Q for the no chill brewers

[chuffer]

Apologies if this has been done before but i couldnt see ewt on the search. Im thinking of going down the no chill route but ive read elsewhere that this can make ipa's overly bitter due to increased contact time of hops at high temps. Is this your experience? If so, do you simply reduce the amount of bittering hops in your recipe to negate this?

 

[Simonh82]

Might be worth asking on the aussie homebrewer forum. It's the predominant brewing method over in Oz as they have such severe water restrictions.

I think the general advice is that you need to tweak recipes for no chill to reduce bitterness and then dry hop like crazy.

 

[MyQul]

I no chill but I dont make IPA's all of my brews have modest hopping. I dont reduce the hopping. It doesn't seem to make any difference with the styles I make (mostly english styles bitter/porter/mild etc)

 

[chuffer]

I no chill but I dont make IPA's all of my brews have modest hopping. I dont reduce the hopping. It doesn't seem to make any difference with the styles I make (mostly english styles bitter/porter/mild etc)

Yeh this is the issue...as i like the idea of no chill but im mostly into pales and ipa's....i can see that it will be fine on the rare occasion i make darker beers

 

[samale]

Apologies if this has been done before but i couldnt see ewt on the search. Im thinking of going down the no chill route but ive read elsewhere that this can make ipa's overly bitter due to increased contact time of hops at high temps. Is this your experience? If so, do you simply reduce the amount of bittering hops in your recipe to negate this?

You can bag your hops and remove them once the boil is over to stop the contact time. I no chill but I am not a fan of overly bitter beer. If I am making a beer like stout that requires a bitter hop I remove the bag at the end then transfer to my bucket to chill over night.
When making hoppy pale ale or IPA I leave my hops until the end. Transfer the wort at 80 degrees to the bucket and add my hop stand hops and leave them in over night. This works for me, don't ask me how many ibu because I don't use calculator's. You will learn as you go along through trial and error and make adjustments to suit your own taste.
Hope this helps you don't stress and enjoy it

 

[MyQul]

Yeh this is the issue...as i like the idea of no chill but im mostly into pales and ipa's....i can see that it will be fine on the rare occasion i make darker beers

It's fine for pales, as I sometimes make blonde ales and pseudo lagers and regularly make bitters using no chill. But it may not be suitable for highly hopped beers

 

[Alside101]

I brewed a neipa no chill and it came out good. Just take the wort off the hops after the boil/hop stand

 

[chuffer]

Just take the wort off the hops after the boil/hop stand

Sorry, dont mean to be dense but what exactly do you mean?

 

[PhilBrew]

Hi @chuffer

As others have said, so long as you separate the wort and the hops at end of boil then there's no need to change your recipes for no-chilling ... but if you're looking to get the "fresher" hop flavours into your beers that lots of late hops bring then you might need to introduce those differently ... what you can do is ... you brew your hoppy beer as usual but when it comes to adding late hops (say anything to be involved for anything less than 15-10 mins) you leave those hops in the freezer to be used later ... then at end of boil you drop your beer into whatever vessel you plan to let it cool in, but I would recommend you get a a no-chill cube that you can expel the air from and seal up air tight (an HDPE jerry-can is ideal) ... just cause the method is called "no-chill" it doesn't mean you're not allowed to chill that vessel, so if you can get that somewhere cool then do (if you have a brewfridge and can get the cube chilled, after it has cooled to ambient, it will help with the next stage) ... when you're ready to transfer to your fermenter, take a small portion of the wort from the no chill, around a fifth to a third and put that in a saucepan and bring it to a boil. Meanwhile, put the rest of the wort from your no-chill into your sterilised FV ... you should boil that small portion of your wort to sterilise the saucepan, but you can boil it for as long as you need to add your late hops (from your recipe) into it, and then also use it for any post boil steeps. Put the saucepan into a sink of cold water if your recipe calls for cooler hop-stands (at 85C or 75C or whatever) ... then, if you were able to chill your wort in your no-chill then you may well find that adding the hot wort from the saucepan will even the temp out to pitching temp, or you may need to cool the wort in the saucepan in the sink a while longer before you can combine the two parts ... once you've got the two parts combined, in your FV and at pitching temp, you can proceed to pitching your yeast.

All a bit more involved, but it's probably harder to explain than do

Cheers, PhilB

 

[chuffer]

You can bag your hops and remove them once the boil is over to stop the contact time. I no chill but I am not a fan of overly bitter beer. If I am making a beer like stout that requires a bitter hop I remove the bag at the end then transfer to my bucket to chill over night.
When making hoppy pale ale or IPA I leave my hops until the end. Transfer the wort at 80 degrees to the bucket and add my hop stand hops and leave them in over night. This works for me, don't ask me how many ibu because I don't use calculator's. You will learn as you go along through trial and error and make adjustments to suit your own taste.
Hope this helps you don't stress and enjoy it

So maybe the way forward here is to not add any bittering hops at the boil and save them for flame out?....at this point are people keeping them in the kettle whilst cooling or chucking them in the cube instead?

 

[chuffer]

Hi @chuffer

As others have said, so long as you separate the wort and the hops at end of boil then there's no need to change your recipes for no-chilling ... but if you're looking to get the "fresher" hop flavours into your beers that lots of late hops bring then you might need to introduce those differently ... what you can do is ... you brew your hoppy beer as usual but when it comes to adding late hops (say anything to be involved for anything less than 15-10 mins) you leave those hops in the freezer to be used later ... then at end of boil you drop your beer into whatever vessel you plan to let it cool in, but I would recommend you get a a no-chill cube that you can expel the air from and seal up air tight (an HDPE jerry-can is ideal) ... just cause the method is called "no-chill" it doesn't mean you're not allowed to chill that vessel, so if you can get that somewhere cool then do (if you have a brewfridge and can get the cube chilled, after it has cooled to ambient, it will help with the next stage) ... when you're ready to transfer to your fermenter, take a small portion of the wort from the no chill, around a fifth to a third and put that in a saucepan and bring it to a boil. Meanwhile, put the rest of the wort from your no-chill into your sterilised FV ... you should boil that small portion of your wort to sterilise the saucepan, but you can boil it for as long as you need to add your late hops (from your recipe) into it, and then also use it for any post boil steeps. Put the saucepan into a sink of cold water if your recipe calls for cooler hop-stands (at 85C or 75C or whatever) ... then, if you were able to chill your wort in your no-chill then you may well find that adding the hot wort from the saucepan will even the temp out to pitching temp, or you may need to cool the wort in the saucepan in the sink a while longer before you can combine the two parts ... once you've got the two parts combined, in your FV and at pitching temp, you can proceed to pitching your yeast.

All a bit more involved, but it's probably harder to explain than do

Cheers, PhilB

Cor thank phil for the comprehensive reply....will have a good few read throughs to get my (slightly inebriated) head around

 

[foxy]

Apologies if this has been done before but i couldnt see ewt on the search. Im thinking of going down the no chill route but ive read elsewhere that this can make ipa's overly bitter due to increased contact time of hops at high temps. Is this your experience? If so, do you simply reduce the amount of bittering hops in your recipe to negate this?

All you do is:

1 - Put your recipe into your brew software as you normally do, write down the number of IBUs.

2 - Go to every hop addition entry and increase the time in the boil by 10-20 mins. The ibu figure will naturally go up.

3 - Now go to the entry for your main bittering addition, your start of boil hops. Reduce the amount of hops until the IBU figure matches the "old" figure from your recipe as it originally was.

4 - Brew the recipe as you originally would have. DONT actually change the time you boil the hops, leave them where they were! Just use the new amount for the bittering addition

Its just an estimate though - the no-chill process will increase the bitterness of your beer, but it will depend on what hops you use, when you add them, what % aa they are. This method of using software and notionally adjusting takes all that into account. The unsure part.... is where in that 10-20 minute spectrum you personally need to make your adjustment. It will vary from brewer to brewer and will change if you change your process. Just like everything else in brewing, so its not anything unusual. I personally would start by making the adjustment 15 minutes, then you just have to tweak it as you go till the results from no-chill start to match the ones you got from chilling
ahb

 

[chuffer]

Awesome guys, Thank You

 

[BassoonBrew]

I use BrewMate for my recipes, it has a "no chill" selection box, which makes some kind of notional adjustment. I have a steel fermenter so I just dump the hot wort straight into it and pitch my yeast next day, but like MyQul I mostly brew darker beers!

 

[Alside101]

When i no chill i just follow the
recipe im doing and just strain off the hops like i would any other way. Having a hop spider is useful or hop sock. I recirculate my wort through my hop spider for the last 15 mins of the boil too but that's probably not necessary

 

[Ghillie]

Apologies if this has been done before but i couldnt see ewt on the search. Im thinking of going down the no chill route but ive read elsewhere that this can make ipa's overly bitter due to increased contact time of hops at high temps. Is this your experience? If so, do you simply reduce the amount of bittering hops in your recipe to negate this?

There's no calculator that will be accurate I'm afraid.

No chill will certainly increase the IBU of the beer, but by how much depends on your hop additions.

Kind of pointless, as the process is now NOT "no chill", but if you cooled your wort to <80C then you wouldn't be extracting much (if any) further IBUs from the boil hops.

It's all guesswork really.

 

[MyQul]

I forgot to mention. As others have said, I pass my wort through a seive to strain out the hops, when I no chill

 

[MyQul]

I use BrewMate for my recipes, it has a "no chill" selection box, which makes some kind of notional adjustment. I have a steel fermenter so I just dump the hot wort straight into it and pitch my yeast next day, but like MyQul I mostly brew darker beers!

I dont think I made myself clear. I brew exclusively low IBU (compared to IPA's) English styles. So both dark and pales. I mostly brew bitter.

 

[bobukbrewer]

at end of boil I strain out the hops, and a 22 litre stainless steel pan with lid is placed in the sink and cooled with slow running tap. If you agitate the wort every 4 minutes I get to 22 deg C in about 15 minutes....

 

[An Ankoù]

You could do a partial cool- down to about 75C or thereabouts and them leave it to cool overnight. I don't think there'll be much more conversion to bitterness though, especially after a boil. It's not as if you're adding extra hops.