If the cooling water gets warm, replace with colder water. When the pot is barely warm to the touch, the temperature is in the right range. People often wonder about adding ice directly to the cooling wort. This idea works well if you remember a couple key points. A wort chiller is coil of copper tubing that is used as a heat exchanger to cool the wort in-place.
While wort chillers are not necessary for your first batch of beer, especially when you are only boiling gallons, this is a good time to make you aware of them. Wort chillers are useful for cooling full volume boils because you can leave the wort on the stove instead of carrying it to a sink or bathtub. Five gallons of boiling hot wort weighs almost 45 pounds and is hazardous to carry.
There are two basic types of wort chillers: immersion and counter-flow. Immersion chillers are the simplest and work by running cold water through the coil. The chiller is immersed in the wort and the water carries the heat away. Counterflow chillers work in an opposite manner. The hot wort is drained from the pot through the copper tubing while cold water flows around the outside of the chiller.
Immersion chillers are often sold in homebrew supply shops or can be easily made at home. Instructions for building both types of chiller are given in Appendix C. References Barchet, R. While this is a faster start, the warmth of the wort will also propel any bacterial contaminants to grow faster as well.
One big thing to keep in mind is that bacteria can multiply faster yeast so, you don't gain much from starting warm. Starting a fermentation warm can lead to more fermentation by-products in your wort. Starting warm also causes more potential cold break material remains to be dissolved into the wort. These by-products can contribute to haziness in your finished beer.
If your goal is producing a "clean" tasting beer, starting at fermentation temperature is more advisable. Extract brewing often requires boiling a concentration of wort that is smaller than the volume of the batch and after the boil, water is added to make the full-batch size. This water can greatly reduce the temperature of your wort. It is ideally best refrigerated beforehand and stored in an airtight container.
Water that is exposed to the interior of the refrigerator can pick up flavors from other foods. Prior to mixing the water with the wort, you should aerate the water thoroughly.
This can be done by vigorously shaking the container for seconds, or you can use a fish-pump aeration device or oxygen tank. Cold liquids can hold more gas than warm liquids, which means aerating your cold topping-up water can help greatly with overall aeration.
It is important that when mixing cold water and hot wort, you should add the cold water to your fermenter first, then slowly add the hot wort and stir the wort with a sanitized spoon. Doing the opposite could cause your glass carboys to crack. One disadvantage of transferring hot wort into cold water without chilling it first is you carry all the potential cold break into the fermenter.
If you want to get rid of this break material, you can initially transfer the wort to cold water in a sanitized bucket and wait about 15 minutes for the break material to settle out.
Then, you can siphon the clear wort to your primary fermenter. A five-gallon or smaller batch of wort can be cooled by submerging the brew pot in a sink, given your sink is large and deep enough.
This technique transfers the heat from the wort to the water. The best way to do this is to put a cover on the brewpot after the boil, place the pot in a sink, and fill the sink with cold water. To speed cooling, swirl the water in the sink every couple of minutes and change the water in the sink every five to seven minutes.
You should also, stir the wort with a clean, sanitized spoon every time you change the water. Once the brewpot has cooled to the point where you can comfortably touch it for a few seconds, check the temperature of the wort. Then, put some ice in the sink and fill it with water. To properly cool down your wort, quickly enough, you will need a total of about three to four pounds of ice per gallon of wort. This depends on how cold your wort is when you begin icing it. You will need to keep changing the water and adding more ice every time the ice melts.
While this can be effective, it isn't the easiest process or very convenient. It can also be quite messy with water potentially splashing everywhere. Once the wort is cooled to your target temperature, transfer it to your fermenter. If you are using the cold-topping method, it is still a very good idea to use an ice bath because you want your wort cooled down as quickly as possible and cold-topping often isn't enough to get the wort to the ideal temperature.
Also, when hot wort is splashed around, it can darken significantly. This can occur even if you are pouring the hot wort into cold water, especially if you're pouring it through a funnel. Whatever you do, don't pour hot wort through a strainer because this will definitely darken the wort and leave your beer prone to quick staling. Finally, hot wort can cause scalds, and cooling it before moving prevents this. Even when wort is used to make starters, it should be chilled before transferring. This ensures that my light-colored worts won't scald.
Cooling the wort before transferring also allows you to separate the wort from some of the cold break material. If you are cooling your wort in the sink plus adding topping-up water, you don't need to cool the wort all the way down to fermentation temperature.
Simply cool the wort to the point where you can comfortably touch the brew pot for a few seconds, then transfer the wort to your fermenter. The wort can either be gravity fed through the copper tube or fed through using a pump. Plate chillers utilize copper and stainless steel plates to cool the wort. These products are compact devices wherein hot wort and cold water flow in opposite directions from one another similar to the counterflow chiller.
Much larger plate chillers are typically found in breweries where the plates are not fused together the way they are in smaller, homebrew cold plates. We believe wholeheartedly that the immersion chiller is the best cooling solution for the novice homebrewer and some not so novice home brewers as well.
Pro Tip: If one were interested in trimming the cooling time even further, they could place their batch in an ice bath while also using the immersion chiller. That said immersion chillers are easy to set up and use. As such they allow the novice brewer to get used to the process of chilling their wort without also having to adjust to a technological learning curve.
Every piece of equipment you use in the homebrewing process will need to be properly maintained as is the case when it comes to any equipment used to produce products intended for human consumption.
If you choose not to change the oil in your car no one is going to come down with some hideous bacterial infection as a result. The immersion wort chiller is, after all, immersed directly into the hot wort.
Therefore it is going to emerge covered with all manner of residue that can and will play willing host to airborne microorganisms.
0コメント