ice cooling

[Ster]

What if I froze a couple of 1 gallon water pitchers and dropped them in to the hot wort to cool????

I usually top off with tap water anyway..

 

[twistr25]

As long as its sanitized, that is perfectly acceptable and quite a few people do it.

 

[looneybomber]

I've done that with 1gal jugs of distilled water. It works, but giant ice cubes take forever to melt. What I do now is put them in the freezer about 4 or 5hrs before i need to use them and periodically shake them. Right when I am going to use them, I shake the holy crud out of them and pour in the slush. Because it's not a solid chunk of ice, it won't drop the temp down as much, but since the chunky slush has a surface area about 1000x greater than an ice cube, it melts extremely fast and drops the temp very quickly.

I do the ice thing after the wort has cooled a bit floating in a tub of cool water. Between circulating cool water with the hose and the slush, I can drop below 100 in an OK amount of time. 12-15min?

 

[brew_ny]

when I do a partial boil of 7.5 gallons boiled down to 6.5 gallons I drop in about 30 pound of ice cubes that I make with boil water

then top it up with a gallon or so of cold water as needed and it is cooled to 64 - 66 degrees in minutes

pitch my yeast and it is all good, I have dug wells here and even if I recycle the water it is not good for me

all the best

S_M

 

[looneybomber]

I tend to boil 4 gal of water, so I don't have a lot of room for ice, but 30lbs will certainly bring some wort temps down!