cooling Wort ?

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How do you prevent infections with no-chill?
Well, I guess the surest way has to the the plastic "no-chill cube" method that several have mentioned. However, like Dutto, I'm not keen on the idea of pouring near-boiling liquid into a thin-walled plastic container, thereby making it very pliable indeed, and manipulating it. As long as your wort volume is reasonably close to your "cube" volume, a better approach might be to pour in the hot wort, squeeze the sides to exclude virtually all air, fit an airtight cap & leave it to cool. I believe that this is a technique that many use with good results.
I don't do this, though. I simply switch off the heat and leave the wort, hops and all in my boiler overnight. The boiling pan has a pretty tight fitting lid. Yes, it's bound to draw some air in as it cools and, yes, this seems a definite pathway for infection. However, I've done many, many brews this way without a problem. Where I am might help - especially when I brewed on the Isle of Skye, as I never saw a fruit fly there! If there were flies about about I'd be a lot more nervous & probably would use MyQul's cling film method, although I might try putting the cling film over the boiler itself. I probably should try this anyway!! :)
 
Don't know how effective it would be but I saw an American chap use the same water in a large container. He used an aquarium pump to circulate the water through his chiller and kept putting large pieces of ice in the container. Looks good on paper and seemed to work ok for him, and probably used a lot less water?
 
the cubes i got via ebay are hdpe, yes they soften a bit with temps above 80c but they hold ok..


you can always relieve the pressure safely as it will push outward not letting anything back in, BUT this can also evacuate air that occupied the headspace if you do this resulting in a more extreame suck back when it cools.

Its Nothing like pouring hot water from a kettle into a pet pop bottle, the cube will not shrink around your valuable beer.

google for a few of the aussie brew forums its a very active brewing community down under and they have been responsible for more than a few home brew innovations.. and its a tried n tested practice out there after all water can be quite scarce in places ..

afaik the aussie home brewers bought us no chill hop randels, 2 vessel brewing and, both the Matho and Leal opensource controller builds and probably a lot more im unaware of..
 
hop filtering is usually done on the kettle drain, but yes if left in the beer they would continue to bitter the brew while sufficient heat remains, generally i would suggest that the cube filling take place after any flame out or later hop additions have been made and steeped. iirc 86C is a sufficient temperature to pasturise so a 20 minute post boil hop steep should retain sufficient heat in the beer to successfully no-chill still.
 
Depending on what book you read FWH doesn't add bittering. I even used some ibu software that gave no ibu's for FWH.
So surely draining wort onto cube hops should be the same thing?
I often go back to the cube after an hour to add more hops with good results.
 
Does any one know if these plastic cubes/jerrycans contains bpa? If so, hot wort WILL give you boobs!!

If not BPA some other ****. Hot plastic is not the best thing for you. Also be aware they will contract once they start to cool and buckle the container. I am now using a 32l cheap SS pot for now chill with a brick on top to hold the lid down. I pour into an FV the day after.
 
Do you get any problems with chill haze from proteins with No Chill?

Sometimes but not very often. I've had plenty of great clear beers.
Anything with a touch of dark malt in it certainly seems to clear no problems.
 
Seems like you may have to remove the hops before doing a no chill?

Many do, I don't. Mainly because I just leave everything to cool in the boiling kettle, so I don't want to open it or mess with it until I'm ready to pitch, in case I get an infection.
Yes, most definitely leaving the hops in makes a big difference to bittering. I pretty much always brew my own recipes, or experiments based on them, so I know what weight of bittering hops to add to get the bitterness I require. It's certainly significantly more than if I removed the hops after the boil. Also, if my late-addition hops are high-alpha, then I reckon these will also lead to more bitterness if there's lot of them. If I ever brew a book recipe then I definitely have to cut down on the bittering hops to get a good result.
I do suspect that I get more flavour out of my late-addition hops by leaving them in overnight (sort of a huge "hop tea" effect). But I haven't done any back-to-back trials, so I don't really know. It would be interesting to do a split-wort trial, removing the hops from half the wort, whilst leaving the other half to soak overnight. Tricky to segregate exactly half the hops, though, and I doubt if I'll ever get round to trying it :)
 
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