As I mentioned in a prior post, I had been planning on doing a couple of extract batches this winter to try to stay out of the bitter Chicago cold but keep up on brewing.
Firstly, I did a full 6.5 gallon boil instead of the 3 gallon boils I used to do on the stove. I remember reading somewhere that natural gas has significantly less heat energy than propane, but didn't really take that to heart. It took almost two hours to get it up to boiling, with two burners on my stove at full blast. That sucked.
Secondly, the cooling stick I bought ended up barely having any effect on the temperature of the wort at all... I probably should have thought out the physics on that one. 1 gallon of frozen water really doesn't have much of an impact on 6 gallons of boiling hot, sugar laden wort. It got the wort down to about 165 in 30 minutes. Not so good either.
All in all, six hours start to finish on an extract batch is pretty weak in my opinion.
I did a 3 gallon boil, which made an enormous difference in the time to get the water up to temp. After finishing my boil, I used an old trick Alton Brown recommended on his episode of Good Eats about brewing. Dump a 7lb bag of ice plus a gallon of near-freezing distilled water into your wort as soon as you kill the heat. That alone dropped the three gallons of wort to 115F in about 3 minutes.
Three hours start to finish on the second batch. That's more like what I expect from extract brewing!
No comments:
Post a Comment