No Chill

Australia & New Zealand Homebrewing Forum

Help Support Australia & New Zealand Homebrewing Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Ok to play devil's advocate then (for the sake of interest). This would seem to be more about the efficiency or perhaps speed of utilisation then?
So in theory, to pull numbers from a hat, a rapid boil of 40 minutes could get the same utilisation as that of a gentle 60 minute boil? But given that there is bugger all extra utilisation after 60 minutes, then both a rapid and gentle boil would have a similar IBU rating after 60 minutes?

To go to the coffee analogy: wouldn't an unstirred cup of coffee will have its sugar just as dissolved as a stirred one, if they are both left on the bench for a period of time (on the premise that they don't cool too quickly)?

I see where you are coming from and I don't disagree with your logic by any means. As I said, there is not much specific information in many brewing books aside from the general statement.

My semi-educated take on all this is that isomerisation will not 'stop' at lets say 30-40% utilization (about the max for a 60 min boil usually) but by this time it will have slowed down dramatically. It will continue to increase but at a much slower rate. See below

rager2663.gif
 
I see where you are coming from and I don't disagree with your logic by any means. As I said, there is not much specific information in many brewing books aside from the general statement.

My semi-educated take on all this is that isomerisation will not 'stop' at lets say 30-40% utilization (about the max for a 60 min boil usually) but by this time it will have slowed down dramatically. It will continue to increase but at a much slower rate. See below

And I am not disagreeing with you. I was just was trying to draw more information.
I have seen various charts similar to that and from I can see the utilisation (with an S :D ) would indeed appear to taper off after 50-60 minutes. I was more interested in your comment on the boil: in regards to the influence of how vigorous the boil is and what significance this is to utilisation.
 
As you suggested earlier, the efficiency factor is probably a big part of it. While it means you could get the same ulitisation with a shorter boil, that will become an increased ultilisation with the same boil length (vigorous vs gentle). That chart backs this idea up by showing that isomerisation will slow down rather than stop completely around the 60 minute mark according to the Rager method.
 
I wish I knew more about it and I will look into it a bit more.. :kooi:
 
Ash's contention about boil vigour and isomerisation is partially true and almost exclusively do do with whole flower hops. It is basically a physical thing - in a flower, the soft resins are mostly contained within a structure. If you don't poke and bash it a bit via the vigour of the boil - inside that structure is where they will stay.

If you are using pellets though, they break up completely almost straight away and the iso alpha acids very quickly dissolve. From there on isomerisation is primarily about heat (and pH) - any boil that even remotely resembles an acceptable boil for brewing purposes will do absolutely everything required to mix and isomerise properly. Sure - if you tie them up tight in a hop sock, or perhaps you simply heat your wort to barley a simmer you might notice a difference. But you are talking about a difference you might see between utterly calm and normal... the difference between an acceptable boil on the gentle end of the scale and an acceptable boil on the aggressive end of the scale would be basically non existent.

On the other hand - alpha acids absolutely continue to isomerise in the No Chill cube. I have dozens and dozens of brew's worth of experience to say thats true, and I also have tested the iso alpha acid levels of no-chilled worts to see by how much its true.

In my tests (which could stand a couple of repeats to make them statistically valid) I found that no-chilled worts tended to have an increase in bitterness over chilled worts roughly equivalent to that you would get by boiling all the hop additions for 10-20mins longer than you actually did. So your 60min hops contribute bitterness like they were 70-80min hops and your 5min hops contribute like 15-25 min hops etc etc

That is though specifically for pellet hops added loose in the kettle and assumes you leave behind your trub and hops when you transfer to your NC cube. (Removing the plant matter does not stop this from happening, the acids are already in solution by now). It would not be the same for whole hops, for hops in a hop sock or if you No-Chill in the kettle along with all the hop trub. The bitterness will still increase... but the quantum of that increase is going to be different and I have no suggestions as to how much. And it might not work that way for you - thats just how it worked out in the tests I did.

I also tested for hop pellets added directly to the no-chill cube that never saw the inside of the kettle. Wort into cube, greenery into cube - seal it up and let it cool (moving it about a little every now and again). I found that those "Cube Hops" contributed to bitterness as though they had been in the boil for 25-30mins and the wort had been rapidly cooled. The notion of gentle vs rapid boil is in my experience visible in this situation, because if you put those pellet hops inside a tightish bag (in my case an ankle high stocking/sock) they contribute noticeably less bitterness than if they are loose. If you shake the cube a few times vs just leaving it sit undisturbed after adding the hops... same thing. Noticeable difference in bittering.

The 25-30min figure is for loose pellet hops with the cube moved about a bit over the first few hours. I dont have any sort of a figure for flower hops, hops in a tightish sock or for leaving the cube unmixed - but significantly less bittering for the sock and worth considering with the "still" cube. NFI about flowers, I don't use them.

What I would do to take this stuff into consideration is:

Do not change when you actually put your hops into the boil. Change the time in your software when you are calculating your bitterness and then simply change the quantity of your main bittering addition. So for example

I plan a Pale Ale - it will be a 23L post boil volume @ 1.050 and will have 15g of Chinook (13% AA) as bittering charge @ 60min with 20g of Amarillo (10%AA) at 10mins and another 20g Amarillo at 1min. Pro-mash assumes it will be rapidly chilled and tells me that it will be 38.3 IBUs

BUT - I know that I am going to No-chill the batch and believe that this will increase the bitterness. SO - I tell promash that those hops are all going in the boil 15mins earlier than they really are. 85min, 25min and 16min. Now promash tells me that my new expected bitterness is 50.8 IBU. Now - I adjust the bittering charge down in quantity until the IBUs are back to 38.3. It turns out that that means I am now adding only 8.7g of Chinook. Thats what pro-mash thinks I am going to do.

So now what I actually do is add 8.7g of Chinook as my bittering charge, the Amarillo still gets 20g @ 10mins and 20g at 1 min - and I no-chill.

And that gets me beers that are at the level of bitterness I expect them to be at. It will be different on your system, you will just have to experiment to find out how much you need to "tweak" the boil time you use in your calculations. But if you find you are making over bitter beers and think NC could be the reason - that 15min adjustment is IMO a fairly reasonable place to start your tweaking from.

BTW - I use pro-mash to formulate my recipes and within Pro-mash the Rager IBU calculation formula.

But hops are an art not a science... look at the different formulas, all give different figures for teh same hop additions. No one can agree on how much bitterness you get from a FWH addition, everyone knows you get some bitterness from flameout/whirlpool additions but none of the formulas actually add any IBU's for them. You get different bitterness if you immersion chill vs plate or CF chill and surprise surprise.... you get different bitterness if you No-Chill than you do with chilling. Treat the numbers as a rough guide that will stop you popping an eyeball with a totally over bitter beer and then just go with your tastebuds. They're the only things that really matter anyway.
 
i had late hop additions of cascade @30mins from memory so it could have added more bitterness from nochill?
even if extract brewing (i'm actually brewing partials mainly now), the effect on the hops would be the same, i would chill or add mid additions to the end of the boil to compensate? :unsure: sorry but much cheaper to nut out online than bugger up another brew?
 
well summed up TB... another highly valued post. :icon_cheers:
You've articulated exactly my process and supported it with a bit of testing

I can see my self linking/pointing to this post many times in the future

Cheers :icon_cheers:
 
How about Aroma additions?

I saw this chart the other day here:
http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/forum/inde...st&id=39604

I've tried Cube Hopping as an alternative to Aroma additions but would rather keep hops/socks out of the cube if I can, as it leads to more loose material in primary and beyond with my setup.

Does anyone do FWH as an alternative to Aroma additions for No-Chill?
The Chart is confusing (to me) since it suggest 10 minute additions are Flavour additions but I take them to be Aroma ones???

If it's relevant, I tend to use No Chill as a way of stockpiling brews, rather than an overnight chiller method, so the brews can sit in the cube for weeks/months.

Keeping Aroma is the only downside to No Chill I've encountered so far, other than that I love it <3 <3 <3 as I often don't want to deal with the delicate end of the process (and an extended brewnight) in one hit, but can do yeast/aeration/pitching etc.. separately as a dedicated task.


*edit. Maybe I'll follow advice from the other thread to draw off a few litres of chilled wort, reheat it and make additions to that. Just curious on the FWH success as it'd be a lot easier..
 
Now this is a robust discussion, terrific.

Please forgive my ignorance but if I understand it correctly, the alpha acids can be floating about in the wort, having been seperated from the glands/hop vegetative material by the physical action of the boil and are in the solution but not yet 'dissolved' or isomerized to iso-alpha acids? Thus they would at that stage contribute no percieved bitterness. However, if you continue to maintain the wort at high enough temperatures such as in a no chill cube, these alpha acids that are in suspension (rather than disolved or isomerised) then could have the chance to isomerise and therefore increase bitterness. This is ignoring the fact that isomerisation does not occur all at once and that it occurs over a period of time.

So what this means, if what I have said is true, is that hot wort in a no chill cube can become more bitter over time even if you have strained out all of the vegetative parts of the hops. I think this last statement is true but it is interesting to look at why it is so.

Now to take it a little further and back to Ash In Perth's point, could it be that a more vigourous boil could put alpha acids into suspension at a rate that is quicker than that of a gentle boil? Is it a jump too far to then to think that maybe a vigorous boiled wort in a no chill cube could end up more bitter than a gentle boiled wort in a no chill cube? Or is it just that maybe it is so, but in very minimal amounts such that there would be no percieved difference?
 
well summed up TB... another highly valued post. :icon_cheers:
You've articulated exactly my process and supported it with a bit of testing

I can see my self linking/pointing to this post many times in the future

Cheers :icon_cheers:

Well i am thinking of possibly doing some no chilling in the future, i thank you also, best laid out info i have read so far on this process.

Bookmarked!
 
I saw this chart the other day here:
http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/forum/inde...st&id=39604

I've tried Cube Hopping as an alternative to Aroma additions but would rather keep hops/socks out of the cube if I can, as it leads to more loose material in primary and beyond with my setup.

Does anyone do FWH as an alternative to Aroma additions for No-Chill?
The Chart is confusing (to me) since it suggest 10 minute additions are Flavour additions but I take them to be Aroma ones???
Just because it's a chart doesn't mean it's scientific! :p I'd take it with a pinch of salt. Theres so much differing opinions and conjecture on FWH and NC its best to just bite the bullet and see what works for your tastes.
 
Bitterness is only half the story in NC though isn't it? By keeping the timing of your additions the same but adjusting for bitterness, do you find that you lose aroma? I haven't tried the technique you're describing but it sounds easier than what I'm currently doing... I literally shift the additions forward (backwards?) 15-20 minutes and for every thing under 15 minutes I do a small boil around the time of pitching and chill by adding straight to the rest of the (chilled to 2-3C) wort.

If your method wouldn't lose much aroma, it sounds much more convenient to me. What is your experience? Is the method more suitable for specific styles of beer?


Ash's contention about boil vigour and isomerisation is partially true and almost exclusively do do with whole flower hops. It is basically a physical thing - in a flower, the soft resins are mostly contained within a structure. If you don't poke and bash it a bit via the vigour of the boil - inside that structure is where they will stay.

If you are using pellets though, they break up completely almost straight away and the iso alpha acids very quickly dissolve. From there on isomerisation is primarily about heat (and pH) - any boil that even remotely resembles an acceptable boil for brewing purposes will do absolutely everything required to mix and isomerise properly. Sure - if you tie them up tight in a hop sock, or perhaps you simply heat your wort to barley a simmer you might notice a difference. But you are talking about a difference you might see between utterly calm and normal... the difference between an acceptable boil on the gentle end of the scale and an acceptable boil on the aggressive end of the scale would be basically non existent.

On the other hand - alpha acids absolutely continue to isomerise in the No Chill cube. I have dozens and dozens of brew's worth of experience to say thats true, and I also have tested the iso alpha acid levels of no-chilled worts to see by how much its true.

In my tests (which could stand a couple of repeats to make them statistically valid) I found that no-chilled worts tended to have an increase in bitterness over chilled worts roughly equivalent to that you would get by boiling all the hop additions for 10-20mins longer than you actually did. So your 60min hops contribute bitterness like they were 70-80min hops and your 5min hops contribute like 15-25 min hops etc etc

That is though specifically for pellet hops added loose in the kettle and assumes you leave behind your trub and hops when you transfer to your NC cube. (Removing the plant matter does not stop this from happening, the acids are already in solution by now). It would not be the same for whole hops, for hops in a hop sock or if you No-Chill in the kettle along with all the hop trub. The bitterness will still increase... but the quantum of that increase is going to be different and I have no suggestions as to how much. And it might not work that way for you - thats just how it worked out in the tests I did.

I also tested for hop pellets added directly to the no-chill cube that never saw the inside of the kettle. Wort into cube, greenery into cube - seal it up and let it cool (moving it about a little every now and again). I found that those "Cube Hops" contributed to bitterness as though they had been in the boil for 25-30mins and the wort had been rapidly cooled. The notion of gentle vs rapid boil is in my experience visible in this situation, because if you put those pellet hops inside a tightish bag (in my case an ankle high stocking/sock) they contribute noticeably less bitterness than if they are loose. If you shake the cube a few times vs just leaving it sit undisturbed after adding the hops... same thing. Noticeable difference in bittering.

The 25-30min figure is for loose pellet hops with the cube moved about a bit over the first few hours. I dont have any sort of a figure for flower hops, hops in a tightish sock or for leaving the cube unmixed - but significantly less bittering for the sock and worth considering with the "still" cube. NFI about flowers, I don't use them.

What I would do to take this stuff into consideration is:

Do not change when you actually put your hops into the boil. Change the time in your software when you are calculating your bitterness and then simply change the quantity of your main bittering addition. So for example

I plan a Pale Ale - it will be a 23L post boil volume @ 1.050 and will have 15g of Chinook (13% AA) as bittering charge @ 60min with 20g of Amarillo (10%AA) at 10mins and another 20g Amarillo at 1min. Pro-mash assumes it will be rapidly chilled and tells me that it will be 38.3 IBUs

BUT - I know that I am going to No-chill the batch and believe that this will increase the bitterness. SO - I tell promash that those hops are all going in the boil 15mins earlier than they really are. 85min, 25min and 16min. Now promash tells me that my new expected bitterness is 50.8 IBU. Now - I adjust the bittering charge down in quantity until the IBUs are back to 38.3. It turns out that that means I am now adding only 8.7g of Chinook. Thats what pro-mash thinks I am going to do.

So now what I actually do is add 8.7g of Chinook as my bittering charge, the Amarillo still gets 20g @ 10mins and 20g at 1 min - and I no-chill.

And that gets me beers that are at the level of bitterness I expect them to be at. It will be different on your system, you will just have to experiment to find out how much you need to "tweak" the boil time you use in your calculations. But if you find you are making over bitter beers and think NC could be the reason - that 15min adjustment is IMO a fairly reasonable place to start your tweaking from.

BTW - I use pro-mash to formulate my recipes and within Pro-mash the Rager IBU calculation formula.

But hops are an art not a science... look at the different formulas, all give different figures for teh same hop additions. No one can agree on how much bitterness you get from a FWH addition, everyone knows you get some bitterness from flameout/whirlpool additions but none of the formulas actually add any IBU's for them. You get different bitterness if you immersion chill vs plate or CF chill and surprise surprise.... you get different bitterness if you No-Chill than you do with chilling. Treat the numbers as a rough guide that will stop you popping an eyeball with a totally over bitter beer and then just go with your tastebuds. They're the only things that really matter anyway.
 
as for aroma in nochill, i have this theory (and it could well be wrong) that the essential oils that cause the aroma cool down and separate from the wort, and then stick to the sides of the cube. I base this guess on the stuff that seems to be stuck to the side of my cubes before i clean them.

To add aroma i french presss hop, seems to work quite well.
 
Aroma and flavour are exactly why you change only the bittering charge and not the others. You still add you 5 min hops at 5 mins and the same amount of them. Bitterness changes in no-chill, so to compensate for that, change your bittering hops.

If you notice that flavour and aroma are poorly affected by no-chilling. Then worry about that separately. Some people dont have any issue with aroma or flavour, some people find NC really changes it.

i find i do get the change personally. My actual process is to cube hop anything that is a later addition than the 30 min addition. Normally my boils have only bittering hops and all other hops go in the cube. I used to put them in a hop sick in the cube... But because the were so constrained and as previously discussed, that changes the amount of bitterness (and incidentally aroma and flavour) that come out of them - i was unable to get my bitterness right. Lots ofnhops made a tight fit in the bag and that worked differently to only a few hops that were loose..... So now they just go into the cube loose and i pour the wort through my sanitised BIAB bag to get the pellets out. Same as in the pot... Bag goes into fermenter like a bin liner, fermenter get filled up with wort, bag gets pulled out and takes all the hops and a percentage of break material as well.

I like cube hops, i get flavour from my aroma hops and aroma from my flavour hops - and bittering from both so i dont use as many bittering hops.

Another way to get aroma into no-chill brews is with hop teas. i use a french press, some people do a quick boil with hops in a bag... Lots of variations. Bit of a search will pop up a number of threads on the topic.
 
Hi Guys,

Been knocking out a few APA's and IPA's using the no chill method and been hit and miss with my flavour and aroma. This whole discussion is news to me and has been a real eye opener. I have been following 'conventional' hop schedules and find really earthy tones from noble hops like Cascade/Amarillo etc.

A possible solution for me will be to purely add my bittering hops to the kettle and do a small stove top (2lt) with a bit of LDME and do my flavour/aroma additions to that.

Probably cheating a bit but I don't like the idea of cracking my cube and leaving it semi full while I do a 20 min boil.
 
If you notice that flavour and aroma are poorly affected by no-chilling. Then worry about that separately. Some people dont have any issue with aroma or flavour, some people find NC really changes it.
I think style is a huge player here. For US/New World styles the only way I can get suitable hopping levels (for me, others may have their own preferences, of course) is through cube hopping - kettle additions fade too hard, IMO. I can completely see how many European/local styles could be cubed without showing much of this effect and could be accounted for with a very slight change in kettle additions/timing.
 
Ash's contention about boil vigour and isomerisation is partially true and almost exclusively do do with whole flower hops. It is basically a physical thing - in a flower, the soft resins are mostly contained within a structure. If you don't poke and bash it a bit via the vigour of the boil - inside that structure is where they will stay.

If you are using pellets though, they break up completely almost straight away and the iso alpha acids very quickly dissolve. From there on isomerisation is primarily about heat (and pH) - any boil that even remotely resembles an acceptable boil for brewing purposes will do absolutely everything required to mix and isomerise properly. Sure - if you tie them up tight in a hop sock, or perhaps you simply heat your wort to barley a simmer you might notice a difference. But you are talking about a difference you might see between utterly calm and normal... the difference between an acceptable boil on the gentle end of the scale and an acceptable boil on the aggressive end of the scale would be basically non existent.

Cheers mate, the point about cone hops fills in the gap in my knowledge.... The same concept would be true about pellet hops to an extent also but as you say, not as significantly
 
Now to take it a little further and back to Ash In Perth's point, could it be that a more vigourous boil could put alpha acids into suspension at a rate that is quicker than that of a gentle boil? Is it a jump too far to then to think that maybe a vigorous boiled wort in a no chill cube could end up more bitter than a gentle boiled wort in a no chill cube? Or is it just that maybe it is so, but in very minimal amounts such that there would be no percieved difference?

I'll stand behind this point completely. Thirsty Boy touched on it briefly when he pointed out the adequate boil idea. I was not comparing a normal healthy boil to a vigorous boil but a gentle (piss weak) boil that I have seen too often.

If you boil very gently (think 'simmer') there will almost definitely be a reduction in perceived bitterness against a properly boiled beer (vigorous).

A mostly unrelated side point, there is also the hydrophobic nature of a-acids to think about. While boiling, alpha acids will be gather on the surface of vapour bubbles and move through the wort with them. More bubbles will increase this effect. I doubt this will have any real effect on isomerisation but it all becomes part of the complex chemistry of wort boiling.
 
Back
Top