The Beer and Gardening Journal™
Brew something. Grow Something.
This is the (second half of the) eighth installment in the All-Grain Brew Day Walkthrough, which started with a post on strike water preparation.
After the wort has been boiled, it’s time to chill it. In the first part of this discussion of wort chilling, I explained how to chill the wort using an immersion chiller. Today, I will discuss counterflow chiller and plate chillers.
Wort chilling — on my rig, a pump circulates the wort, so it flows past the cooling coils. This speeds cooling.
This is the eighth installment in the All-Grain Brew Day Walkthrough, which started with a post on strike water preparation.
After the wort has been boiled, it’s time to chill it. In some cases, the brewer may first employ a whirlpool step, but we’ll save that topic for another day. Chilling brings the wort temperature down to a point that yeast can be pitched to it. It also forms the cold break.
Most all-grain homebrewers chill their wort either with a copper coil immersion chiller or some form of counterflow wort chiller. This includes the coiled “tube within a tube” type counterflow chillers as well as plate chillers. Today I’ll discuss using an immersion chiller. In the next installment of this series, I’ll cover counterflow chillers.
A pond pump and some ice water can really help speed wort chilling.
When I noticed the thermometer in my basement read 50˚F (10˚C), one thought popped into my head: Lager Time. Finding (or creating) a space to ferment beers at lager temperatures is a challenge. Bringing wort down to lager pitching temperature quickly and easily can be a bigger challenge. I’ve found a way to deal with that challenge in a fairly inexpensive and low-tech way.
My immersion chiller does a good job of knocking most of the initial heat out of near-boiling wort. But, at a certain time, the temperature reaches a plateau where the chilling slows down. The level of that plateau varies, depending on the season and the temperature of the ground water.
The trick to the method that I use is to circulate ice water through the immersion chiller using a cheap immersible pond pump from the local hardware store. This is even more effective than adding a second pre-chiller that is immersed in ice water, which I have tried as well. [Read more…]
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