Have a couple dumb questions here. Recently bought a new house, and as such would like to limit my indoor brewing activities to keep the kitchen nice and orderly.
Where do y’all direct the outlet water from your immersion chillers? When I brewed in my apartment, I would simply run it down the sink, but now that I’m connecting up to the garden hose outside, I haven’t figured out what to do aside from clumsily filling up buckets with water and periodically dumping the water onto plants. This activity keeps me quite occupied and doesn’t allow me much time to stir the wort or move the chiller up & down to ensure rapid chilling.
How do y’all make your yeast starters outside? I used to do it on the stove, but now I’d like to do it outside. I can’t quite place my flasks on my propane burners as they are too small to fit on the platform. Was considering buying a camping stove of sorts expressly for this purpose, but it seems a bit wasteful.
Early on in the chilling process you want to contain the very hot water. After 5 or 10 minutes it’ll be cooled off enough that it won’t harm plants, so route it onto the lawn or into flower beds or vegetable garden. As for making yeast starters, I would just make them indoors. Not like they take up a bunch of space or disrupt anything.
I have a pool that constantly needs to be topped off in the summer months. Outlet water goes there.
Not a great idea to put a flask on any burner. Better to fill a flask with boiling water or wort, but not bring the liquid to a boil in the flask itself.
Re:#1, you can try pre-chilling the water or no-chill brewing to minimize the volume of water needed for cooling.
Re:#2, if I need to make a starter around the time I’m brewing a batch, I submerge the flask in the sparge-water kettle to pasteurize. I use Propper and bottled water, so I have no need to boil DME.
I always have thought of the disposal of chilling water as way more problematic when I have to brew inside: putting all that water into in my case a septic system or for others a municipal waste system. Outside is easy, collect the hot stuff in the fermenter and add sanitizer then let the cool stuff go in the yard, where it does good, not harm.
I don’t understand why you still wouldn’t do your starter on the stove top.
Flasks are made of heat-resistant borosilicate glass but they don’t have a shape that distributes heat evenly. You risk cracking the glass by putting it on direct heat, especially an electric burner. A gas burner isn’t as risky, but it’s still not a good idea unless you’ve shelled out for a top-quality flask from a reputable source.
I catch the 1st chiller runoff in a 5 gallon cooler to use for later washing, once it’s around 110 it goes on the lawn. While that may at first blush seem a bit too warm for watering, on any sunny day the water in a hose that’s been in the sun for an hour or more is usually hotter than that.
This is from my college chemistry lab experiences. If you put a flask on a burner you need to put a wire gauze (available from most scientific supply houses) under it to keep the direct flame away from the flask. The wire gauze will diffuse the flame so you don’t create hot spots on the borosilicate glass (a.k.a Pyrex) that could crack it. If you are using a glass cooktop stove, it is not necessary to use the wire gauze but I would also use one on a coiled burner for the same reason mentioned above.
If you have a rain barrel you can dump your outlet water in there to cool. Plus then you can use rainwater to water things. A lot of the time cities will have programs for free/cheap rain barrels.
Maple leaves and bumblebees common ingredients in my beers. My American Wheat tap is labeled “Bumblebee Wheat” for a reason.
On occasion I add a honey bee or two, but that’s about it.
I have 3 very large maple trees in my backyard and Fall can make it interesting sometimes.
When I started brewing in the garage, I used to direct the outlet hose into a drain in the stairwell of the walkout basement door - sometimes water the lawn and/or plants with some collected. I always hated wasting so much water. So now, I place a pump in a cooler with a 20 lb bag of ice and fill the cooler halfway with water from the hose. I hook the immersion chiller inlet hose to the pump and stick the i.c. outlet hose into the cooler. When it’s time to chill, the pump gets plugged in and the water in the cooler is circulated from cooler, through chiller, and back to cooler. Adding a second 20 lb bag of ice when the first has melted, it takes me about 20 - 30 minutes to get the wort to near pitching temp.
Like Denny, I make the starters a day or two ahead and so the small amount of wort is still boiled on the stove in the kitchen.
I started using a pond pump and ice water this year, so that I could get down to lager pitching temps during the warm months. In the past, I either did not brew during the warm months or only brewed ales at the beginning or end of the period.
