I accidentally dumped a quart of ice into my fermenter when trying to freshen my ice bath. I wasn’t paying attention and poured the ice onto the lid which then tilted into the kettle and dropped in the ice.
Hoping for the best. The beer was already down to about 120F when it happened so too cool to kill any bugs I may have poured in with the ice.
I have a good krausen now but I am wondering if the bugs may lay relatively low while the yeast ferments then become apparent after flocculation when they have had time to reproduce.
;D I remember that episode of Good Eats. It was kind of like homebrewing knowledge in general circa 92 or 93 when I started. Did he strain out the crystal that he steeped ? I could swear that he just boiled the whole mixture.
I don’ t know. I made some entirely acceptable homebrew with that method. he used a grian bag for the crystal and removed it before the boil. He even chilled to below 70 before pitching yeast. pretty decent technique actually. the ice chilling is a great way to chill wort low tech.
Ok, my bad - hadn’t seen it for awhile. Don’t know where I got that idea. That’s how I started out brewing too. And it sure beat the alternative which was mostly BMC then too.
I think it was my third batch I brewed that I used the ice chilling method. I had 8 pounds of ice in my bucket, poured the 2 or so gallons of boiling wort on top. It didn’t work out so well. For some reason, I thought it was a good idea to top up and pitch the yeast, just assuming the ice brought the temp down enough. But no, I felt the side of the bucket and it was warm in spots…whoops. That batch didn’t turn out so well. Good times. Plus, store bought ice isn’t necessarily the cleanest either. You risk contamination with that method.
yeah you gotta use the whole remaining volume in ice or it won’t bring the temp down enough. Good point on store bought ice by the way. I never did have a problem
I always thought the ice was a brilliant idea. The math is easy to calculate (assuming you know your boil volume well enough) and you can’t beat how fast it gets you to pitching temperatures. If I wasn’t now doing full wort boils, I would do it that way by freezing bottled water the night before.
Brown took his lumps from some uptight homebrewers on what he did in the show, such as keeping the steeping grains in the brew pot, and he did later apologize and made process changes and posted them to his blog, but I still think that was an excellent show on homebrewing. Like all his Good Eats shows, he explained the how and the why and showed you how easy it is.
It simply made me doubt a lot of the other stuff he said on the show. The good part was that it made me do my own research and reach my own conclusions.