A couple of questions

[Davebull]

Hello all

I’m very new to all this and have a couple of questions that I’m hoping someone can answer for me.

1/Doing an all grain brew, does it really matter if the wort is left over night to cool down rather than use a cooler.

2/once the starch has turned to sugar after the mash can the sugars turn back to starch if cooled down before the boil.

Thanks in advance

 

[Bigcol49]

Hi @Davebull
Many home brewers use the "no-chill" method - following the boil they either transfer to a "cube" or they cover the boil kettle to seal it, and the wort cools naturally.
Those who use a sealed cube have left the wort for some time before fermenting it.
I believe that @MyQul uses cling film to cover his boil kettle.
Leaving your wort in this manner will not change the sugar content i.e. it will not revert to starch.

 

[Duxuk]

I used to no chill and it seemed to work well. The difference that I got with chilling was that the late hops gave a much fresher and more intense flavour. You can always reserve more hops for dry hopping to mitigate any effects that no chill has.
The danger of allowing your mash to cool before the boil is that it's possibly prone to infection as it cools through the bactaria friendly temperature range. I overnight mash and by morning it's sometimes as low as 50C. I've never had a problem by doing this but many nasties may survive the 65C or suchlike mash temperature so you wouldn't want those to be breeding for too long.
You could give us a bit more detail about your intended schedule and see what others think about it.

 

[-Bezza-]

To date I've not used a chiller. Instead, I've just frozen some water in old PET bottles and then chucked these into the hot wort to bring the temp down quickly (spraying with starsan first, though). Can repeat if you want it to get colder quicker. I have then left the wort, covered, to get down to pitching temps.

 

[GerritT]

I practice overnight chilling. I move the wort from the pot to the sanitised ferment bucket (by sanitised silicon hose), put on the lid, wait 12 hours, temperature is down to below 25º and I might pitch immediately or wait another few hours. Never had problems. Yet.

 

[MyQul]

@Bigcol49 is almost correct in that I use cling film when no chilling. What I do is jug the wort rom my pot into a spare FV (passing it through a sieve, to seive the hops out). Then cover the FV with cling film, held on with an elastic band. The next day the wort is cool and ready to pitch the yeast into