Wort Chilling Question...

[acidrain23]

So, I've been away from brewing until earlier this year. But I do have a lot of experience making meads and melomels, though not a lot of beer. In mead making it is common to bring down the temperature of hot honey must by just topping with cool water. Is there any reason to not do this with beer? Especially given a small volume boil (don't need a huge volume with extracts). The last couple of beers I brewed I used this method and it came out great, but wondering if there was a reason beer brewers do not use this technique...

 

[beerhound28]

yes the reason i believe you should not top off to cool is because it will dillute your batch and change the gravity of the wort and usually us brewers have a target OG to achieve and by adding water like i said will dilute it but more importantly it can also infect your batch maybe..Im not 100% sure but this is my take hope it helps cheers

 

[acidrain23]

I guess I don't really see dilution as an issue since the total batch size is constant (5 gallons) and I calculate the gravity using a brewing calculator before hand. I'm using DME as a base mostly with some steeping grains. I'm sure it wouldn't work with all grain batches since you need a much larger boil volume to extract the sugars...

 

[H-ost]

I haven't found a truly convincing reason why you can't do it that way but I'm sure someone somewhere knows why...

If you are doing a small boil volume then I would suggest using an ice bath in the sink or bath tub to get the wort to down around 90 degrees and then add your colder top off water. A few bags of ice and some stirring both inside and outside of the pot (don't interchange your stirring utensil though) can drop the temp pretty fast for 2.5 gallons.

 

[stratslinger]

I actually thought that was pretty common in extract brewing, when using partial boils... Most of the instructions I've seen (including Palmer's!) have stated to cool your wort down to 100 or so then dump in with the top off water - but if you chilled said top off water sufficiently, you probably wouldn't have to work quite as hard to chill the wort.

One thing to be careful about though, is that it's probably safest to pre-boil the top-off water. As beerhound pointed out (breathe dude, or at least use a little punctuation! ), there is an increased chance of infection if you're not boiling that water beforehand to sanitize it.

 

[beerhound28]

yeah sorry im not educated

 

[bottlebomber]

Its fine to do that. If you're trying to chill the brew I've also heard of people putting boiled water into a sanitized tupperware, freezing it, and adding the ice block to the top off water.

 

[acidrain23]

Interesting, thank you for the replies- just something I've been curious about!

 

[acidrain23]

Also, I've never had an infection- but I always use a large yeast starter with I start about 24 hours in advance.

 

[Mongrel]

The only real problem with the partial boil method is that you take a hit in your hop utilization.

 

[Yooper]

Adding cold water doesn't work very well, even with a partial boil. That's because say you have 2.5 gallons of boiling wort. Adding even 2.5 gallons of 50 degree water to 2.5 gallons of 210 degree wort will NOT cool it enough. Then you'd have 5 gallons of too-warm wort that will take even longer to cool!

But what does work great is a combination of chilling and topping off with cool water. Take the 2.5 gallons of wort to the sink and put it in an ice/water bath for 20 minutes. Gently stir both the water bath and the wort (with a sanitized spoon for the wort!). It'll get to 100 degrees in about 15 minutes. THEN take your 100 degree wort and add it to the 2.5 gallons of cool water! Aerate it by stirring well, and boom- you're at a perfect pitching temperature of less than 70 degrees in 15 minutes!

 

[acidrain23]

Awesome, I will defintely try that next time!

 

[Run3minman]

Great idea.