wort chillers

[James L]

thats a totally valid reason considering you situation.

I thought it was quite important though to chill your wort after boiling as quickly as possible?

[rwh]

That's the theory. The main reason is to reduce DMS levels, but it also means that the wort spends less time in the ideal temperature range for bacterial replication. People do make good beer with no-chill tho. As with anything it's debatable (and we do certainly debate it).

From How to Brew:

DMS is continuously produced in the wort while it is hot and is usually removed by vaporization during the boil. If the wort is cooled slowly these compounds will not be removed from the wort and will dissolve back in. Thus it is important to not completely cover the brewpot during the boil or allow condensate to drip back into the pot from the lid. The wort should also be cooled quickly after the boil, either by immersing in an ice bath or using a wort chiller.

[James L]

I agree

In another of Palmers recipe books i've been reading, he suggests (especially for Ag lagers and pilsners) you should boil for 30 minutes before adding hops to reduce the DMS levels in the brew, therefore making it a 90 minute boil (if you have a 60 minute hop boil).

Also do you mean that the wort will spend more time in the ideal temp range for Bacterial Replication? not less?

[rwh]

In another of Palmers recipe books i've been reading, he suggests (especially for Ag lagers and pilsners) you should boil for 30 minutes before adding hops to reduce the DMS levels in the brew, therefore making it a 90 minute boil (if you have a 60 minute hop boil).

Yeah, the idea is that lager malt is kilned at the lowest temp of any kind of malt, which means that less DMS is driven off during kilning, leaving more in the wort, so from a theoretical point of view, this sounds reasonable. I don't have any first-hand experience to either confirm or deny this, however.

Ale malts are generally kilned at a high enough temperature to make DMS problems unlikely.

Also do you mean that the wort will spend more time in the ideal temp range for Bacterial Replication? not less?

I mean that if you chill the wort, it spends less time sitting there nice and warm without the yeast in it. You go from boiling to pitching in a shorter time, which leaves less of a window for bacteria to start pigging out on your lovely sweet wort.

[James L]

Yep got ya...

wealth of knowledge

[SpillsMostOfIt]

It's another aspect of the subject where everybody has an opinion and they are all right and yet, all wrong.

There have been NoChill'd beers take first place at beer shows and stuff. (Controversially, there have been chilled beers take last place at the same shows! )

People who use counter-flow or plate chillers leave the Yet-To-Be-Chilled wort sitting in their kettle at whatever temp it sits at until it is all chilled, so whatever effects occur at high temperature will be occurring to some of their wort while waiting to pass through the chiller. I don't think this helps breed insects in the wort, but it means that the hop acids will continue to isomerise, the hop extracts will continue to do whatever they do at high temperatures and any DMS pre-cursors will convert to DMS until it all hits the chiller.

People who use immersion chillers have to be extra careful with the cleanliness of their kettle taps. If you use the Other Kind of chiller, or NoChill, you are more likely to kill off the animals living in your ball-valve with the hot wort as it passes through.

I've pretty much always boiled for 90mins to reduce the DMS pre-cursors. The only beer of mine that anyone thought displayed DMS was one made with German Pilsner malt(*) I chilled in an ice bath bringing it to pitch temps in about 15 mins. A mate took a sample of the same beer to his work place where a Golden Nose declared it to be DMS-free.

I'm trying very hard to do the brewing community the service it deserves and work out all these problems using a brute-force evidence-based method...


* Edit: I've since looked at my records and realised that was BS. I used JWM Pils malt in that brew.

[Ed]

Good post Spills. Agree.

Cheers, Ed

[drsmurto]

I did no chill to begin with - maybe the first 4 AGs altho i didn't go to the effort that some do, i simply ran the wort into a fermenter and sealed it with gladwrap and came back the next day to pitch yeast.

I see my AG equipment as a long term investment so have been happy shelling out cash left right and centre as my beers are better than any kit i ever made (and they werent half bad). I figured that if i was going to the effort of making beers i had never made before (pils, alts, weizens etc) i wanted to do to the best of my ability from the beginning. Cooling the wort down immediately makes more sense to me. I am sure if circumstances were different i would make allowances but i dont have to so i dont.

Are my beers better than someone who no chills? Probably not but this works for me at the moment. Water use has never been a valid argument as far as i am concerned as we all use vast quantities of water for various things, i save water in other activities so i can use more on brew day (altho rainwater tanks nullify even those arguments).

Each to their own.

[SpillsMostOfIt]

Use and/or waste of water is an interesting thing to contemplate.

Imagine you are a brewer and live next door to someone who gardens for a hobby. By legislation (at least in my part of the world), you are allowed to use as much water as you want for your hobby, but they are not.

Imagine you work from home so don't need to conform to some social norms and choose to shower just once a week. Are you allowed to use the water you did not use for showering to water your garden (or concrete drive)?

Like DrSmurto, I advocate NoBreed. I rarely drive and when I do, I do so in about as environmentally-friendly car as is currently available, else I walk or ride a bike. I live in high (-ish) density housing and spend a fair amount of effort being environmentally responsible (certainly in comparison to what I see happening around me). Rhetorically, why can I not enjoy a slight increase in my water allowance?

[Trough Lolly]

At the risk of drifting further O/T, I was told that we aren't subject to water restrictions as there are no restrictions (that I'm aware of in the ACT) in relation to using water when making food!!

Then again, that could be a crock of $hit!

Cheers,
TL

[rwh]

Weeeell, looks like we've all learned something today: A society's laws will always lag behind its sense of ethics, and will at best be an approximation of the real ethical substance on which it is based. Life is just too subtle to be properly covered by a human construct as clumsy as words.

My sense of ethics tells me to minimise my water use in any way I can; I guess it's up to you to decide on your ethical responsibilities.

[James L]

i give money to greenpeace instead....

[Trough Lolly]

....hmmm, ethics and canberra....interesting construct!

[rwh]

As is ethics and the law, I suppose.

[Trough Lolly]

Fear not; any discourse re wort chillers is clean and green at Chez TL...I use a CFWC and have a 2100L water tank located on the wall alongside the brewstand!

Cheers,
TL

[rwh]

Lucky!

I live in a tiny unit. But fear not, I will not live there forever! Whether I'll ever be able to afford buying a house is another matter, of course.

[SpillsMostOfIt]

What if...

I buy a chiller. I commit to brewing early in the day. When I brew, I store the hot water from chilling in a big insulated drum and call rwh, who can come around, pick up the water and use it to brew with - thus saving both energy and water?

[Trough Lolly]

Since we've now drifted completely O/T...my concern is whether joe public will have to pay rates on any additional water capacity that joe installs at personal expense? With more and more properties hooking up their own water infrastructure, there's a ready made source of revenue of that water consumption was also taxed, albeit at a "green" rate. After all, I've redirected storm water away from the public and to my own personal tank...

Cheers,
TL

[rwh]

What if...

I buy a chiller. I commit to brewing early in the day. When I brew, I store the hot water from chilling in a big insulated drum and call rwh, who can come around, pick up the water and use it to brew with - thus saving both energy and water?

Sounds good to me. I might have to pick it up on my push bike to make it work though.

That is what the big breweries do. I read an article about the Monteith's brewery in NZ. Once a week they do three batches in a row, which means that they have to do an 36 hour day or something stupid. I'm sure it saves them like 80% of their energy bill for the second and third brews though.

Since we've now drifted completely O/T...my concern is whether joe public will have to pay rates on any additional water capacity that joe installs at personal expense? With more and more properties hooking up their own water infrastructure, there's a ready made source of revenue of that water consumption was also taxed, albeit at a "green" rate. After all, I've redirected storm water away from the public and to my own personal tank...

Didn't they already try to pull this one, and back-pedalled super fast when there was an outcry? At least in Vic I vaguely remember something like that happening. Or maybe it was the case of existing legislation clashing with the new pro-watertank government policies of recent years.

As for redirecting stormwater away from the public, I really wouldn't worry about it. It's one of the biggest wastes of water in our society. It goes something like this:

1. Build big city on best land with best rainfall, which increases runoff due to paving large areas
2. Drive cars around, tip oil, paint, detergent etc down the storm water drain which pollutes all the runoff
3. Let runoff drain into the rivers, polluting them

Any water that can be saved from this and used productively is a bonus.

Incidentally, did you hear about that project in a large Asian city (can't remember which one) where they have dammed the inlet to the estuary that the city is built on? The idea is that they're going to let the runoff from the city flush out the seawater (over several years), then they're going to treat the water that collects for use for drinking water. Apparently it's much much more efficient to treat this kind of stormwater runoff than it is to do desalination. If only Australians were so enlightened. Talk of installing desalination plants makes me irate.

[gregb]

Since we've now drifted completely O/T...

My bad.

I may have been confusing this thread, but in my tiny little mind I thought that part of the question was on water usage, which has a converse to water conservation.

Cheers,
Greg