Keep calm and chill the wort quickly.

That uncomfortable feeling when you realize you've just spend an hour writing a blog post on the exact topic on which you've already written a post.  Ugh!  I knew it sounded familiar.  Oh, well.

At least this time I've got photos as proof of the efficacy of the new wort chilling system.  Check out the photos, and to prevent myself from scrapping an hours worth of work, the remaining post will follow.  Read only if you want to.  Kinda like a rerun, of sorts.

Preparing the ice bath in the mash ton.

Ice water is gravity fed to the wort chiller in the boil kettle.

Cold water in, and hot water out.

115 degrees after 5 minutes.

86 degrees at the 10 minute mark.

After 20 minutes, down to 70 degrees
and it aerates as it transfers to the carboy.

Now for the work I began earlier this morning...

Chill the wort.  No, this is not a post about epidemiology.  To the brewer, it is known that after boiling the wort  (it isn't called beet yet at this stage) during the brewing process, it is best to chill it quickly to the temperature at which you can add the yeast and begin the fermenting process.

The period of time from the boil to pitching the yeast (at a temperature of 65-72 degrees) is when the wort is the most susceptible to infection.  At boiling temps nothing can live in it and once alcohol is present, it will assist in killing any bad things as well.  But the in between stage...

The objective is to chill it quickly to limit this time.  Additionally, when chilled quickly the protiens will collect upon themselves and fall out of the solution.  This is called the "cold break" and will help to result in a clearer beer.

At the homebrewer level, some of us don't have expensive chill plates and pumps or other cooling mechanisms.  One thing you will want to invest in is an immersion wort chiller.  This is a copper coil that is to be placed in the hot wort while cool water flows through it.  The heat in the wort transfers to the cool water in the chiller, ultimately removing the heat form the wort.  The problem is that sometimes the tap water isn't cold enough (at least in Florida).  With this method alone, I could not get it chilled to below 80 degrees.

For me, this meant, headaches and worries.  I would wait for 30 minutes or so with the chiller flowing water and then siphon the wort from the kettle to the carboy to avoid exposing to oxygen until I could put it in the refrigerator and then finally aerate after it got closer to 70 degrees.  This was additional time, and equipment to wash.  I also had to have room in the refrigerator (and not the fermentation refrigerator as that would take way too long).

The Solution:  (Yeah, I know, finally.)

20 lbs of ice.  During the hour of the boil, I will clean out the mash ton, dumping the spent grains into plastic bags and rinsing it out thoroughly.  That same mash ton will then be filled with ice and water, making an ice bath.  It gets set onto the rack and the inflow attachment to the wort chiller gets attached.  Instead of flowing tap water through the chiller, flow ice water through it.  This is gravity fed, so some adjustments in positioning of the kettle and the ton may need to be arranged, depending on your setup.

With this method, I brought the temperature from boiling to 72 degrees in 20 minutes.  It was at the 86 degree mark at about 10 minutes, less than half the time of the previous attempts.

Wort Chiller demo video

Perhaps I'm a bit more anal than this guy.  100 degrees still seems way warm to transfer.  The temp of the tap water makes a huge difference too.

A simple way to reduce the cooling time when brewing

Aside from bottling, chilling the wort has been my lease favorite part of brewing.  It just doesn't happen quick enough, and the whole time is stressful, watching it, hoping the ice does it's job, wishing it would cool quicker, hoping not to let the bad stuff in at this critical stage of the process.

With the tap water pushing 80 degrees and the Florida heat, it's tough to get the wort to a good pitching temp.  Even using every last ice cube from the freezer, it just seems to sit there and slowly cool.  I've found for the last several batches that once it hits about 80 degrees, I transfer to the carboy.  It just doesn't get any cooler than that.  I then set that in the fermentation refrigerator and wait.  After several hours it would be cooler and then I pitch the yeast.

I've invested in an immersion wort chiller (probably the most common) and it does work.  It is simply a very slow process.

But why aim for a fast cooling?  A quick cool will produce what they call the "cold break" with separates the protieins and allows them to fall to the bottom, helping to result in cleared beer.  Those same proteins will produce what is called "chill haze" once the beer is chilled to serving temperature.  Not a big deal, but doesn't a nice clear sparkling beer seem so much more inviting?  More importantly, the most dangerous time for the beer is between the boil and the start of fermentation activity.  After the temp drops below 150ish, microbes and other beer spoilers can live again in the liquid.  Part of proper sanitation is to work to avoid opportunities for something to get in the beer.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  This past weekend, I was determined to try something new to help chill the wort faster.  I relayed my frustration to Aaron at the Sanford Homebrew Shop.  I told him that I've tried prechilling the water, by placing the hose and an extension of tubing in an ice bath so the water inside would cool before hitting the hot wort.  He said that several others (including himself) has tried that same method and it simply doesn't save any time.

Instead, he said, they've used a pump to recirculate water from an ice bath through the chiller.  Get a bucket, fill it with ice and hook up an inflow and outflow, and send ice water through the system.  This sounded good, except I don't have a pump, or a big bucket, or necessarily the pieces and parts to create this closed type system.  Plus, what about the hot water that leaves the chiller and then goes back to the bath?  He assured me that it works well and the ice keeps the overall water nice and cool.

Sounds like a viable solution.  Perhaps I can figure out something similar.  I already have the cooler which I use as the mash ton, and it have a valve which will release water from the bottom of it.  I can hook up a 1/2" tube to the output on the tun and into the wort chiller.  If I elevate the tun, will the water gravity feed through the entire chiller and out the other end?  In fact, it will.  Especially it there is a full 5 gallons of water (and ice) in the tun, adding pressure to the flow.

I know it's not the best photo.  Sorry.

Ice ice baby!  I purchased a single 20lb bag of ice.  With the tun set up, I filled it with ice (about 2/3 of the bag) and then filled with water and started the flow.  As the water level diminished, I simply added more water to the tun through the hose.  Cold water into the wort chiller, hot water out the other side.  It's working!  It's working!

I believe that the hot sides of the brew kettle work against cooling, so I have a storage bin that I filled with hose water also and set the kettle in it.  If that water gets too hot, I'll change it out with new water.

The biggest advantage is sending ice cold water directly through the wort chiller.  I timed it, roughly, and got the temp down to 80 degrees in about 12 minutes.  And it kept on lowering.  Ideally, around 70-75 degrees is good to start transferring.  I've done that the slow way and now, knowing that the wort will be cool, I can possibly save time and headache with that transfer as well...but that is another story.

A jump start on cooling?

"Don't boil the wort chiller," I was told.    ...but that's not what the books say.  With 20 minutes left in the boil, you are supposed to put the wort chiller in the wort to give time for the boiling water to kill anything living on it.  Then after the boil, flow your cool water through it, to chill the wort.  But first that cool water will have to chill the chiller though.

I'm not sure why I didn't think about it, but I'm thankful to the Twitter friend who pointed it out.  Instead, simply sanitize the chiller like any other component gets sanitized, then after the boil, you can insert a cool chiller with chilled water running through it, giving a jump start to the chilling process.  Seems so simple!

I'm not sure how much time this will shave off the cooling, but it's bound to help.  The key thing is to make sure it is sanitized.  What I did was bathe it an a small tub of StarSan, making sure to flip it around to hit all portions of it.  I also used a bottle brush to help make sure all nooks and crannies were covered.  At the same time, the near boiling water won't be viable to sustain microbe life until it cools some anyway.

Another trick I saw recently is to coil the hose leading to the chiller in a large bucket full of water with a full frozen gallon jug placed in it.  This will theoretically cool the hose allowing the water to get even colder before entering the chiller.  It may be particularly helpful here in Florida where the tap water is never cold.