Chilling wort: best practice

How much beer?

 

Since your outside temp is probably around zero today it is tempting to advise you to go outdoors. But you'd have to constantly re-pile snow around the kettle because the heat will constantly create a melt zone which won't do you any good. If your sink is deep enough to get a good water/ice bath around that kettle, I'll vote for that so you don't have to spend so much time outdoors in that cold air.

 

I'd guess the most cost efficient and energy efficient strategy would be to get some of that snow from outside and make a dense slushy slurry with water in your sink.

 

I tried one time to cool a batch of beer in a snowbank. Didn't work very well.

 

Densely packed snow is a pretty good insulator.

 

Ice bath or let it go natural.

 

I'd just leave it outside for awhile a gallon would cool pretty quick in the open air

 

It's only a gallon? It should get down to temp pretty fast either way. Probably a few hours, but don't worry too much about that.

 

What's the ground water temperature in MN?

 

Put it in the snow with a garden hose filling the melt zone around the vessel. At -6F, you'll need to keep the water running fast enough to keep the hose from icing up.

 

About 40* these days

 

or just put the 1+ gal kettle into a larger metal pan/vessel and fill with water...rinse, repeat...with 1 gal it shouldn't matter much how you do it...stir frequently with sanitized utensil and change the water a couple times.

 

It's really difficult in the summer months here in Texas to cool the wort down fairly quick so I purchased the blichman therminator to help with this issue. However, ground water has been around 50 F since it has cooled down and I cooled down 8.5 gallons of wort yesterday in about 10 minutes. Must be nice to have super cold water coming out all year around.

 

Yeah, if you're going for speed, I wouldn't recommend the snow bank. A co-worker and I tried this several years ago. We thought we were being clever, but it ended up taking about three hours for our 5-gallon batch to get to temp.

The nice thing about having snow is that you can save on purchasing ice when you do an ice bath.

 

I chilled my first ever brew outside a few weeks ago , it went great it took me aprox 20 min for a 5 gallon batch , note it was -25 f outside temp, which helped .

 

Another option is to fill a large open container with cold tap water, let it sit outside for a day before the brew, and use that to immerse your beer container into (I have one large enough to hold more than a five gallon brew pot). Doing this outside has the advantage of cold air keeping the water and container cooler than it would inside in a sink of water. You can also keep adding snow to the water.

I personally use an immersion chiller (50 feet of copper) with a pre-chiller (25 feet of coper) sitting in a bucket of ice water. I use an outside garden hose to connect to the pre-chiller, but keep the hose inside for a day prior to brewday to thaw out, and only bring it out immediately before I start chilling. As long as the water keeps running in the hose, it won't freeze. It chills ales down quickly (to about 65-70 F), and even for lagers, it doesn't take too long to chill down to about 55 F. Anything lower than about 55 F takes a long time.

 

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but after a day wouldn't that result in one big solid block of ice?

 

Not at all - I've done it often. Even at our temperatures (except when it's very cold), it takes a while to freeze the water, and even if it does, you might get a thin crust of ice on the surface, which can easily be broken and add to the coolness. Again, I use a very large container, 2 feet in diameter and 1.5 feet high, which holds a lot of water. If the container was smaller, just enough to hold a gallon or so, then I would put the water out overnight only, or even early in the morning of the brewday, and then leave it in the garage.