Cooling wort

[Zman3]

I have always put the ice I bought at the gas station directly in my fermenter with no, bacteria infections or anything but people say I shouldn't do that? Why.......

 

[Zman3]

It takes twice as long as an ice bath in the sink and I sanitize the fermenter and the wort is sanitized my sink is too small and my pot is too big it would take a really long time too cool it in the sink if that would even work or not?

 

[Calder]

A couple of potential problems.

1) The ice has oxygen in it. If added to hot wort it might cause Hot Side Aeration. Many people believe HSA is a hoax, but I bet most of them still minimize the potential for it. I believe it is real, but takes a lot of abuse of the hot wort to get it.

2) If there is any bacteria in the ice, you are giving it a great environment to reproduce and spoil the beer. There is always bacteria in the wort; we don't sterilize anything (apart from possibly the wort itself with the long boil), we only sanitize, so everything has some bacteria on it, and there is always bacteria in the air. When we pitch yeast, we generally pitch a healthy amount, and it becomes a race between the yeast building it's colony and creating alcohol to protect the beer, and any bacteria building it's population to a level to which it can affect the taste of the beer. The bacteria grows and establishes itself quicker than the yeast, so we need to keep any bacteria to a minimum while maximizing the yeast. This is probably your biggest potential problem - you don't know the quality of the water that made the ice, so you could be adding bacteria; someday you will get a bad bag of ice, or the yeast you pitch will have a problem leaving more time for any bacteria to multiply.

 

[LogicBomb]

The ice can harbor bacteria and dirt. You have no guarantees. The ice could come from dirty ice machines or factories. You have no idea what the water profile of the ice is. The bags can bump and bang and scratch causing dirt and other nasties into the bag of ice, etc...

I'm not going to tell you NOT to do this, but I wouldn't.

I personally use a 50' 1/2" copper IC, but if I DID go the ice route, I'd use sanitized tupperwear filled with water the rest of my brew used, sealed in my own home freezer. For one - it would be cheaper, and two - more sanitary.

 

[Nummey]

I've read on other threads of people freezing 1 gallon jugs of store bought water cutting away the plastic jug with a sanitized knife and dropping the ice right into the boiling wort. This would only work with partial boils though. You should check out the thread on adding ice in the General Techniques subforum. I'm very interested in giving this method a shot on my next brew.

 

[richkev]

I still do that when I extract brew. I use sanitized Culligan water jugs, freeze filtered water, cut the jug away with a sanitized knife... I do this mainly as a time saving measure, which is why I occasionally extract brew, to begin with. If time is if the essence, works well.

 

[speeddemon190]

I put my pot in a laundry tub and get the temp down to 90-100 with just an ice bath. once its down to this temp I pour in 1 gallon of store bought ice cold spring water that has been sitting in the fridge for awhile. This usually gets the wort down to temp very quickly (partial boil. Pour wort into fermentor and top off with more spring water.

 

[TriggerFingers]

1) Ice has bacteria, and you don't know how "sanitary" the ice packaging, ice house, gas station, etc. is.
2) You water down your beer.

 

[brewbama]

Can you sanitize some used 2L Coke bottles, freeze ice in them, and use them to cool your wort?

Edit: Disregard -- I should have read richkev's post ^^^ a bit closer.