cooling

[dave2]

whats every ones thoughts on cooling your wort overnight?

[PieOPah]

I have heard that people successfully do this. The problem is though is that speedy cooling helps with coagulating the protiens (cold break). Withy a slower cooling then you won't get as good a cold break which in turn will likely effect your brew.

Also, leaving overnight will leave your beer open to infections. If you completely seal the container then it is going to cause a vacuum (as the liquid will be shrinking). This means that when you taken the lid off there will be a lot of air sucked in - this means nasties floating around will get sucked into the brew.

Personally I wouldn't like to try it.

[bitter_dave]

Some people seem to get good results by leaving their brew to cool overnight, but it is easy to cool the wort reasonably quickly even if you don't have an immersion or counterflow chiller. I only recenly got an immersion chiller, before which I used to cool the wort by placing the bin in the sink, and filling the sink with cold water and ice packs. If you change the water reasonably frequently and stir the wort every now and again, you can chill 25 litres in about an hour in my experience.

[mysterio]

Yeah, I wouldn't try it because it's known to make a big impact on clarity and helps drive off volitile compounds, along with possible bacterial problems.

Saying that I've heard of people doing it without problems.

[Calum]

I regularly brew in the evening so after I runoff from the boiler I simply snap on the lid (sterilised of course) and leave it until the morning. When I wake up I pitch the yeast.

When I brew during the day at the weekend I tend to cool it down in the bath (this still takes about three hours).

My only worry is that it is the prime time for infection but to be honest I haven't experienced this yet (perhaps I've been lucky). I've also never had any problems with clarity or off flavours (except for my one and only extract brew ). You really have to work around the time available to yourself and find out what works.

Without blowing my own trumpet, here is a picture of my B&T that was brewed and left to cool overnight. It was both clear and pretty well conditioned.



Having stated the above. I do appreciate the benefits of cooling the wort quickly and intend to sort something out this year

[guildofevil]

Why would you do this? I'm sure you can get away with it 9 times out of 10, but there are potential problems with chill haze, beer stability and infection, etc. which are avoided, or greatly reduced, by rapid chilling.

It's also a lot less hassle to chill the beer. 20 Minutes and you have your beer finished and the yeast pitched. Time to put the feet up and have a beer.

I have always been of the opinion that a wort chiller is one of the best pieces of equipped a brewer can buy or build.

[delboy]

Presuming people chill it slowly in the boiler, wonder what a slow cooling overnight would do for the hop flavour and aroma?? (anyone tried it and care to comment?).

I've heard that all grain kits which are basically freshly prepared hot boiled wort poured into a fermenting bin can be bought from homebrew shops downunder (apparently people using these kits have reported no problems with infections, clarity, stability or taste (actually did hear of one guy who did get an infection but you're always going to get one!!).

[Northern Brewer]

With perhaps 100 AG bitters under my belt, I have always cooled the wort in the boiler overnight, I have never transferred the protein trub to the fermenter, I have never had a chill haze, and I have never had an infected beer.

I boil my wort in a 5 gallon Burco outdoors in an open-fronted garage. Once the boil is complete I top the boiler up to within a centimetre its rim with boiling water, put on the lid then seal this in place by wrapping cling film around the top of the boiler (half the clingfilm's width around the boiler and the other half folded down over the lid to form a seal).

This forms a vacumn seal which becomes tighter as the boiler cools. It's impossible to draw more than half a litre of wort the following morning without firstly breaking the seal.

I always aim to start brewing at around 2.30PM which means I switch off my boiler at around 7.00PM. I transfer the wort to the fermenter 12 hours later leaving all the detritis behind in the boiler. By this time it is cool enough to enable plenty of oxygenation and I then pitch my yeast straight from the packet.

I see one proviso in that because my boiler is effectively located outdoors the night air obviously helps with cooling and I invariably serve my beers at 13C which is the temperature in my cellar. However, for me it works every time, so I see absolutely no point in making things harder

[Jim]

As Daab said, I used to cool my wort in the bath. The beer was still fine - my main reason for going cfc was that my old house had the bathroom downstairs and the new one has it upstairs. I didn't fancy carrying 5 gals of hot wort up the stairs.