it took twice as long to chill the wort than using the ice bath. Last Sunday I combined the two and got terrific results! I had been using up to 40 lbs of ice ($7) from Publix and combined I used 20 lbs. The 5.5 gal batch cooled in ~15 min. Didn't really time it but it was much faster than either method alone. Granted water out of the tap right now is colder and will be less in the summer.