No chill brewing and hop usage

[Gastronaut]

I'm looking into no chill brewing, primarily to save time and water. I've read quite lot about it, but am confused by the issue of hop usage. Lots of the information I've seen says that, due to increased contact time with the hops at high temperature, all hop additions should be pushed back later in the boil. If, however, I am planning to transfer the hot wort fairly quickly from the kettle to the no chill cube, and therefore away from the hops, I don't understand where the extra contact time is coming from.

Can anyone who is no chilling explain this? Alternatively has anyone successfully no chilled without changing their recipes?

Also, is there a way of adjusting recipe design on BeerSmith to account for no chill brewing?

Any advice gratefully received! I

Edit - just noticed the earlier 'is cooling necessary' thread with some thoughts on this

[Matt in Birdham]

Its a good question, and I don't the answer, but I would guess something to do with isomerisation of the alpha acids. If the alpha acids leach from the hops into the wort fairly quickly (I don't even know if this is true - the iso form is much more soluble in water than the initial form), then the isomerisation could continue in hot wort even after the hop material has been removed.

[injac]

I no chill and the only change I have made is for beers where you want a big aroma hit. In cases like that I would move flameout hops to dry hop.

[TheSumOfAllBeers]

Alpha acids continue to isomerise as long as the wort is over 80C.

As a rule of thumb, most no chill Brewers use a 20 minute rule to account for this increased isomerisation.

So your 5 minute addition goes into software as if it went in 20 mins earlier. Some software like Brewers friend can do this conversion for you.

In practice any hop forward recipe will need to be adjusted, and it is hard to get that hop burst effect. In the past I have thrown all my hops in the last 5 minutes, to get hop flavour, no 60 minute.

Lastly some no chillers just throw the hops straight in the cube. It's messy getting the beer back out again, and the rules of hop contact time apply, but you can get great effects this way - by trapping the more volatile hop oils like myrcene

[jaroporter]

i've always understood it like Matt, but i tend to whirlpool for half an hour before running off into the chillcube so i can't really comment from similar experience.

i touched on this in the other thread, but for me it's just a different process that needs understanding in it's own way. i don't think that an absolute "covert this hop addition to no chill by pushing it back to here" approach is really the right way to look at things. it can get you roughly in the ballpark for standard beers, but ones with lots of hops i think need to be considered on their own merits. i'd actually recommend brewing a recipe you know well in a fairly similar way to before, and then you can really see how the no chill aspect affects not just bitterness but also hop flavour and balance.
brewing software only gives you a calculated figure for bitterness that you can use as a reference point each time to compare your result to - whether chilling or no-chilling (just look at the differences in the tinseth and rager formulas for that). if you use it, i'd suggest that whatever method you use to calculate bitterness and late additions, you stick with it and compare results between batches, rather than try to find an absolute solution.

i feel like i've probably answered none of your questions - and there's more than one way to nochill even! - but i've settled on what works for me through a huge amount of trial and experimentation with hop timings and even cube hopping, so hope it helps give you ideas in some way or another

[aamcle]

I've done a number of no chill batches, if it's not hop forward (IPA/APA types) then I'd change nothing so Stout/Porter/Mild/most bitters are usually OK. If I needed the BIGHop effect I'd add a hop tea to the FV.


ATB. aamcle

[PhilB]

Hi

If I needed the BIGHop effect I'd add a hop tea to the FV.

... +1 ... and if you chill your no-chill (I know it sounds wrong, but once the wort in the no-chill has cooled to ambient you can put it in your brewfridge to get it cooler than pitching temp (fridge temps 0-5C, say)) then you can take a few lts of the wort from the no-chill and make the hop-tea with that ... boil the wort sample up in a pan to sterilise the pan, you could add late hops and boil for 5-10 mins here if you wanted, then add flameout hops and/or cool and steep some hops if you prefer to do that ... meanwhile if you put the rest of your chilled wort into your FV, then when you've finished making the hop tea you can sieve the hops out and transfer the (still hot) wort into the FV and the two portions will (probably) even out to around pitching temp

If you can't chill the no-chill, you can do the same but you'll need to chill the hop tea before adding into the FV ... you can do that by sticking the pan in a sink of cold water and changing the water a few times

Cheers, PhilB

[Gastronaut]

Thanks for all the comments.

Most of the beers I'm brewing at the moment aren't hop dominated, so I think I'll just start by leaving the recipes as is for now and see how it goes.

I like the idea of shifting late additions to dry hopping.

A lot of this for me is to do with time saving, so I can brew more often, so keeping things simple will probably work best for me.