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Hehe, bad idea - you couldn't have a beer on brewday since you'd have to stay sober to handle this with appropriate care! But seriously, I'm wondering that if you have to ask the question about suitability then you are probably not familiar with handling liquid nitrogen. As well as getting suitable training, you would need equipment that is designed to ...

I always thought of this as being a HUGE no no. But I guess not...below is from John Palmer. People often wonder about adding ice directly to the cooling wort. This idea works well if you remember a couple key points. Never use commercial ice. It can harbor dormant bacteria that could spoil your beer. Always boil the water before freezing it in ...

I do something similar, I keep my fermentor in a big rubbermaid bucket filled with cold water. If I need to make it even colder I drop in water bottles that are filled with ice, as they melt, I swap them out for others and put them back in the freezer. I don't have temp controlled fermentation (yet) and this method seems to help keep the ferm temp somewhat ...

You could buy or build a jockey box. It's just a coil of stainless steel or copper immersed in ice with a spigot at one end a quick release at the other, all inside an insulated container. It doesn't cool the keg down, but rather cools the beer as you're serving it.

This is how I do all of my brews. I usually boil about 11/12L for a 20/21L batch, put a filter over the primary bucket, pour the wort in from a bit of a height to help aerate, add ice until I get the right temperature then top up with water. The "right temperature" might be a couple of degrees above / below target, depending on whether the top up water is ...

Not really, unfortunately. Heating is a much easier mechanical process than cooling is, and as a result cooling applications tend to be more involved and more expensive. You have two options: 1) You could get a glycol chiller of some sort. A glycol chiller is usually a standard refrigerator compressor used to circulate liquid. Works well, but it's ...

The cooling effectiveness of the coil is a function of several things: Contact surface area Contact time The difference in temperature between the warm beer and cool water. The MoreBeer Draft Box has 50 feet of 3/8" tubing, providing about 700 square inches of contact surface versus your proposed 69 square inches. So I would say you need to run the beer ...

Dig a hole in your back yard! Seriously a small bunker type hole just big enough to fit your brew is fairly cheap to build. Build a well insulated roof for it, make sure it's sealed to keep out pests. Underground temperatures are much cooler than above ground in warm areas, and much warmer than above ground in cooler areas. The temperature stays fairly ...

You will want something to strain your hop material before going into the pump and chiller … either a hop spider or a hopback-like device. You could conceivably use gravity to run the wort from the kettle through the chiller, but … this is slow (not necessarily a problem, as you'll want a relatively slow wort flow) and (somewhat) assumes you will chill in a ...

How worried should I be about contamination that may have occurred during two days of air cooling this wort? Honestly, I'd be very worried. However, not much can be done now anyway, so don't sweat it, but don't do this again for future reference. As that wort cooled, it contracted in volume slightly, which created a very slight vacuum that might ...

The only problem I can think of might be contamination or (depending on the age of your ice...) picking up off flavors from the ice. Remember that it will also dilute your wort by some (probably calculable) amount. If you're doing a concentrated boil anyway, then it would be easy enough to dump the hot wort onto your extra 2-3 gallons of ice. I ...