Using Store Bought Ice To Reduce Wort Temp

[slaam]

I just get a 5 ltr food grade bottle, take some wort out and cool it for a white and put it back in . yes yes its all clean n stuff when i do this. brings temp down and u dont have to add any bad crap . Best way if u use filtered or boiled water and dont want to fill wiff tap water.

 

[Big John]

i dont understand how adding cold water doesnt bring the temp down enough. put the water in the fridge before hand?

Just to clarify (as a number of people have already guessed), I top up my fermenter with tap water.

My procedure is 2 litres of boiling water, KnB & tap water

On hot days (35+ degrees) I finish with a temp that is in the 27+ degree range
On cold days (15 degrees in winter) I end up with a temp of 21 degrees in the fermenter

I guess the air temperature combined with the pipes & tap water temp makes the difference

 

[fergi]

during summer here in adelaide i used bagged ice at least a dozen times to bring down my wort temp,always use water straight from the tap and can only remember ever having one infected batch and that was probably due to dropping the can opener into the fermenter.the bagged ice you get from the pub has to be good quality because they obviously know that people drop the bag of ice into the esky and people grab a handful to put in their drinks.its probably more sterile than some of our brew operations.
fergi

 

[Flippo]

What I do is this. I "found" and "borrowed" one of those 15L water fountain bottles from work. Now this is assuming you have the space and resources, which I used to. A day before you're gonna brew, fill it and stick it in your brew fridge at a normal fridge temp (3 or 4 deg). On brew day, boil up your malty, hoppy goodness in your pot, mine was approx 5-6L. Grab your pre chilled water from the fridge, whack a bit in the bottom of the fermenter, dump your hot wort in, then upend the 15L container of cold water into your fermenter, this will take you to around 21/22L at what I always found to be around 18 or so deg. Chuck in your yeast, spin the top on nice and tight, airlock in the top, Bob's your uncle. If I ever wanted to do a lager, I'd freeze an amount of water the day before, or, run across the road to the servo and get a bag of ice and stick a bit in to bring the temp down to lager pitching range. Never had a problem with infections using servo bought ice, never thought to sterilise the 15L container either come to think of it, and always used tap water straight from the hose. Probably living on borrowed time re the infection, but I did numerous brews like this and they were all great.

Hope this helps

 

[nardcooker]

I've used bagged ice heaps of times when doing k&k, used to mix up with a couple of ltrs boiling water, then dump in 2kg ice and top up with (filtered) tap water no issues. pitched yeast about 5 - 10 mins after the ice was melted and after a big stir. works a treat for people with no time and a couple of kids.

 

[RobboMC]

i dont understand how adding cold water doesnt bring the temp down enough. put the water in the fridge before hand?

It's a straightforward heat balance.

For example, if you take 5 litres at 100 deg C and add 5 litres at 0 deg C,
then you get 10 litres at 50 deg C.

With a kit, you get around 4 litres at 70 deg C ( assuming the kit was warmed to help pouring )
so if you just add 19 litres of tap water at 20 deg C the result is: ( 4x70 + 19x20 ) /23 = 28.7 deg C

The water in Melbourne is much cooler I assume, so it's not such a problemo.

Ice containes about 10 times the amount of 'coldness' as cooled fridge water, so even just 1 litre of ice
makes a huge difference.

Based on the above example, a simple test is to measure the temp of your tap water,
if it's above 19 deg C then you need some ice. Yes, you can cool the entire 19 litres to 4 deg,
but it's much easier to freeze 1 litre of ice than fit 19 litres into the kitchen fridge where SWMBO is
defrosting the dinner.

I did my first ever brew in February when I started, at the wort came out at 30 deg C.
I've learned a lot since then. I use sanitised ice-cream containers with lids, seem to work fine,
and always keep a few kg of ice waiting in the freezer just in case the brewing bug hits me,
and they come in handy to keep the esky cold for that unplanned picnic as well.

 

[jonocarroll]

Ice containes about 10 times the amount of 'coldness' as cooled fridge water

This is a gem, really. I don't know where you think that comes from. I'll come back to that.

so even just 1 litre of ice makes a huge difference.

I'll come back to that too.

It's a straightforward heat balance.

For example, if you take 5 litres at 100 deg C and add 5 litres at 0 deg C,
then you get 10 litres at 50 deg C.

This assumes that the two fluids have the same specific heat, which they won't - wort will take more energy to heat/cool.

For the sake of simplicity, I'll assume the same for now.

With a kit, you get around 4 litres at 70 deg C ( assuming the kit was warmed to help pouring )
so if you just add 19 litres of tap water at 20 deg C the result is: ( 4x70 + 19x20 ) /23 = 28.7 deg C

This seems about right.

As a check (and, since I'm bored) here's a graph of the cooling abilities of frozen water (0 degrees), unfrozen water (also 0 degrees, but not needing to be melted), and tepid water (20 degrees). The calculation assumes that the wort is at 100 degrees, and you are going to make up 23L total. I have assumed that the wort is just water, with the common heat capacity. The calculation assumes you need to extract x joules of heat from y litres of a hot liquid to cool (23-y) litres of a warm liquid such that they reach a common final temperature.



As you can see, adding 11.5L (half) water at 0 degrees and half at 100 (highlighted) does indeed result in 23L of 50 degrees water. Interestingly, if you add 13kg of ice to the 10L of water, you'll bring the entire batch down from 100 degrees to 0 degrees... but you won't freeze it of course.

19L of 20 degree water added to the 4 litres of 100 degree wort would give you 35 degrees. Not a bad estimate then.

Ice containes about 10 times the amount of 'coldness' as cooled fridge water, so even just 1 litre of ice makes a huge difference.

A single kg of ice saves you about 7 degrees. I don't see a factor of 10 improvement here though.

After all that... no-chill FTW!!! :super:

 

[D.lycle]

I have been using White Labs pitchable yeast vials for my last few batches of beer and have had good results. Most of those batches were using specialty type ale yeasts like Scottish, or Hefeweizen. I am about to brew a Porter and was considering using a good quality dry ale yeast since it is less of a specialty style ale and a bit more forgiving. I am just being cheap, but what do you think of doing this?