I’ll be moving soon and I probably won’t have the abundant water that I am used to in Washington so I need to start figuring out how to brew with the least amount of water possible.
No chill seems like it may be a way to conserve.
Has anyone out there used a S S conical or Anvil type S S bucket to do no chill?
Other than creating a vacuum in a sealed vessel, there shouldn’t be an issue. The fermenter will be stupid hot, so be careful handling it.
If you are careful you can chill the normal way with no “waste”. I am in California where water efficiency is always on our minds. The most water that I put down the drain from brewing is from cleaning because that can’t be captured and repurposed. For chilling wort I use a standard immersion chiller, along with a whirlpool to keep the wort moving across the coil. I collect the hottest water in the sink for cleaning with later, then collect water in buckets to use for watering household plants and the vegetable garden It is perfectly clean water. When the discharge water from the chiller drops to the temperature of my tap water, I switch to a closed system that has ice water in a small cooler and a submersible pump to move it through the coil and back into the cooler. There are other techniques also, but the key point is to capture any clean water and use it later. The only water that goes down the drain is soapy or dirty in some form, and that is a small fraction of the total.
I’ll be moving to N. CA just over the OR border and I don’t know just how the water availability is effected in that part of the state.
This might help.
http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?CA
Cool, thanks. Where we’re going is in the white none area in Humboldt county.