I just got a 15 galloon boil kettle 
but now I can’t cool in my sink or laundry tub.
I do not have a wort chiller to plate chiller so I wanted to propose the idea of transferring the hot wart from boil kettle to fermentation pail and put that in the ice bath?
Anyone ever done this? will it melt? other ideas.
I am brewing in 4 hours.
Help.
Live2Drink
Happy New Year!
Buy a bunch of Ice from the store and put it into large freezer bags. Sanitize the outside of the bags with Star-San or iodophor. Drop the bags inside the boil kettle. Make sure the bags stay sealed- they may want to expand.
John Palmer in his book How to Brew mentions freezing 2-liter bottles then dropping them into the kettle. I’ve done this and it works ok. You need to make sure you seal the lids tight and sanitize them well. I’ve added a small amount of Star-San to the water inside so if it leaks out it is somewhat sanitized.
I’ve also been very careful by putting in a large pot inside the other one, weighing it down with lots of ice too.
Don’t forget you can add lots of salt to the ice to further drop the temperature.
Not sure if anyone has stated it directly above, but I would be very hesitant to cool in a plastic pail, because 1) I’m not confident that it wouldn’t melt or leech something undesirable into your wort if it’s near boiling and 2) plastic is a bad conductor of heat and it probably not cool efficiently at all.
If you have a bathtub and a ton of ice, you could do that.
This is a little off the wall, but maybe filling a large garbage bag with ice and water (being careful not to allow the hot pot to touch the plastic bag) would do the job? Maybe if you have a big enough cardboard box (to help retain the shape) you could double-line it with trash bags? Definitely don’t want to do this inside as a leak could cause water damage.
Other ideas–maybe a large trash-can? You’d want to fill the unnecessary volume with whatever filler you could find…
Another thought, while it may be pretty unsatisfying, would be to use your old smaller pot this time around and cool as usual until you work out a good solution with the new pot…
Good luck!!
+1. Or use your shiny new toy but stick to a partial boil and top off with (pre-boiled, sanitary) ice.
Why not just set it outdoors for a few hours? Covered of course.
I had the same issue with my kettle that i just got. I remedied it by buying on of those large plastic storage bins and filled it with ice and water. It worked great.
Our local BOP uses some large copper kettles that have very small openings at the top, so we had to use an immersion chiller in our buckets all the time. We never had any off flavors from the plastic and the boiling wort in left very little concern for potential contaminates that may have been hiding in any tiny scratches.
I would be more concerned about this. It’s frustratingly slow to cool just a 2L starter in a glass Erlenmeyer flask, even when swirling in an ice bath, let alone 10+ gallons. I’ve even debated making a very narrow immersion chiller just for my starters.
These HDPE buckets from USPlastics sure look to be the same ones sold as fermentors.
http://www.usplastic.com/catalog/item.a ... &catid=752And from HBT:
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f11/how-hot ... ndex2.html http://www.polymerplastics.com/corrosion_polyeth.shtmlShould be OK.
-kenc
