jaginger
Well-Known Member
I just read a post that got me thinking. What would be the problem with using one (or more) a gallon-sized ice blocks dropped into the wort after the boil? I used a 6 gallon final volume for the calcs below.
My back of the envelope math shows that one gallon of ice added to 5 gallons of 212-degree wort would drop it to 158 degrees in whatever time it took to melt the ice (not very long.)
2 gallons of ice would drop 4 gallons of boiling wort to 104 degrees.
Obviously neither of those is pitching temp (especially the 1-gallon version), but the point is you've gotten off the very high temps quickly.
The downside is you don't have a quite full-volume boil. But in the 1-gallon case I don't see that being too big a deal (final boil volume 5 gallons vs 6, so you probably started with close to 6.)
Omitting responses of "just get a chiller", would this technique cause any problems I'm not seeing? Boiling the water before freezing it should take care of any contamination issues.
Thanks for responding!
My back of the envelope math shows that one gallon of ice added to 5 gallons of 212-degree wort would drop it to 158 degrees in whatever time it took to melt the ice (not very long.)
2 gallons of ice would drop 4 gallons of boiling wort to 104 degrees.
Obviously neither of those is pitching temp (especially the 1-gallon version), but the point is you've gotten off the very high temps quickly.
The downside is you don't have a quite full-volume boil. But in the 1-gallon case I don't see that being too big a deal (final boil volume 5 gallons vs 6, so you probably started with close to 6.)
Omitting responses of "just get a chiller", would this technique cause any problems I'm not seeing? Boiling the water before freezing it should take care of any contamination issues.
Thanks for responding!