AG question: chilling wort by pouring In cold water

The Homebrew Forum

Help Support The Homebrew Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

stinka

Active Member
Joined
Nov 23, 2019
Messages
38
Reaction score
6
Can you add cold water to your wort if you made up 3-4 litres short instead of using a wort chiller ?
 
It would cool it off but not enough to get to pitching rate. You'd need to split it half and half but your hop utilisation would plummet
 
Can you add cold water to your wort if you made up 3-4 litres short instead of using a wort chiller ?

That would only be efficient if you'd do it to get a brew from 25º to 20ºC.

Suppose you have 12 liter wart @25º and you'd add 4 liter @ 10º.

(12*25+4*10)/16 makes 16 liter @21.25º
 
Ah ok

just confused after watching this



I know he’s adding a small wort addition to a kit, but I just wondered
 
He's adding in the LME at the end instead of at the start of the boil as the higher the sg is during the boil the lower the hop utilisation will be. I tried doing a half boil and cooling with the extra water once without taking that into consideration and there was no bitterness at all. If that all makes sense:laugh8:
 
@stinka
I looked at a small part of the video. It could have done with a lot of editing!
Anyway I guess all he is doing is is a smaller volume mash with a hop boil to be added to a kit. So not all the wort starts hot just the boiled mash volume part. The rest is just made up a like a kit using cold water. More on that here
https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/threads/simple-kit-plus-mini-mash-method-to-improve-a-kit.52938/
So translated to a full volume AG brew I suppose you could make up a lower volume more concentrated wort for the boil and then dilute that with cold water in the FV at the end. But you would have to adjust the hopping rates since hop utilisation in the boil is different for more concentrated worts.
However, as others have pointed out, the bigger the boil volume the more you will have to consider cooling the wort and/or chilling the cold water so that you get the correct pitching temperature. I do partial mashes using a 9 litre pot for nominal 20 litre brews and it still takes me 30/40 minutes to get the hot wort temperature down to the lower 20*C's using several sinkfuls of water, to mix with the cold water in the FV .
 
Due to my living situation I've been doing, mostly, no-boil extract brews in two gallon batches. I've had success heating half a gallon of water and mixing in 1/4 to 1/2 of the extract. After steeping with some hops I mix in the remaining extract and then I add one and one half gallons of cold water which gets me pretty close to proper pitching temperature.
 
I do things differently now, but I used to get my wort temp down by throwing in a couple of frozen bottles of water ( still in the bottles and sanitised of course). I also don't worry too much about that last 5-10 degrees. I just get it in the FV then wait to pitch the yeast until it naturally gets down to my target temp.
 
I do things differently now, but I used to get my wort temp down by throwing in a couple of frozen bottles of water ( still in the bottles and sanitised of course). I also don't worry too much about that last 5-10 degrees. I just get it in the FV then wait to pitch the yeast until it naturally gets down to my target temp.
I bet that worked pretty bloody well !
 
I bought a chiller as soon as I went to All grain (I brewed one of those cheap wilko lager kits, it was awful, so I decided to go straight to AG). In the early days I used to chill down to 35c before pitching, and I know now that this was a little too hot, but it seemed to work ok. The only reason I mention this is that the frozen bottle idea sounds like a good shout to me, but might take a while to get right down to 20 C and the sooner you get the yeast in once down to temp, the better.

For what it's worth, my cooler was about £30 off ebay and it works an absolute charm, it's just a simple copper coil with hose fittings attached to it!

Unless you're brewing on a small budget (Nowt wrong with that, its how I started) then i'd recommend saving yourself some grief and buy a chiller.
 
The ice thing works very well, because ice has a high latent heat. In fact, I worked out an equation to tell you exactly what temperature you need to get down before chucking in your ice in order to get your desired volume and pitching temperature exactly: :https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/threads/how-to-get-to-pitching-temperature-using-ice.66198/
Previous good'uns: Epiphany Triple, Fisherman stout, Hefeweizen, NEIPA, BIPA x 5, Belgian IPA, RIS, Zombie Dust, Munich dunkle, dark mild, Gales Festival Mild (GW clone), RyeIPA, NEDIPA, Bitter, Perry and cider from scratch, Hobgob clone, DIYDog Dogma, Mild, ginger beer

Somehow, making ginger beer kicked off my re-introduction to homebrew (First was a cheap wilko kit which had a horrid 'twang', then long time.. then AG). One of the first AG's that I made was a Hobgoblin clone, it was a beautiful ruby red colour and a decent all round brew.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top