Chiller Question

[mmmforbiddendonut]

Okay, I'm trying to figure out how not to overchill my beer, or find out if this is even a problem. I put together an immersion chiller with 25' 3/8" copper tubing, some polyester tubing to hook up to the sink and to drain it, and fittings to the sink. After the boil was over, I put this immersion chiller (sanitized) into the wort, and placed the brew pot into an ice bath, and made sure to stir the wort with a sanitized steel spoon to ensure quick cooling. I managed to drop the temperature of the wort from boiling to 58F in roughly ten minutes (3 gallon boil). When I added it to the water in my carboy, and topped it off, I was down to 54F. Problem was, this was an ESB and the yeast I used, Danstar Windsor, is supposed to be optimal at 64-70F. Due to time constraints I pitched into the 54F wort and let it go. The beer took off anyhow, was visibly fermenting in 8 hours and high krausen in 24. At 24 hours the fermenter is up to 64F. Is there any risk to chilling the wort too cold or am I just risking a lag time for the wort to warm back up? Or should I just RDWHAHB?

One other question: Is there any good way to filter out pellet hops out of a boil? I have been using leaf hops and just use a strainer along with a fine mesh filter that fits into my funnel. With the pellet hops, they tended to clog like crazy in the fine mesh filter.

And to anyone who is reading this, 25' lengths of 3/8" copper tubing are available cheaply at Ace Hardware stores, the tubing was $17.49 CHEAP. I'm done now.

 

[WOP31]

Don't worry about chilling your wort too much, what you mainly need to worry about is having your wort and your yeast at the same temp. I talked to the headbrewer at a local micro and he chills his beers down to almost freezing to pitch his yeast. But he said that you have to make sure that the yeast and wort are very close in temps.

As far as filtering just do a search for hopstopper or hop filter and you will find all the answers that you can handle.

cheers