chilling wort to 35c, then pitch yeast starter?

[neal32]

I used to pitch when the wort was ~25 degrees and then let the fridge take it down the rest of the way. Used to. Without a shadow of doubt my beers are now better pitching slightly below ferment temp and letting it rise naturally up to ferment temp. YMMV

 

[stux]

You know, I always plan to pre-chill the cubes... but never do. End up pitching into wort which is at room temp, which is about 22C (yeay a/c), and cooling to 18C rapidly.

Really must try to get more organized and pre-chill the cubes

So, to those who pitch cool and warm up, are you pitching at say, 16C and then raising to 18C? ie via a heat source/heat belt... or just hoping the yeast will get there by themselves?

 

[mje1980]

For ale yeast, yeah 16 is fine and it'll definitely warm up to 18 once it starts.

 

[verysupple]

So, to those who pitch cool and warm up, are you pitching at say, 16C and then raising to 18C? ie via a heat source/heat belt... or just hoping the yeast will get there by themselves?

If I want to ferment at 18 C, then I'll aim to pitch at about 17 C, but my chilling isn't that accurate so anywhere from 15 to 18 C and the yeast goes in.

I let it warm up by itself if the ambient temp. is higher than my desired ferment temp., otherwise I use a heat cord coiled up in the bottom of the fermenting fridge. I have an STC-1000 with two relays (one for heat, one for cool) so if I'm letting it free rise I just unplug the heat cord and let the fridge do its thing when it gets too warm.

 

[MaltyHops]

My water isn't much lower in temp than high 20's and to get the wort to that temp, I'd have to let it chill for hours I'm sure...
I am in the process of making an ice bath recirculation type thing...

On my system, once I get down to mid 40Cs using tap water on warm days when tap water is not that cold, I switch to using a cube of water pre-chilled down to about 5C for the rest of the cooling.

This brings 20L of wort down to mid-20Cs using a trickle amount of flow of both wort & chilled water through the chiller and - unlike as shown in pix - wort going straight into another cube for transfer to fermenter.

Could use a second cube of chilled water (and higher flow rate of chilled water) if you want to bring temp down even further (or have more wort to cool down).

 

[stux]

So you recirc your wort thru the plate chiller and back into your pot?

 

[MaltyHops]

So you recirc your wort thru the plate chiller and back into your pot?

Yes, for the initial post-whirlpool cool down using tap water. This means I also end up cooling down the thermal mass of the kettle as well - took me a while to trust that using chilled water (when wort has cooled down to the 40Cs) will cool enough to go straight to "fermenter" at mid-20Cs.

I also sterilise the p-chiller with wort just as it reaches boiling for about 15 mins, then disconnect the chiller from the circulating loop (use one of the camlock hoses to cover both chiller ports) and finally reconnect after whirlpooling for a while. I do this to minimise hop/break material collecting in the chiller.

 

[seehuusen]

Thanks for the tips and thoughts guys, I'll be following a similar method to MaltyHops, using tap water for the initial process and then cool further using a recirculated ice water system.
I'm currently looking for containers that I can make the ice in (ready and frozen for my next batch) and I've made an arm that I'll use to recirculate the wort over the chiller to maximize efficiency

As a minor update to the current batch and cause of this discussion, no bad flavours that I can detect thus far, ferment is probably one of the fastest I've ever done.
Since Friday arvo until now (3 days) it has dropped from 1.067 to 1.022... Recipe calls for a finish around 1.017, but I think it might go a bit lower than that... It has started to slow down slightly though...

 

[MaltyHops]

... using tap water for the initial process and then cool further using a recirculated ice water system.
I'm currently looking for containers that I can make the ice in (ready and frozen for my next batch) ...

Not sure what you're planning to do but I've had occasions where the chilled water cube got too cold and formed ice/slushie inside and blocked the cube tap at an inconvenient time. So chilled water good , icy water not so good <_<

 

[seehuusen]

Thanks for the heads up, I guess it'll be a bit of trial and error...
End goal will be to use the least amount of water

 

[Matplat]

I am thinking about doing partials etc. in the not to distant future so will need a different method of cooling the larger volume of wort.

I reckon the best compromise of efficiency vs cost will be an immersion chiller attached to a cheap magnetic drive pump recirculating my pre-chilled pot of cooled/boiled water.

Nil water wasted.

 

[seehuusen]

update, I'm about to crash chill this batch.
Flavour is OK, but has a minor off hint through it, I'm not quite sure how to describe it... I didn't get the flavour before I put it on the Centennial dry hop, but I doubt that was the reason... Perhaps an infection, though I've never had one before...

In any case, after the first sip of the beer, you don't notice it anyway.
The respondent who said it'd be OK beer but not Great beer was bang on the money

I'll brew this one up again, perhaps in a smaller batch just to see if it presents the same flavours or not... This time around, and for the future, I'll chill my wort all the way down below pitch temp as suggested in this thread

Cheers for your input,
Martin

 

[seehuusen]

Well, I ended up leaving the batch for another 4 days in secondary on dry hop, then crash chilled it until yesterday.
That totals 10 days on dry hops, and I'm not sure if that is the cause or not, but there is absolutely NO bad flavour in this beer at all now...
It could be that the yeast has cleaned up, or of course that the dry hopping has masked any detectable flavours...
I'm bottle conditioning them now, and actually looking forward to tasting this beer.
I think I'll brew it again, just to be sure that the experiment/stuff-up wasn't detrimental to the beer... Heck, it can only get better, right?

The new beer I brewed up yesterday was chilled to 19.9C, and TBH I just pitched at that temp. I can't imagine there would be anything wrong with that.
It had that classic lag for 20-ish hours, not 8 hours like this beer did.

As QLD Kev said, if your wort can get chilled down before the main part of the fermentation starts, you're probably going to be OK.
I'm going to be chilling my beers down to that 20C mark from hereon in though
First I used the garden hose down to 40C. Then the esky with ice recirculated from 40C to 20C. Pretty happy with how that worked, though all together it did take about 30-40 minutes in total (~15min with tap water on a slow trickle, then ~20 with the ice recirculation). I will be finding containers that I can drop the ice into the slurry, rather than bottles that keep the ice in and slightly away from the water that is being recirculated.

Cheers,
Martin