Everything gone wrong

[tubthumper]

Just had a really bad brew day 1st thing that went wrong was the mash temp didnt go to plan ended up 63.2 C and I couldnt get it any higher unless I added anothe 3 gals from my HLT as it was at 70 C. quick check of grahams book and am ok about temp says it will be dryer with a higher alchol level , so not so bad
now when i run off from the mash tun to the boiler I left the boiler tap open and dont know how much I lost before I noticed. I got a stuck mash for the first time ( think it was due to the high amount of flour in the grist .I managed to get 23Ltr before the wort looked far to weak to be ok ( never been able to measure its gravity at such a high temp ) and boiling it reduced it to about 19 Ltr (thought thats ok will fill a corny) then find out my daughter need to go to hospital . and to cap it all I forgot the hop filter in my boiler so that sticks when I try and run it off into fermenter. cooling went good and managed to hit right gravity but I only got 4 Gal in the fermenter .

Bad day to brew me thinks

[garwatts]

|It will probably be one of your best yet

[floydmeddler]

Have had two awful brewdays recently. Changing some of my equipment in the hope that things start changing. Don't worry too much if a load of crap went into the fermenter. The yeast will push it all to the top and you can skim it off. Alternatively, you can leave it and it will fall out.

Hope your daughter is OK.

[Dennis King]

hows your daughter

[6470zzy]

but I only got 4 Gal in the fermenter .

Believe me 4 gallons in the fermentor is better than NO gallons in the fermentor

[Nermal]

I had a couple of mishaps on my saturday brewday.

Smashed my knuckle after slipping while trying to stick the hose for the chiller on the outside tap - think it's time for a hozelock connector Turned the tap on, heard the outlet hose make a strange noise so ran back in to find it had come out of the sink and was filling a cardboard box full of stuff with water. Yanked hose out only to cover my bleeding hand with boiling outlet water. Argh.

Still - 23 litres of tasty strong ale bubbling away under the xmas tree makes it all worth while

[tubthumper]

think we should have a mishap thread started may make it seem a little lighter
as for daughter she has lukemia and has a high temp probably due to swine flue vacine
as for whats in fermenter it seems to be settling out and lots of crap in the bottom and on the top so will let it go for 7 days then put it in another fermenter for a while then bottle as its not going to be enough to fill a corney ( as I was hoping)

At least we learn from our mistakes ( well those of us that do actually learn anything that is ) so thats the upside I suppose

must remember to add salt to cooling liquid as it helps keep temp lower for a while ( not sure how long or if to add to bottles in frezer)
but I will do web page to show what I do one day so I can get more ideas from the guys tht get more sucesses here

[OldSpeckledBadger]

must remember to add salt to cooling liquid as it helps keep temp lower for a while ( not sure how long or if to add to bottles in frezer)

Salt lowers the freezing point of water but only by a degree or two which isn't going to help much. Most of the cooling effect of ice comes from water's very high latent heat of freezing/melting.

[coatesg]

Salt lowers the freezing point of water but only by a degree or two which isn't going to help much. Most of the cooling effect of ice comes from water's very high latent heat of freezing/melting.

I believe you can get to -21C by adding salt (ie NaCl) to ice (it's how you make ice cream the "old fashioned way"). In much the same way that much of ice's cooling effect in water comes from the heat required to break the ice's crystal structure (ie the latent heat of fusion in reverse), by adding the salt to the ice you exploit the same cooling effect (adding the salt causes the melting point to lower, the ice melts and, counter-intuitively, the temperature of the melted ice is lower than the still solid ice as heat is absorbed in the melting process).

The lowest temp is about -21.something C for a 23.something % solution of salt in water (by weight) - the "eutectic point" for this system.

You'll still need a fair amount of ice and salt to be able to cool a 5 gallon batch, though I've seen this method used as a "pre-chiller" for the water running through an immersion chiller. Handy for the summer, or for lager pitching temps. I have a small IC spare - I may rig one of these up sometime and have a go.

[OldSpeckledBadger]

Someone's been googling Using a IC is a lot easier IME.

[coatesg]

I knew there was a reason I did thermodynamics five times at uni... at least bits of it stuck at some point

Agreed - the IC is easier, but the ice trick is useful sometimes when you can't get the temperature low enough (though I've not struggled with it myself as yet).

[tubthumper]

I have read that salt water frezzes at a lower temp thats why I figured to add it , not to get into thermodynamics or anything but I know that its gott be be very very cold for the sea to freeze thats why I wanted to try it ( I allways use salt when boiling stuff as it means the water can boil at a hotter temp) .
I can cool a 5 gal batch with a 30 ltr bucket of cold water with 2 robbinson squash bottles of ice and probably an extra 8 ltrs of cold tap water down to 25 C in 30 to 40 mins ( saves water as I am on a water meter) I use a grandiflos pump to pump it round the IC and it works much better than I ever thought it would and its much quiter and a lot faster than the drill pump I tested it out with . Will have to make a chiller to fit my next prodject a 60 Ltr boiler ( not sure how much water that will need to cool )but thats for the future .

[coatesg]

If you make a bucket of ice and then add a load of salt to it, then you could in theory have a liquid salt solution that you can pump round the IC that starts off at -20C or so. Otherwise, adding the salt to the water that goes in the bottles that go in the freezer probably won't make much difference at all - in fact, you're probably better off having ice that can melt rather than cold liquid (since it's the actual melting that uses heat).

Either way, I'd hazard (without knowing water meter prices these days!) that water out of the tap may be cheaper than the salt and ice - the flow doesn't need to be to strong at the start - ideally, it just needs to be strong enough that the IC out is the same temp as the wort (and no cooler).

[garwatts]

the flow doesn't need to be to strong at the start - ideally, it just needs to be strong enough that the IC out is the same temp as the wort (and no cooler).

Absolutely correct

[tubthumper]

how Iactually did it was the following way
one the bottles had warmed up enough I opened them and run off the melted water into the bucket
and put the out hose into the bottle, when full poured it back into the bucket then the other bottle was used
I kept repeating this untill all the ice was melted ( the wort was getting quite cool by then prob 35 or 40 c)
I filled up the empty bottle with the runnings from the IC and emptied that into the sink then filled up the bottle with cold tap water and emptied that into the bucket
I did this maybe 5 times and by then I had a 25c wort that I could pitch the yeast into

so I recon I could do something to get more ice into the bucket like plastic bags of ice as the bottles were quite slow to melt ( and the bags would be a better fit in overloaded frezzer) so I will try the salt in the water and ice bucket and start with the tap water on its on for maybee 10 mins before getting the ice and salt into the bucket to see if that cools quicker and usses less water