Chilling those last few degrees...

[Calypso]

We all have our challenges, and one of mine is getting my wort down to pitching temp. I can get it down to about 75F in a reasonable amount of time (20 minutes or so), but from there it seems to take exponentially longer.

So I tend to call it good enough and siphon my wort through a double mesh screen to aerate and cool it a little further (since room temp is 70F). Should I be making more of a concerted effort to drop it those last few degrees? My tap water is cool enough that if I spent the time, I could get it down to the low 60s.

 

[Queequeg]

You could use a cold liqueur tank. If you keg you can fill a keg with water, chill to close to freezing, connect your chiller. Alternatively you can do a gravity feed setup.

 

[YeastMode]

Personally, I do not (more a consequence of me living in FL than anything else), but you could always let the wort sit for 20 minutes in a ferm chamber if you had one, and then pitch. The other option would be to use a small fountain pump in a bucket of ice water.

From my experience I do not think it is an issue, but best practice would be to cool to as close to 70 before pitching. I would not, however, pitch refrigerator temperature yeast into 75* wort. I let the yeast come up to room temp before pitching.

 

[Onkel_Udo]

Depending on the yeast and beer style, yes. Sounds like you are using an immersion chiller? Indoors? Kitchen sink?

Assume all the above is true you are probably worried about the time involved as well as water usage. A couple on thing that can certainly help the water usage is using a lower flow so that your discharge temp is higher.

The best answer is to use that time for other things and find a use for the discharge water. Until recently I brewed exclusively outside so I added a garden hose fitting to the discharge and used it to water my lawn...this way I could just set it and forget it for while allowing me to do something else.

Now that I live in the frozen north, 6 months out of the year I cannot safely discharge my water outside unless I want to skate in my back yard so I started using a pond pump and ice water to chill wort recirculating it into bucket. This uses a lot of ice but I make my own so it cost almost nothing.

Finally, if you can chill in a laundry room you can use the discharge to fill the washer...if it is an top-loader it take a lot of water.

 

[Calypso]

Depending on the yeast and beer style, yes. Sounds like you are using an immersion chiller? Indoors? Kitchen sink?

Correct, correct, and correct.

Assume all the above is true you are probably worried about the time involved as well as water usage. A couple on thing that can certainly help the water usage is using a lower flow so that your discharge temp is higher.

The best answer is to use that time for other things and find a use for the discharge water. Until recently I brewed exclusively outside so I added a garden hose fitting to the discharge and used it to water my lawn...this way I could just set it and forget it for while allowing me to do something else.

Now that I live in the frozen north, 6 months out of the year I cannot safely discharge my water outside unless I want to skate in my back yard so I started using a pond pump and ice water to chill wort recirculating it into bucket. This uses a lot of ice but I make my own so it cost almost nothing.

Finally, if you can chill in a laundry room you can use the discharge to fill the washer...if it is an top-loader it take a lot of water.

All good ideas. I live in Michigan, so I don't feel TOO bad about using a lot of water, but I don't like being more wasteful than necessary. However, I live in an apartment, so the only one of those I could really do would be to fill my washer.

I don't keg, and I don't have a fermentation chamber (gotta pick your battles when you live in an apartment!), but I will keep the other ideas in mind for the future.

 

[peterj]

I always just chill until I fill the big (10 gallon) tub I use to catch the discharge water then proceed to transfer to my fermenter. In the summers I usually only get it down to around 80F or so. Then I just put the fermenter in the ferm fridge for a few hours until it gets to pitching temp, then pitch my yeast. You could just put it wherever you are fermenting and pitch whenever it cools down.

 

[Gavin C]

For the lalst bit of cooling you could switch from tap water to a recirculating ice water. connect the chiller to a pond pump immersed in iced water and that will bring it down very well.

I don't do this myself as I tackle this problem in another way which is not apllicable to your setup. I have read some thread on it and by all acounts it is very effective.

You need

• Cheap pond pump
  
• Plastic Tote
  
• Couple of bags of ice.

Use your tap water to get into the 100's and switch it to the pond pump.

 

[Calypso]

Good point! I could definitely just put the bucket+wort in my swamp cooler tub with ice packs and pitch an hour later. Do I need to worry about wort without yeast sitting around for an hour?

 

[MaxStout]

If you can borrow another IC, set up a prechiller. Connect that inline on the water source, at a point a few feet before the water reaches your main IC. Thus, the water passes through the prechiller, into the main chiller, and out. You'll need to make some short tubing sections for this. Chill until the wort temp won't go any lower, then drop that other prechiller IC into a bucket of ice water and continue chilling.

I brewed a lager last August (what was I thinking?) and chilled with 65F tap water. The prechiller enabled me to get the wort down to 48F, and only took about 10 more minutes.

 

[wilserbrewer]

I freeze a few 2 liter bottles filled with water, dunk them in star san and add to the kettle and let the wort chill. Much easier IMO than pumping ice water through a chiller.

 

[m00ps]

Good point! I could definitely just put the bucket+wort in my swamp cooler tub with ice packs and pitch an hour later. Do I need to worry about wort without yeast sitting around for an hour?

No, I regularly seal up my fermentor and let it sit overnight and pitch the next morning. It takes too long to get the wort down to the mid 60s. Now I hjust get it below 100 and get it into the fermentor and that into the fermentation chamber for the night

 

[Onkel_Udo]

I freeze a few 2 liter bottles filled with water, dunk them in star san and add to the kettle and let the wort chill. Much easier IMO than pumping ice water through a chiller.

This was my first method except a whole bunch of 10 oz thick walled bottles because my freezer was so tiny. When I was doing 5 gallon full boil in an 8 gallon pot I put the pot into a wash tub (later used as my swamp cooler), water around the outside and about 6 bottles in the wash tub and a dozen in the wort. My memory may be off as this was like 1994 but I seem to remember getting the whole thing chilled to about 65 f in 30 minutes.

 

[mtnagel]

According this this one experiment, what you are doing won't make a noticable difference.

In the winter, I usually cool to fermentation temp (~65F), but in the summer I usually only go down to around 75F like you.

I freeze a few 2 liter bottles filled with water, dunk them in star san and add to the kettle and let the wort chill. Much easier IMO than pumping ice water through a chiller.

I tried that a couple times as it seemed like a great idea in theory, but in practice it didn't seem to help all that much. The explanation I've seen is that a layer of ice will melt and form an insulative layer that's warmer than the ice.

 

[unionrdr]

Since I do pb/pm biab, I chill the hot wort in the sink till it gets down to about 75F. Then strain into the fermenter & top off to recipe volume with spring water that's been in the fridge a day or two before brew day. This gets the temp down to 54-64F quickly. so much so it gives a nice little cold break. & being unboiled cold water, it contains more dissolved oxygen as well.

 

[slym2none]

If you have good sanitation practices, then no. Some do no-chill brewing where they leave the wort out to cool overnight (covered, of course).

 

[Calypso]

According this this one experiment, what you are doing won't make a noticable difference.

Interesting, thanks for the link. I'm all for simplicity, so I might not worry about it. My recent RIS came out more estery than I wanted (hopefully it will age out a little), but my hunch is that it's due to insufficient oxygenation rather than pitching temperature.