Waiting for wort to cool

Folks,

With the warm weather, house water, and using both a pre-and plate-chiller, I cannot get my wort south of 82F.

Is there any harm in airlocking it and putting it in the chest freeze/ferment chamber and waiting for it to get to 65-70 before aerating and pitching yeast?

Thanks for the help!

 

Nope, people do that for lagers all the time.

 

Thanks for the quick response JonK331.

 

Becareful that the shizz in the lock doesn't get sucked into the wort along with all the bugs that are in your freezer, due to contraction of the liquid as it cools. The longer the wait in the cooling to pitching process. The more the chance of bugs. The family meatpop freezer/"chamber" isn't the best device to use to cool wort to pitching temp.. Since you have chillers and so on. Use ice water as the coolant if possible.

 

I use an IC and submersible pump/ice water recirc. My summertime city water temps average around 76˚F. It takes about 10 minutes to get my wort down from boiling to ~100˚F with this water directly into the IC due to the large temperature differential between boiling wort and even relatively high temp tap water. At that point the temperature differential is not great enough for chilling any further in a reasonable amount of time.

Now the objective is to create another large temperature differential. Disconnect the city water from the IC and go into ice water recirc mode with the submersible pump in a 5 gallon bucket filled with tap water and store bought crushed ice. The pump discharges the ice water into the IC and the return water goes back into the ice water bucket. This an efficient use of the ice, as the return water temp is no so high as to obliterate the ice as it recirculates. I use about two 5lb bags of ice, topped off with city water. I'm able to go the rest of the way from ~100˚F to lager pitching temps (~55˚F) if I want in about another 5-7 minutes with this method.

 

I chill my beer as far as i can with an IC (usually about 80 to 100) then I rack my wort to carboys and chill in the chest freezer overnight. I put on the airlock and have learned how much liquid to use to avoid the dreaded suckback. Dial it in and you will not have infection problems.

I have used this method to chill my beers for almost a year and have produced award winning beers.

 

I always get tired of wasting water for my recirculated immersion chiller to get from 80-the 65 (even though I don't pay for it, lol) I consistently pitch at 80*, and through it into the fermentation chamber to cool to the 60~ temperature I want.

What started out as pure laziness, became a ritual. I notice much faster starts of fermentations, and by the time anything REALLY crazy starts, the beer is within temperature of what I am shooting for.

 

How powerful is your pump? I'm looking at doing this myself and am leaning towards a 250gph pump. Stepping up to 350gph wouldn't cost me too much more and would probably be a good idea since I'll be pushing water through 15ft of RV hose, plus the IC and the garden hose attached to the IC output.

 

This is what I've been doing as well my last couple of batches. IC to around 80F, pitch, put it in the chamber to bring it down to fermentation temps. Seams to work well.

 

Here is the link to the Flotec Submersible Pump that I bought from Home Depot. It's 1/6 hp and capable of flowing 930 gpm at 10' of head. It's probably overkill for this application, but it's what Home Depot had on hand when I first conceived of cooling this way. It has served me well for several years now, and I've used it for many other tasks around the house, like emptying kiddie pools and such.

 

If you fill the airlock with starsan is the suck back going to cause any issue?

 

No, but when I used those types of airlocks I filled them with cheap vodka, so suckback only meant a slightly higher abv, lol!

 

You can also use the bubbler type air lock, which does not allow the water to be sucked in.

 

What if you just plugged the airlock completely with a #1 or 0 stopper (whatever fits)? I wouldn't think cooling 20 degrees would cause enough vacuum to break a carboy or bucket. Thoughts?

 

I've seen the vacuum collapse a Better-Bottle with my own eyes and heard of it causing a glass carboy implode! I don't think anything would happen to a bucket fermenter though.

 

^^^ This and I lay a little CO2 blanket in the carboy also.

 

Thanks for the all the great suggestions. I will probably try out a few of them in my next session.

To clear some things up, my chest freezer is dedicated as a fermentation chamber, was bought new, and is very clean so I'm not too woried about nasties. I also thought about "suck-back", however I air-lock with a blowoff tube that has its open end dipped into a StarSan solution. I also used ~2ft of tubing so that if it did suck-back, it would have a decent length of tubing to travel through first. Plus, if a little bit of StarSan gets in the wort it can only help things, right

I pitched the yeast late Friday night and had solid fermentation since Sunday morning. It's just starting to slow down today.