Chilling the Wort for Home Brewed Beer

Chilling the Wort for Home Brewed Beer
This is JB with Austin Home Brew supply. We’re finishing up our boil now and we’re going to chill this wort down as fast as we can, and we’re going to get it into the primary fermenter. When you’re beginning, you’re going to take the whole brew and you’re going to put it into an ice bath. Now, I have a couple of little things that I bought over the years, because I’ve been doing this awhile, it’ll make it a little easier on me. One of which is called wort chiller. That is this side right here. This is a wort chiller. So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take this, and I’m going to place it directly into the boil. It’s already sanitized so I can do this. Put this done in here. Now, generally you would just hook this directly to a garden house. I have the liberty of having what’s called a pre-chiller. Basically, it’s another wort chiller just like that one, but I’ve put into a bunch of ice water, because I live in Texas and the ground water is hot. So, I’m trying to get a best temperature inversion I can. So, the ground water will come through my pre-chiller, then it will chill it down. It will help to chill this down a little quicker. So, I’ve got that all set up. I’m going to walk over and turn on my ground water and get it flowing through. It’s finally coming through and it’s about the right rate. So here we go. Look at steam pouring off of this. It’s going to get us here with a big flood. You can see the steam pouring off of the black top here pulling the heat out of that brew kettle. That’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to get a good temperature inversion. With this I’m going to smash down in there as much as I can, chilling down the wort. This process will generally take around 20 minutes. Like I said, when you’re starting out, you’ll take the whole brew kettle, you we will not have either of these wort chillers, and take the whole brew kettle and just put it into a tub of ice water. That will do the trick too. I’m just using re-freezable ice packets that we have here. The only reason I’m using these is it’s cheaper than ice; instead of going on buying a bunch of ice. This is, like I said, it’s about a 15 maybe 20 minute process, something like that. We’re getting real close to beer now. Once the yeast goes into it and the yeast starts to actually eat the sugar, well then it’s officially becoming beer. At this point, it still worked sugar water. Basically, barley, sugar, water, and lots of hops.