Chill then whirlpool or whirlpool then chill?

[stm]

Even better - no chill and no whirlpool!

 

[Schikitar]

But even with no chill you end up with trub at the bottom of the cube that can get stirred up easily when transferring to the fermenter..?!

I no chill as well, never had a very successful whirlpool experience though, all the junk just keeps floating around in the kettle and barely settles out before I have to get it into the cube.. I've recently resorted to transferring the last 5L from the kettle and/or cube to a flask, cold crash it and pour off the resulting wort to keep things as clean as possible..

 

[vonSchlapper]

Thanks everybody - it seems like there’s a good split between chill-then-whirlpool, whirlpool-then-chill, and no-chill.
I guess the answer is just to chill out about it!

 

[MHB]

I'll give you one more clue - every commercial brewery whirlpools then chills!
Reason being we want to remove Hot Break (the matter that settles during the boil) and we really don't care about Cold Break (flock that forms during cooling). Cold break is an important source of nutrients for the yeast. Problem is that if you chill first, it is very difficult to discriminate between the two types of flock, Cold Break is also very fine and very slow to settle so eliminating it is both difficult and expensive in terms of wort losses.
In very high protein worts (6 row malt, lots of adjunct...) there can be so much cold break that it can cause problems (yeast coating, reduced bitterness...) but outside the US where they may use crappy malt, given a decent boil and a kettle fining, best practice is to either: -
Separate then cool, ignore cold break that forms post chilling, or
Chill with an immersion chiller, then make sure you leave enough wort in the kettle to ensure that all the hot break and hop trub stays in the kettle.

It would be a good idea to do a trial run if you are going to use an immersion chiller, syphon or otherwise transfer the hot wort from the kettle until you have clearly identified how much trub/wort you need to leave in the kettle to be sure that the hot break is left behind.
Mark

 

[stm]

But even with no chill you end up with trub at the bottom of the cube that can get stirred up easily when transferring to the fermenter..?!

I find that by, post-mash, lifting my BIAB bag very carefully without any stirring post-mash or ramping up to mash out temp, then using Brewbrite at T-10, there is very little trub and it settles quite well during the 20 minutes or so between FO and cubing, w/o any whirlpool. (Bribie method - see his photos)

 

[vonSchlapper]

I'll give you one more clue - every commercial brewery whirlpools then chills!
Reason being ... we really don't care about Cold Break ... best practice is to ... Separate then cool, ignore cold break that forms post chilling ... do a trial run ...
Mark

Excellent; thanks. I was getting worked up about clearing the cold break. I’ll just chill out about it.

Forgetting Charlie Papazian’s wise words “Relax. Don’t worry. Have a Homebrew!”