wort cooling with frozen water bottles?

[OlGravyLegs]

i am holding off on the wort chiller for several reasons, mostly due to apartment home brewing spacial restraints. my idea is fairly simple; providing i use clean and sanitized water bottles, can i freeze these and throw them into my luke warm wort? the ice bath works pretty fast getting the wort down to about 100F. maybe these icy water bottles could speed up the process without watering down the wort. what do you guys think?

also, ive been trying to find out if topping off a concentrated wort with cold, sanitized water has any quality issues. are there conversion problems with the super high OG levels pre top-off? do hops respond the same under these circumstances?
thanks

i love beer

eric

[ziggy]

As far as the sanitized frozen water bottles go I think that would work but you would have to be really careful about sanitizing them. You are probably further ahead just using the water bath. As far as topping off with water goes, you want to boil as much of the full volume of the batch as you can. Boiling 4 gallons and topping up to 5 is better than boiling 3 and topping up to 5. The concentration of the wort does effect hop utilization but you only lose a few IBUs most of the time.

[marvelman742]

We had a guy in our brew club that had some funny tasting beer. It was very good but had a strange taste in the middle. After much tasting and prodding and going over the brewing process we figured out that it was a plastic taste. He was freezing two liter bottles of water and then throwing them into his wort to cool it down. It must have been outgasing the plastic because of the sudden shock of going from freezing to boiling in a fraction of a second. He changed his brewing practices with a immersion chiller and he makes excellent beer now. But he also passed that idea of bottles on to several of his friends before learning his outcome. We had a rash of Plastic Ale in our area.

[BadRock]

I'd skip the plastic bottles. It would probably work well however, (besides the possible plastic taste) it is really hard to sanitize soft plastic like that not to mention the neck of the bottle that has a ton of nooks and crannies.

As far as top off water, you can always pre-boil and chill a day or so in advance. I'm lazy and have had pretty good luck using bottled distilled water. I just buy the local store brand and toss it in the fridge. An hour before I need them I throw them in the freezer to get them as cold as possible then after the boil, crack'm open and pour them in.

Using the cold water for dilution you probably won't need to much more chilling power and an ice bath should do the trick.

[Mylo]

Yeah, I would say that if you are going to go through that much trouble to not use a conventional method of chilling, then why not just boil and chill some water into a big block of sanitized ice?


Mylo

[budrockdiesel]

Before I went all grain I would stick my pot in an icechest with a couple of bags of ice. It would melt pretty quicklly and the temp would equalize. I then started with just water till I got it below 100, and would add frozen bottles to the water, not wort, 2 or 3 at a time. Whenever your chill water rises above tap temp take some out and add more. Just play with it and have a home brew while u wait.

[OlGravyLegs]

thanks for the tips, guys. didnt think about the plastic taste. probably right though. in my apartment, my kitchen faucet doesnt have any threads on it. i couldnt use an immersion chiller because i cant attach a hose.

now that i am brewing all grain and boiling down to volume, new challanges arrise. my new pot wont fit in the sink, and cooling quickly becomes problematic. i'll have to find a new to use a chiller.

thanks again

eric

[marvelman742]

When I was still brewing in the kitchen and now even when it is brutal cold outside.(We just got an inch of snow today here in central IL), I would use an immersion chiller in my kitchen sink. I did not have threads on my faucet but plumbed a t fitting in below the sink where the water supply valve meets the faucet. I plumbed in a t with a ball valve feeding a barb fitting. When I was chilling wort I pushed the hose on the barb and attached it with a hose clamp and put the return line from the chiller in the sink drain. It worked very well and cost less than 10 dollars to rig up. When not in use I closed the valve and noone was the wiser.