How to Cool Wort (w/out wort chiller)

[laterholmes]

In fact you may be onto the next big thing in Chillers.

Thanks for saying it for me

 

[Beer_Guy]

BTW, the reason for the salt is to help the water stay fluid. Otherwise the sides will thaw and the bottles will lose overall cooling ability.

I might have to pick up a six pack of beer in those new aluminum bottles and try it.

 

[duckmanco]

For cooling partial boils the blocks of ice method as top off water is really unbelievably quick. Therefore u are not wasting water ice or money and it's down to pitching temps in probably 10 min. I used about 2 gallons of water for my blocks. Worked great.

 

[laterholmes]

For cooling partial boils the blocks of ice method as top off water is really unbelievably quick. Therefore u are not wasting water ice or money and it's down to pitching temps in probably 10 min. I used about 2 gallons of water for my blocks. Worked great.

Sounds cool but how do you get sanitized 2 gal blocks of water?

 

[PanzerBanana]

I put mine in the tub with enough water for the kettle to just begin to float. So there's water on all sides, and crack the lid ever so slightly.

 

[dfc]

If you're doing a partial boil freeze 1 1/2 gallons of water and place directly in your wort. It melts and in the process adds your make up water and cools your wort down in about 10 minutes.

 

[millaj92]

If you're topping off with fresh water to get to five gallons:

• Put three 1-gallon jugs of bottled water in the freezer at the beginning of your brew session.
  
• When your boil is done, fill your sink with cold tap water.
  
• Place the kettle in the sink and gently move both the wort and the water around.
  
• Once the sink water warms up, replace the water. If you have a double sink, simply move the kettle from one sink to the other with fresh, cold water. If you repeat this process about 3-4 times, you'll get the wort down to 100 degrees pretty quickly.
  
• Take one of the (now starting to freeze) jugs of water and pour it into the fermenter.
  
• Add your wort, then top off with enough additional cold water to get to 5.25 gallons.

This should get you to 75 degrees on the money.

This is very close to the method I use with one difference. I sanitize four 32oz cups then fill them about half way with RO water the night before and freeze them. After the BK is in the sink surrounded by water, I pop the giant ice cubes out of the cups and into the wort. I leave the water running barely so the hot water spills over to the other side of the sink and stir gently. When the 4 ice cubes are melted, I pour the wort in to a sanitized 7gal bucket that has 3 gallons of very cold water in it already. I stir this briefly, then siphon it to the primary with an aerator and it hits the carboy at 68 degrees. From there it's pitch, agitate, and done.

 

[sportscrazed2]

yep ice water will drop it to pitching temp in under half hour with a 2.5 gallon boil. it's winter now so i don't have to run out in middle of boil just so ice won't melt by the time it's time to cool wort yay

 

[WyomingBrewer]

The one time living where snow stays around for ever actually pays off.....no need to buy a wort chiller or bags of ice! I just drop the kettle in a snow bank off the porch for about 20 mins. 3 gallon boil cools to about 95-100 in that time and the top off of cold water gets it to pitching temp.

 

[laterholmes]

I'm thinking of using a frozen (full) stainless steel 1/2 gallon SIG or Kleen Kanteen type water bottle that I've sanitized as a wort chiller, alongside icebaths etc....Any problems with this idea? It would involve not having to buy new stuff which is very important to me at this juncture

Update on this practice: It isn't that fast, the lids don't prevent the bottles from gassing off when you stick em in the hot wort, and you have to sit there with your lid open til the ice melts. I'm pretty sure this practice led to my other thread about my beer tasting like a skunks hindquarters:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/my-beer-tastes-like-skunks-buttocks-232649/

Wort chiller city, baby.

 

[adempewolff]

The pot I've been using recently is too big to fit in the sink, and winter has gone so there are no snow banks outside. I thought about using sanitized plastic bottles or glass bottles, but after concerns about sanitation with the first (removing labels leaves sticky goo that I imagine bacteria would love hiding in) and thermal shock failure with the latter, I decided to double bag the bottles. It then took me about 2 minutes to realize I should just ditch the bottles and use the gallon ziplocks.

My conclusion is that its honestly not really even worth freezing the water or putting ice in alongside the water. When you are cooling 3 gallons from 200 degree to 100 degrees. Its not going to make much of a difference whether you are immersing 6 quarts of a 30 degree substance or 6 quarts of a 40 degree substance. I probably used about 4 quarts of ice/water mix, before switching to cold water, I then put two bags with about 3 quarts of cold water eacher in, refilled once, and had hit 100 degrees. Mixing this with two more gallons of cold water in the fermenter got me right to 78 degrees.

The process took under 30 minutes, and I imagine it could be done in 15 or less if you had the bags of water prepared beforehand and switched them out as soon as they warmed up. The other advantage is that you can take the temperature of the warm water in the switched out bags rather than leaving the cover off the pot while you get a reading from the pot.

If I did it again I would use cold water first (if not only) and then maybe use a bag of ice towards the end as the temperature differential gets smaller. I was a little sketched out about achieving full sanitation with the weird opening of the bags, but I think I was probably being paranoid. Next time I might boil the bags first.

 

[BrewPilot74]

I do all grain now so I use a wort chiller, but on one of my last extract brews I started thinking, hey, since I only boiled like 3.5 gal and I'm going to add water to this anyway to bring it up to 5 gal, why not just dump a couple of bags of ice right into the hot wort? I did that and it worked like a champ. Cooled it down in a matter of minutes.

 

[BeerChef17]

Personally I would stick away with dumping bagged ice into your wort. If you look at studies some ice can actually be really dirty since the bags get small holes in them and such during transport. I recently started buying 3 gal of spring water and chilling it the night before. After I remove my wort from the stove I put it in a straight water bath for a few min and drastically reduce the temp. Then I drain the water, fill the sink with an ice bath and add my chilled Spring Water to the wort - stirring to get an even mixture before taking my OG reading.