Hi,
This is my first post so here is a bit of an introduction:
I started brewing beer in May this year (2020) after pandemic lockdown rules prevented the selling of alcohol in my country. Couldn't get beer anywhere.
My first 3 brews were extract brew pouches from Mangrove Jacks. This was dumped into 5L of boiled hot water in my 25L stainless steel fermenter and then added 15-25L cold filtered water. Sealed and waited until the temp was good for pitching the yeast. This worked pretty well and produced really good craft beers.
However, I wanted to try real brewing (and get the price per beer down), I moved onto grain brewing.
I've done 3 brews with grain now using the Brew in a Bag method. Two as partial grain with added spray dry malt extract and using a 50L cooler box as the mash tun and a 50L electric urn as the boil tun. However, I could not maintain the mash temperature I wanted so the mash eventually dropped lower than the plan even when adding more hot water.
I have bottled and conditioned the first of these and pretty happy with the results.
Now my first all grain brew I used the 50L urn as the mash tun. Heated the full calculated volume of water to the strike temperature and dropped the bag of grain in. This allowed me to monitor the temperature with a drop-in digital probe and turn the urn on for a short times to keep the temperature up. It seemed to work, but the temperature obviously bounced up and down beyond the desired tolerances. I have achieved the desired OG being 1.052 so it's all looking good, but time will tell how much of that is fermentable as that is very much based on the mash temperatures.
Chilling for fermenting was my challenge and after using YouTube, I found many options to use. I chose to make a coil chiller with half-inch soft copper tubing. Coiling was tricky so as not to flat-bend but after a few hours I managed to shape a chiller. I chose to use the mash tun cooler box, filled with ice and water and a submersible pond pump to circulate the ice water through the chiller, back into the mash tun. I freeze a pile of water bottles to assist the ice cubs in keeping the water cold. It does work well and usually cools the 25L boiling wort in about 15 minutes.
Fermentation is straight forward as it is with an extract brew. My only control required here is to wrap a wet towel around the fermenter and turn on the fan when the temp rises higher than I want.
My bottling choice is in brown 440ml bottles with a bit of dextrose for natural carbonation. When drinking these beers, I prefer one smooth pour into my pint glass, stopping just short of the sediment. After the pour, I drink the remainder of the bottle with the sediment, then move on to drink a very clear slightly short pint of beer. That’s works for me.
To end this introduction, I'm extremely satisfied with my beers and always look forward to the next brew day.
I'm also very grateful for sites like this Home Brew Talk to gather more info and tricks of this trade.
Back to the subject of this thread: Chilling Options - in boil tun or fermenter
I currently add the chiller coil to the boil tun the last few minutes of the boil when I add the last boil hops, Irish moss for flocculation and generate a bit of a whirlpool action to centralise the trub before transfer.
I then move the chiller to the sanitised fermenter, start the chiller pump and then drain the hot wort from the boil tun into the fermenter through a hop bag to catch any particles. So I do my chilling in the fermenter.
My thought is hot wort will be safer to transfer that cool wort.
I fill the fermenter to the level required (if I have enough wort) and take into account how much the chiller will drop the level to when removed.
Most videos I've seen do the chilling in the boil tun and then transfer the cool wort. Is that method preferable?
Anybody have any opinions or reasons of the benefit of each option, or other options?
Thanks to all for reading this and for all the contributions on this site.
GuyZed,
Always focussed on my next brew.
This is my first post so here is a bit of an introduction:
I started brewing beer in May this year (2020) after pandemic lockdown rules prevented the selling of alcohol in my country. Couldn't get beer anywhere.
My first 3 brews were extract brew pouches from Mangrove Jacks. This was dumped into 5L of boiled hot water in my 25L stainless steel fermenter and then added 15-25L cold filtered water. Sealed and waited until the temp was good for pitching the yeast. This worked pretty well and produced really good craft beers.
However, I wanted to try real brewing (and get the price per beer down), I moved onto grain brewing.
I've done 3 brews with grain now using the Brew in a Bag method. Two as partial grain with added spray dry malt extract and using a 50L cooler box as the mash tun and a 50L electric urn as the boil tun. However, I could not maintain the mash temperature I wanted so the mash eventually dropped lower than the plan even when adding more hot water.
I have bottled and conditioned the first of these and pretty happy with the results.
Now my first all grain brew I used the 50L urn as the mash tun. Heated the full calculated volume of water to the strike temperature and dropped the bag of grain in. This allowed me to monitor the temperature with a drop-in digital probe and turn the urn on for a short times to keep the temperature up. It seemed to work, but the temperature obviously bounced up and down beyond the desired tolerances. I have achieved the desired OG being 1.052 so it's all looking good, but time will tell how much of that is fermentable as that is very much based on the mash temperatures.
Chilling for fermenting was my challenge and after using YouTube, I found many options to use. I chose to make a coil chiller with half-inch soft copper tubing. Coiling was tricky so as not to flat-bend but after a few hours I managed to shape a chiller. I chose to use the mash tun cooler box, filled with ice and water and a submersible pond pump to circulate the ice water through the chiller, back into the mash tun. I freeze a pile of water bottles to assist the ice cubs in keeping the water cold. It does work well and usually cools the 25L boiling wort in about 15 minutes.
Fermentation is straight forward as it is with an extract brew. My only control required here is to wrap a wet towel around the fermenter and turn on the fan when the temp rises higher than I want.
My bottling choice is in brown 440ml bottles with a bit of dextrose for natural carbonation. When drinking these beers, I prefer one smooth pour into my pint glass, stopping just short of the sediment. After the pour, I drink the remainder of the bottle with the sediment, then move on to drink a very clear slightly short pint of beer. That’s works for me.
To end this introduction, I'm extremely satisfied with my beers and always look forward to the next brew day.
I'm also very grateful for sites like this Home Brew Talk to gather more info and tricks of this trade.
Back to the subject of this thread: Chilling Options - in boil tun or fermenter
I currently add the chiller coil to the boil tun the last few minutes of the boil when I add the last boil hops, Irish moss for flocculation and generate a bit of a whirlpool action to centralise the trub before transfer.
I then move the chiller to the sanitised fermenter, start the chiller pump and then drain the hot wort from the boil tun into the fermenter through a hop bag to catch any particles. So I do my chilling in the fermenter.
My thought is hot wort will be safer to transfer that cool wort.
I fill the fermenter to the level required (if I have enough wort) and take into account how much the chiller will drop the level to when removed.
Most videos I've seen do the chilling in the boil tun and then transfer the cool wort. Is that method preferable?
Anybody have any opinions or reasons of the benefit of each option, or other options?
Thanks to all for reading this and for all the contributions on this site.
GuyZed,
Always focussed on my next brew.
