My chiller leaked into my kettle, now I have questions.

[The_Beer_Gnome]

Everything was going perfectly until I turned on the water to feed my chiller, then I heard the leak. Evidently my immersion chiller froze overnight and there's an inch-long split in one of the coils. At this point I measured 5.5 gallons in my kettle, so I needed some make-up water anyway. I added water to 6.5 gallons total, brought the kettle to a boil again for about five minutes, killed the burner and waited two hours for the wort to reach 150F. I racked to a carbouy and let it set 'till morning before I pitched my yeast. The temp was just down to 75F by 8am!

So, did leaving my wort at 200-150F for such a long time over bitter my beer? I know many people do no-chill brewing but I'm not sure if this is the right way to go about it. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

[theredben]

It will be a bit more bitter than usual, maybe 10% (not a big deal).

Next time I would not worry about a little bit of tap water. When people make extract batches they usually add 2-3 gallons of regular unboiled tap water. No real cause for concern.

 

[rycov]

i cant remember the numbers, but it needs to be a certain temperature for isomerisation. so you probably weren't getting that the whole time. while it maybe a little different than you had intended, it should still be fine. turn your water on first next time. lesson learned. this is not nearly the worst mistake i've read on here and usually the beers end up just fine. cheers!

 

[dchmela]

I ran into a similar problem with my last batch (water in leaked into the wort), but did not find out until I had 7.5 gallons of watered down Belgian Tripel. I ended up taking 5.5 gallons and pitched my Belgian yeast, waited until fermentation kicked off and added 2 gallons of honey. I estimated the OG to be about 1.055. I have it on tap now and it is a great little session beer. The other two gallons I threw into a 3 gallon fermenter, pitched a packet of s-05 and dry hopped with an ounce of Citra. I haven't tried it yet, but it is really just an experiment, so if it is 2 gallons of hoppy session brew, I'm am fine with that.

As always, it wasn't what I expected, but will make for a fun experiment.

 

[heckels]

My next batch is going AG, but as mentioned above, I've always added tap water to my 3 gallon boil to bring it up to 5 gal and haven't had any issues.

Just hope there wasn't any mold/bacteria growing in the chiller from water setting in there that didn't totally dry out.

 

[HHP]

I think the biggest issue you are going to find is just cosmetic. When I did my first couple of AG batches (after a five year furlough from extract brewing) I didnt use any chilling mechanism, they tasted fine but they were cloudy as ****. I imagine this will be your fate, not the end of the world.