It’s probably been discussed before but I cant find it. I am considering sanitizing a plastic container and then pouring sanitized water into it and then freezing it. This way I can do a boil and when ready to cool it down I will put the block of ice right in to the kettle. Anyone try this? Any opinions on doing it? I usually end up adding a gallon of water to my brews after transferring to the fermenter anyway so why not do it with ice to speed the cooling?
the only problem I see is being able to dial in a specific gravity based on how much water to add. I’m not sure if as part of your process you are adding water to dial in a specific SG or not.
Just curious are you doing all grain brew or extract with partial or full boil?
I will be doing this for this first time as an extract brew. I am planning to start out with 5 gallons of water in the kettle so I can plan for a 1 gallon boil off. Then I will add the gallon of ice to account for that and then add any additional water to hit the exact gravity point.
Its best if you can do a full boil and boil down to your target volume. I believe you have better control of your recipe, hop utililization and color. It can be done though, many extract brewers do it. You can use bottled or distilled water.
What if you only boil off 1/2 - 3/4 gallons?
Ice pic
I used to do this, when I did extract. I filled several small plastic containers, the kind for leftovers or lunches… Each brick was roughly a pound by weight or a pint by volume, so it wasn’t too hard dialing in the volume. I only measured the first, and eyeballed the rest.
I also didn’t get especially concerned about sanitizing the water though. Maybe I should have been? But my logic was, a frozen brick I made couldn’t be less safe than the straight tap water. Right? The dozen or so extract batches I did had no ill effects, so maybe luck, but I still think it’s OK.
tap water is fine unless you are treating your water which you will need to do for your frozen water also. The container should be washed though. Like I mentioned above if you are treating your brew water use bottled. If your fridge is set low enough just keep some jugs in the fridge and poor in what you need. 32 deg or 35 deg into 5 gallons is not going to make a heck of a difference in chilling time. Run ice water through an ic if you want fast chilling
If you are not doing a full volume boil, as many extract brewers do, I don’t see any problem with this method. Just to be safe I would cover the containers. Fridges and freezers aren’t always the most sanitary places. If you are using a bucket with the volume in increments on it you should be able to see how the volume is while adding your ice blocks to determine how close the top up volume is getting.
We are traveling right now in our RV so bringing the 20 gallon brewery is out. I did bring bare minimum extract batch equipment and your ice idea is something I considered to do some mobile brewing. Next hurdle is convincing the Mrs. I need all that space in the freezer for blocks of ice.
