Hiya Everyone. New to brewing, currently doing kits but as an obsessive kinda chap i know i'll go AG.
I live in a coastal, rural location here in New Zealand and we don't get water or waste from council. We have a septic tank for waste and we collect our own water from rain off our roof and into large 25,000litre concrete storage tanks. As do most of our neighbours. So if we run out of water in a long hot summer then we run out. No more to drink kinda thing.
So for me, cooling down the wort is not going to be feasible with water as the coolant. Unless i can run it off to storage again? Whats the water like apart from hot once it has been used? Anything i should worry about?
Water shortage
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Martin the fish
So if i could put it in it's own freezer and watch it avidly would that be cool? Excuse the punDaaB wrote:You can use any water and collect it after. If it's full of sediment for example I would avoid using plate chillers as they will tend to block but if you are using clean potable water, if you put fresh cold water in one end of a copper immersion chiller you'll be able to collect a cup of near boiling water the other end and make a cup of coffee to drink.
If water is at a premium you don't have to chill the wort. If your sanitation is excellent then all you need to is cover and leave it to cool over night. You may end up with a slightly hazy beer but some people claim that they allow to cool over night and don't have this problem. The main issue is infection. As the wort passes through the 'warm' phase it is most susceptible to bacterial growth, so keep everything spotlessly clean and sanitised and pitch plenty of yeast when it's cool.
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Martin the fish
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Buzz
I re-use the water I use for cooling as we are on a meter and the damn stuff is so expensive.
I use an IC and have the run-off go into an old plastic bin.* I usually find that by the time the bin is full of water, the wort has got down to pitching temperature. I then transfer the water from the bin into a water-butt using a bucket. I guess you could do the same and transfer it back to your main storage tank?
*unless of course it snakes about and burns your foot before you realise the pipe isn't directed in the bin.
I use an IC and have the run-off go into an old plastic bin.* I usually find that by the time the bin is full of water, the wort has got down to pitching temperature. I then transfer the water from the bin into a water-butt using a bucket. I guess you could do the same and transfer it back to your main storage tank?
*unless of course it snakes about and burns your foot before you realise the pipe isn't directed in the bin.
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Martin the fish
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Vossy1
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steve_flack
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BarryNL
Re: Water shortage
The water doesn't contact anything apart from the copper and hose so there's no reason you can't run the water straight back into the storage tank. If you're using a reservoir of several thousand liters to cool a 20 litre batch then raising the temperature of the reservoir is not going to be an issue either (e.g. cooling 20 liters of wort from 100 to 25 deg. will raise 1,000 liters of coolant by only a maximum of 1.5 deg.).Martin the fish wrote:No more to drink kinda thing.
So for me, cooling down the wort is not going to be feasible with water as the coolant. Unless i can run it off to storage again? Whats the water like apart from hot once it has been used? Anything i should worry about?
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Martin the fish
Some will be routed directly back to storage, some will be stored. Loose but hey? It's not finished fully and it's better that i discovered the cock ups rather than the public.Vossy1 wrote:Spill the beans man....I have now come up with a cunning way to re-use all my cooling water.
And i may as well move the 'brewing' stuff to the shed and build a kinda Brewery out there. Especially as i want to go AG as soon as i can. And as the compressor is out there i can brew beer and fill dive cylinders at the same time. That confused the Fish wife when i told her i would 'multitask'.
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Vossy1