[a10t2]

Well, nearly freezing it wouldn't help much. You want to make those 334 J/g work for you.

[anje]

Well, nearly freezing it wouldn't help much. You want to make those 334 J/g work for you.

I hear you, but getting said water out of the milk jugs once frozen is more difficult.

[euge]

If you have chilled the wort and it just needs to drop another few degrees to pitching temp I'd say yeah you can do it with reservations. What you can do is freeze PET bottles (plastic soda bottles), sanitize them and drop into the fermenter to cool the wort down further. I've adopted this as an alternative to the ice-water recirc and have eliminated a pump, two hoses and a bucket from my brewery, plus the need for ice.

I've let wort sit in the kettle to see how long it would take to cool down to ambient temps from boiling. It took days, and I doubt a fermenter treated the same way would cool very well even in a controlled environment. Plus, I have reservations from exposing plastic- yes even HDPE, to boiling or high-temp liquids which might cause chemicals to leach into your acidic beer. Picking up a fermenter with very hot or near boiling temps liquid inside will assuredly crack the bottom interior and leave places for the bugs to hide. Ruined two good fermenters doing that.

So my advice is to build an immersion chiller and then resort to frozen PET bottles when you hit your water temp. Let it sit, covered with the bottles floating inside. I've found that 4 one-liters are better than 2 two-liters. Give this a stir every 10 minutes. Tip- if you can, leave a long handled spoon in there so you don;t have to continually re-sanitize it.

[a10t2]

I hear you, but getting said water out of the milk jugs once frozen is more difficult.

I use gallon zip-top bags and just cut them open. They have the added benefit of taking up less freezer space.

I've also frozen ice directly in the fermenter and dumped the hot wort in on top of it.

[ckpash88]

I have a 30 plate, plate chiller from dudadiesel. I was seeing if being lazy would be alright this one time but it sounds like it isn't worth it. I was trying to cut corners so I could brew Saturday but I can't brew now bc I have house work.

I guess I will build a brew stand instead of brewing so it's just a mater of attaching hoses not setting things up every time.


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[seajellie]

Agree with Euge - I would not put hot wort into our normal plastic bucket fermenters for concern of leaching. I've read that the Aussies who do this regularly have plastic cube fermenters specially rated for high heat, but I'm too paranoid to even go that route. If faced with no-chill, either the kettle or a keg would be better options.

I did no-chill to keg a couple months ago as a test, with some weak wort. Pretty sure I detected some minor DMS from it, but I wouldn't swear to it. Power of imagination, and all that.

[denny]

I'm not a plastics chemist, but I don"t think HDPE will leach, even under heat. 

[seajellie]

I'm not a plastics engineer either, but fwiw, from wikipedia:

(HDPE)...can withstand somewhat higher temperatures (120 °C/ 248 °F for short periods, 110 °C /230 °F continuously).

So I guess you could go with that where you like. It's a moot point probably since I doubt many folks here do much no-chill, but that would be too close to boiling for me to risk doing it more than once, considering how much beer I drink.

That said - I use hot water to help sanitize my plastic fermenters pretty much every time I use them. I generally let it cool down to 190 before dumping it in to target 180, and my untested theory is that although the repeated heat may damage (eventually) the plastic, at least the cool wort should cause less leaching than boiling water. And of course, they get replaced too.

[tomsawyer]

If you don't actually melt HDPE, I don't think its likely degraded by being hot.  And I don't think they use BHP or other plasticizers so theres not going to be a leaching problem regardless.  Melting HDPE isn't going to de-polymerize it either, just cause it to lose its shape.

[seajellie]

Sorry for the thread drift OP, it's my fault, but sounds like you have a solution anyway ;-)

To each his own of course; I'm just suggesting that a brewer presumably has a large SS kettle, so choosing to repeatedly pour boiling hot wort into a plastic fermenter does not seem to be the best choice considering the available options. Of course you'll not find any engineering studies that subject our fermenters to what we're likely to do to them in a repeated cycle of no-chill, clean, sterilize, repeat, but does not the following passage give you pause? Nothing about leaching of course, but degradation is not something I would want either.

".. Of particular interest are reports of premature polyethylene pipe failure in the presence of common
chlorinated water disinfectants such as chlorine (hypo-chlorite), chlorine dioxide and
chloramines. Studies in France by major water utilities (i.e. Suez Environnement and Veolia
Environnement) have linked factors such as type of disinfectant, average service temperature,
disinfectant concentration and pressure to HDPE pipe oxidation and failure. With a growing
number of European studies documenting premature aging of HDPE of all types,..."