Cooling Wort For Home Brewing Pale Ale Beer

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Mark on behalf of Expert Village. In this segment, we are going to chill our wort and get it ready to put our yeast into. To do this, we're first going to take our wort and put it into our sink. Next, we're going to take our drain plug and put it in there and start flowing cold water. In the chilling process, we're trying to drop the temperature of the wort as fast as we can to encourage something called "cold break" which will precipitate proteins and also get the wort to a temperature at which we can mix in our yeast as quickly as we can so the yeast has the best chance of establishing itself since it's the dominant microbe in the wort. While I'm doing this, I'm stirring the water around the pot in order to break up the boundary layer that's forming of hot water. Also, you can kind of give the pot a little stir and that breaks up the boundary layer on the inside so this will encourage a cooler slowing...or a faster cooling. While you are waiting for your wort to chill, you may want to get a head start on the next step which is yeast preparation. Since we put in steeping hops, we're going to need to take those out before we mix them with our water. So we're going to go take our tongs and go put them in our sanitization solution so they will be nice and clean before we need to use them. While we are waiting for it to cool, we are going to start filling our bucket up with some nice cold water. Now, with these buckets, this typically represents the halfway mark or (I'm sorry) the five gallon mark. So, we're going to start filling it to roughly two and a half gallons and then we're going to top off with the wort and then whatever else we need to get just above five and a half gallons. So grab your water and start pouring and filling it up. You're going to want to fill your airlock half up with sanitizing solution or water. This is going to help prevent any microbes or air from getting in and also allow the carbon dioxide to escape. Now, with our freshly sanitized tongs, we can go in and take out our hop sack. Let it drip for a minute or so. You really don't want to try to introduce any kind of bacteria at this point because the wort is very vulnerable. And after a minute or so of letting it drain, I'm just going to throw that in the garbage. The hot kettle will heat up your water pretty quickly, so once its gotten to a pretty warm temperature, you're going to want to drain it. And then we are going to fill it up and get some ice next time. Now that we've filled the sink up again with a nice cold batch of water, we're going to make it even colder by adding a whole bunch of ice from our refrigerator. Then we are going to continue to swirl the water around it so that it gets nice and cold and breaks up the hot boundary layer. After a half-hour or so, you should be able to take out your pot, hold your hand here, and if it doesn't feel hot at all, you are in good shape. If it still feels pretty hot, you're probably going to want to let it sit in some cold water for a little while longer. "