Cooling the Wort - Why not just pour cold water in?

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beahmad

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Hi, HBT. When you're cooling your wort down after the boil, why don't people just add pre-boiled cold water to the wort to bring it to pitching temperature? This seems much easier than ice-bathing it or building some sort of other cooling system. But I've never seen it mentioned, so I assume there is some sort of downside to this technique?

Thanks for any help!
 
Most home brewers do full boils. Adding more water is not an option because you're already boiling the full volume.
 
Hi, HBT. When you're cooling your wort down after the boil, why don't people just add pre-boiled cold water to the wort to bring it to pitching temperature? This seems much easier than ice-bathing it or building some sort of other cooling system. But I've never seen it mentioned, so I assume there is some sort of downside to this technique?

Thanks for any help!

Well, the main reason is that it isn't possible to cool it down enough when you add cold water, and then you have 5 gallons of too-warm wort that takes even longer to chill!

Say you have 2.5 gallons of boiling wort. If you add 2.5 gallons of 40 degree water to it, it won't bring it down to 65 degrees, more like 110 degrees. And that's too warm.

But...........if you cool the boiling wort in an ice bath for 20 minutes, then you have 2.5 gallons of 90 degree wort. Add 2.5 gallons of cool/cold water to it- and you have 5 gallons of perfect 62-65 degree wort!
 
Yes, you can add distilled cold water to the wort to bring the temps down. But it's pretty likely it won't bring the temps down enough, so you're back to trying how to figure out how to chill it.

Full-boil batches taste better, and you pretty much have to do full-boil batches when doing all-grain.
 
Well most people I assume are doing full boils and therefore reach their target OG after the boil. Therefore added any water will severely dilute the wort and bring the SG down many many points. I used to do this when I would only have 2.5 gallons of wort at the end of boiling a 5 gallon batch. Definitely helped bring it down from about 90 degrees to 70 or so.
 
If you had a highly concentrated wort that wouldn't be too watered down, you could absolutely do that.

Usually, you won't add as much water as you already have wort (maybe you have only 3 gal of wort to which you add 2 gallons of water). Even if you had more, say 2.5:2.5 for a five gallon batch, boiling wort + ice cold water = 5 gallons of 122f water. Still too hot to pitch.

You are best off (at least for partial boils) to cool a bit in an ice bath or use a chiller and follow it up as you have mentioned: add sterilized cold water to say 140f wort. Keeping with the 2.5gal:2.5gal example, this would yield five gallons of 86f wort. Not quite cool enough, but you can see the trend.
 
But...........if you cool the boiling wort in an ice bath for 20 minutes, then you have 2.5 gallons of 90 degree wort. Add 2.5 gallons of cool/cold water to it- and you have 5 gallons of perfect 62-65 degree wort!

This ^^^^^^ works quite well for partial boil "stovetop" extract batches, especially if you put the jugs of refrigerated water in the freezer for about an hour while you do your boil.
 
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