I’m just getting back in to brewing and I have hot FL hose water for cooling my beer. I am kinda forced to do this so I hope it’s true! What is considered “pitching warm”?[/quote]
What are you doing for temp control? If your using a fridge/freezer you could always put the wort in there to stabilize and pitch the next day. Too warm is subjective. It depends greatly on the yeast but for me too warm is 68°.
I cool with an immersion chiller. And I ferment in a chest freezer with temp control.
My last brew I could not chill below 81 so I x-ferred to the fermenter > aerated > pitched.
Put the fermenter in my brew kettle and surrounded it with ice while I cleaned out my chest freezer. By the time I was ready to put the fermentor in my temp controlled freezer I was down to 74.
By the next morning it was fermenting actively at 64 degrees.
I have pitched next day but I don’t like to.
I’ve also just thrown the pot in the chest cooler and transferred and pitched the next day (kinda like no chill). If I like how this last one came out I’ll keep pitching warm.
I’m just getting back in to brewing and I have hot FL hose water for cooling my beer. I am kinda forced to do this so I hope it’s true! What is considered “pitching warm”?[/quote]
Consider upgrading the length of hose you use coming from your water source and immerse it in an ice bath. The water is pre-chilled before it goes into your heat exchanger, wort chiller, plate chiller, etc. I often do this in combination with immersing the kettle into a similar ice bath. Coupled with the immersion wort chiller, I get a nice consistent cold break and a chill from 190 to 70 in about 10-15 minutes.
A lot of people wouldn’t recommend it, but I gently stir the wort as well…I just make sure I don’t splash so as not to introduce hot-side aeration…just evenly distributing the wort around the edges of the kettle to expose it to the chiller and the ice bath. Just be sure to give yourself a few minutes to let the trub and hop matter settle back to the bottom before you transfer.
If you don’t want to wait to pitch then consider getting a prechiller or a pump. To get my lagers to pitching temps (46°) I use my CFC to go as low as possible while whirlpooling then use a utility pump in a slush bucket to pump through the CFC.
I used to have a prechiller. But my bud moved away and took it with him. That was helpful. I did make a little ice bath for the hose going into the chiller but it’s just not as good as a copper prechiller coil. Moving the immersion chiller around is also a big help.
Stirring while chilling is important when using an IC. Like I said, for $40.00 you can get a utility pump, put it in a bucket, pour ice over it, add some water, and pump that through your IC.
Tell me more about this… and I’m not talking about taking advice from Chumley. 
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Yeah, I’ve over-pitched with terrible results.
Here’s how it happened.
At the time, more yeast was considered gooder. Chumley was going a bit beyond gooder. I can’t remember what the arguments for sticking with lower pitch rates were, to be honest, but there was a big fight about it. The reinheitsgebot was surely invoked, back when anyone gave a rat’s ass about the reinheitsgebot. The reinheitsgebot was invoked a lot back then… :lol:
I started pitching bigger and bigger with starters. Pretty quick, I realized that I didn’t need to make starters. I could make a 1.039 beer, then make a really big beer on that cake. Which got me thinking…why not do a medium beer along the way?
And that’s where I ran into trouble. Because I could.
If I could make a small, medium, and large beer, why not test the boundary conditions?
And I did. As I pushed my small, medium, and large pitch rates together, I started thinking in terms of a “rule of ten.” That is, ten gravity points between steps and you’re hunky-dorey. Not so. Not unless you like lighter fluid.
Some twenty years later, I think a “rule of twenty” is about right. I’ll do 15, if I know the yeast.
