Saving Water

[Owly055]

I live in an area of virtually unlimited water.... crystal clear sweet water straight from the nearby Crazy Mountains flows from my well as fast as I can pump it.

That however does not keep me from being concerned about the water crisis in other parts of the country and world. Most recently Capetown is facing complete cutoff of piped water supplies to all but critical institutions, forcing residents to line up with buckets at local water taps. Something no modern city has ever faced before to my knowledge.

Our fellow home brewers in Capetown will suffer from this, not to mention beer drinkers. Microbreweries are not considered critical institutions, so there will be a shortage of good beer........ an almost inconceivable crisis.

My own brewing process is using less and less water. I've cut my boil times down to 30 minutes. I chill only down to 160F, which takes very little water, then rack to the fermenter, and let it cool, and pitch the yeast the next day.

Beer is just as important as drinking water to most of us, in fact I know people who simply do not drink water at all. Actually this time of year, I drink very little water that is not filtered through coffee grounds or crushed barley, or mixed with frozen concentrate.

Who wouldn't make an extra trip to the community tap in Capetown to get water for brewing? But it's time to look very seriously at no boil / no chill brewing. It does work, and rather than looking at a water shortage as a major crisis........... but as an opportunity to advance this promising technology. The Chinese characters that represent crisis, also represent opportunity. We need to adjust our thinking that way. Climate change for example has created the opportunity for wind and solar alternatives to explode, as well as electric vehicles. War, the space race, etc, have all spawned incredible innovation. Crisis drives innovation and progress in many cases. This should also apply to brewing.

H.W.

 

[RM-MN]

I live in an area of virtually unlimited water.... crystal clear sweet water straight from the nearby Crazy Mountains flows from my well as fast as I can pump it.

That however does not keep me from being concerned about the water crisis in other parts of the country and world. Most recently Capetown is facing complete cutoff of piped water supplies to all but critical institutions, forcing residents to line up with buckets at local water taps. Something no modern city has ever faced before to my knowledge.

Our fellow home brewers in Capetown will suffer from this, not to mention beer drinkers. Microbreweries are not considered critical institutions, so there will be a shortage of good beer........ an almost inconceivable crisis.

My own brewing process is using less and less water. I've cut my boil times down to 30 minutes. I chill only down to 160F, which takes very little water, then rack to the fermenter, and let it cool, and pitch the yeast the next day.

Beer is just as important as drinking water to most of us, in fact I know people who simply do not drink water at all. Actually this time of year, I drink very little water that is not filtered through coffee grounds or crushed barley, or mixed with frozen concentrate.

Who wouldn't make an extra trip to the community tap in Capetown to get water for brewing? But it's time to look very seriously at no boil / no chill brewing. It does work, and rather than looking at a water shortage as a major crisis........... but as an opportunity to advance this promising technology. The Chinese characters that represent crisis, also represent opportunity. We need to adjust our thinking that way. Climate change for example has created the opportunity for wind and solar alternatives to explode, as well as electric vehicles. War, the space race, etc, have all spawned incredible innovation. Crisis drives innovation and progress in many cases. This should also apply to brewing.

H.W.

If you have no late addition hops you can go right to the fermenting bucket (not carboy, they break nor better bottles, they distort) as soon as you kill the heat. The HDPE buckets will take the heat and that boiling hot wort will ensure the pasteurization of the bucket and lid. Late addition hops will add bitterness and lose flavor compounds unless you chill the wort below 170, just as you suggest.

 

[Owly055]

If you have no late addition hops you can go right to the fermenting bucket (not carboy, they break nor better bottles, they distort) as soon as you kill the heat. The HDPE buckets will take the heat and that boiling hot wort will ensure the pasteurization of the bucket and lid. Late addition hops will add bitterness and lose flavor compounds unless you chill the wort below 170, just as you suggest.

The challenge is not one of making good beer, but of making the crystal clear brews we all seem to like. With no boil / no chill this would probably require filtration. But there is nothing at all wrong with hazy beer. Today I'm making a "kitchen sink beer"......... basically throwing in the odds and ends of fermentables I've got laying around. I'm heating the mash water as I write. I've decided to make this a no boil / no chill, and not to do the "hop decoction", I've done in the past. The last few brews I've done, I've not added ANY hops to the boil at all. I'll leave the mash all afternoon, and finish the brew tonight. I plan to add sweet orange peel to the mash, which I've found leaves a subtle flavor I like, as well as keeping the chunks out of the fermenter. I'll also add hops to the mash. The remainder of the hops will go in as soon as I pull the bag, and get raised to about 170, and there will be a dry hop addition. I haven't decided yet what hops to use.....

H.W.

PS (added later)

Using Cascade and Nugget, and Perle. One ounce of Cascade cone hops added to the strike water 10 min before adding the grain

 

[motosapiens]

meh, i'll just skip showering on brew day, and move to where the water is.

 

[ancientmariner52]

I get my water from a rural water district, and my power from a rural co-op. Both are so cheap, I feel like I'm just paying for use of the infrastructure and getting the water and power for next to nothing. Even so, I don't waste either, because I was brought up to be frugal.

However, nothing I do or don't do will have the slightest effect on Capetown, or SoCal, or any other place where the population has outrun available resources. Great cities have been abandoned throughout history for all sorts of reasons. It's going to happen in the future as well.

 

[HausBrauerei_Harvey]

I also have been embracing a psuedo no-chill like H.M. for about 6 months. I use my IC and generate only 5 gallons of chilling water, this usually gets a 5 gallon batch to 120-100F for me and helps with cold break and clear beer. I then pop the lid on the kettle and let it chill overnight then pitch in the morning. Works great and is super low effort. The chilling water is then used to water our two newish trees.

I recently read about the cape town water crisis without having heard of it before, that is very scary for those residents indeed.

 

[BrewZer]

I firmly believe that the water vapor I'm putting in the air as I boil my wort will, in fact, help stimulate rain in South Africa, just as surely as my prodigious use of fossil fuels is putting weather-changing carbon dioxide into that same atmosphere.

 

[Staticsouls]

When water is not near it is far, but never gone.

 

[jtratcliff]

No chill doesn't be equate to hazy... With time and temperature, I get very clear no-chill beers...

The cold break does occur, it's just finer particles... That take a little longer to settle out...

 

[RM-MN]

Yesterday I did a no chill batch and paid more attention to a couple details that I had only assumed before. One was the pasteurization of the fermenter bucket. I poured the wort in and popped the lid on, then let it set in my kitchen for 15 minutes while waiting for the lid to pasteurize. I used my non-contact thermometer on the lid and found that it was between 165 and 170F which should pasteurize within a minute.

Then I set the bucket outside on my deck and monitored the temperature as it cooled, again with the non-contact thermometer on the outside of the bucket. It took about 3 hours to chill to the upper 50's with temperature below zero and winds up to 20mph.

 

[Owly055]

My no boil / no chill from yesterday seems to have come out quite well thus far. I did a bit of a variant, using the sous vide exclusively for the process. I heated my strike water with it, and did my pseudo boil to 170F with it. The variation was that I held the wort at 170 for a full hour..... which is effortless with the sous vide. This was for maximum hop isomerization. It should be interesting to see what the resulting beer tastes like. The wort tastes great.
The Cascade full cone hops added during the mash seemed to provide quite a bit more flavor than I expected....... I'll do that again as it makes an easy way to use these hops.

H.W.

 

[bobeer]

I've been doing no chill brews for years and I've never had an issue with hazy beer when that's not what I'm going for. It works well and gives me time to do other stuff while I'm waiting on the wort to chill. I keep it in my boil kettle because I feel it chills faster on my deck in stainless steel rather than in a plastic bucket.

I feel for the folks who are short on water. I lived in the norcal valley once a d we had to be very careful about our water usage. It sucked so I moved back to my home state, northern Va. Sure, the culture here sucks, and it's very expensive, but we don't have natural disasters, there's plenty of jobs, and we get all 4 seasons.

Just out of curiosity how does a no boil brew work? When are the hops added and how do you extract bitterness from them? Do you use more grain to get the gravity you want since you're not boiling off any water?

 

[beernutz]

The biggest way I've saved water is when using an immersion chiller I cool with tap water down to 100F then recirculate ice water from a cooler using a pump through the chiller to get the liquid down into the 60s. I'd estimate that saves probably 20 gallons of water plus using tap water in the summer here I can barely get under 80F.

 

[hammy1983]

Being close to a lake and getting my water from a 80ft drilled well thats into the aquifer, my set up this summer is going to be an immersion chiller with the sprinkler attached to the end on my front lawn where my well is. Green lawn and putting the water back where it came from.