Changes

From BrewWiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Brewing Your First Beer

1 byte added, 06:11, 12 September 2006
/* Cool and Ferment */
==Cool and Ferment==
Once your boil has finished, you want to cool the hot wort to room temperature as quickly as possible to reduce the chance of infection. Many beginning brewers immerse their pot in a cold ice bath. Adding very cold water to the wort to bring it up to your target batch size (usually 5 gallons) will also help. More advanced brewers will use a chiller such as an immersion coil that runs cold water through a coil of copper tubing to quickly cool the beer. If needed , add water to the wort when you transfer it to your fermenter to achieve the target volume of 5 gallons.
The wort at this stage is very vulnerable to infection so you need to make sure that your fermenter, airlock, siphon tubes and anything else that touches the wort or yeast are thouroughly sterilized. I use a solution of 5 gallons of water and small amount of household bleach to sterilize my equipment. However if you use bleach you must carefully rinse everything with hot water or you risk leaving your beer with a chlorine taste.
25
edits