As I posted over the summer (Making a Pre-Chiller), I was struggling to quickly cool my beer since the warmer weather meant warmer tap water flowing through my wort chiller.  So I made a pre-chiller.  But as it turns out, this handy pre-chiller also helps you cool your beer faster in the wintertime, too.  Brewing in 32 degree weather, it felt silly to fill the pre-chiller cooler with ice water.  But by removing the pre-chiller from the cooler and leaving it in the air, it became a way to chill the house water down by simply letting it sit in the air and the copper tubing to try to pull the house water down closer to 32 degrees.  So the pre-chiller helps speed the cool-down period both when brewing in the heat of the summer, and in the cold of the winter.

I like brewing outside in the winter, just like any other time of year.  Yes, I have to wear extra layers, and maybe I spend a bit more time inside keeping an eye on my brew through a window in my house, but I don’t let the weather stop my brewing.  Last winter I was making a batch and all was going well until I was ready to cool the wort.

I noticed something was up when I was grabbing the hose and it was noticeably very stiff and I had a hard time stretching it over to where my brew pot was sitting to hook up the wort chiller.  I turned on the water and got nothing.  There was water frozen solid in the hose.  I tried the other hose and found the same thing.  I then decided I would bring the hose inside and run hot water on it until I thawed out the icebergs.  That then took 30 minutes and was not fun.

So this winter, I bought a collapsable “pocket hose”.  I keep it inside with my homebrew kit and when it’s time for wort chiller action, I bring it out, hook it up to the faucet and am ready to chill.  It worked well, and was much better than monkeying around with a frozen garden hose at a time when I’m trying to chill my wort fast.

I sanitize my bottles in the oven.  It’s fairly easy, and I hate seeing residual “no rinse” sanitizer lingering in my bottles that I’m about to put my precious beer into.  So I cover the tops with a bit of aluminum foil, stick them in the oven, and set the oven to do a timed cook at 320 degrees for 2 hours and 15 minutes.  I do that the night before and they are ready to go the next day.  Or even sit around a few days because I’ve got the convenient aluminum foil “lids” on them.

My empties I keep in the basement in an open-top box, slowly accumulating as I work my way toward the next bottling day.  Whenever I empty a bottle, I always give it a good thorough 3x rinse with hot water and some sloshing around to ensure I get any residue out of the bottom.  So for the most part the bottles are clean, just not sanitized.

When it comes to my oven sanitizing process, since the bottles I’ve got coming in are already clean per my rinse procedure after I empty one, I don’t wash them or do anything specific with them.  In one instance I had a box of new bottles from the homebrew shop, so I knew they would be clean.  They had a bit of dust on them, so I figured I’d rinse them out just to wash out any accumulated dust.  I was surprised to find a nasty looking creepy crawly had taken up residence in one of my empty bottles in the basement.  Had I not done the “one last rinse” just before my sanitizing, that little guy would’ve been in the bottle as I unknowingly capped him with aluminum foil and stuck him in the oven for a couple of hours.  That would have been a “The last time I ever had homebrew story…” for someone had one of those come floating out as I was serving my family.

So if you store your empties open topped, even if they’re clean, be sure to give a quick rinse just in case something has decided to take up residence there!

I always brew outside, as I think most people do.  Or at least people brewing all-grain, since you need a serious heat source to boil that much water and indoor stovetops don’t cut it.  But that’s OK, because brewing outside is great, as you get to enjoy the out of doors.  Different weather seasons bring different brewing challenges, and the heat of the summer is no different.

The main challenge I encountered was getting my wort to cool down.  Oh the first 100 degrees was not an issue, but trying to get down to 65F or so when it’s 85F out was a challenge.  I’d be running the hose through the wort chiller and as I kept checking the temperature, I was disappointed at how slowly it was dropping the final degrees I needed.  It made me even contemplate backtracking to the days before my wort chiller and filling a sink up with ice water to put the pot into.

Then I read about making a pre-chiller for your wort chiller.  Basically you hook another chiller up and connect it to your wort chiller.  You plumb it into a cooler, which you then fill with ice water.  Then your garden hose water goes through the pre-chiller, which drops its temperature a few degrees before heading into your wort chiller.

I made mine pretty simply.  I had a small drink cooler, bought a small coil of soft copper tubing, length of hose and a couple screw clamps.  I wound the copper tubing around a bottle and made sure the inlet was hooked up to the end that would coil around and loop through the ice water before connecting to the outlet.  Small drilling in the lid and I was all set to go.

I had frequently wondered about my fermenting yeast starter I had gurgling away in a clear growler.  I thought, “A starter is nothing more than a jug of fermenting beer.  Since I know I don’t want to buy beer from a clear bottle because of the ability for light wavelengths to get in there and wreak havoc with the beer, I should also be concerned about my starter.”  I researched it a bit on the internet in various forums but found either inconclusive statements, or no one that really thought/cared about it.

So as I made them and let them sit on a high shelf to be in the warm part of the room, I was always a bit worried about how bright the room was.  Finally, I had a genius idea- “Why grab the clear growler for my starter when I have a perfectly good and light-impenetrable brown glass growler sitting right next to it?”  With this eureka moment I decided this was so obvious I didn’t know why I didn’t think of it before.  So I made a yeast starter in my brown jug.

Moments afterwards, I realized the problem.  The dark brown glass was so good at keeping light out that I also couldn’t really see in.  So as I pitched the yeast and did my frequent vigorous shakes to aerate, I couldn’t see what was going on in the jug.  I couldn’t tell if I had any kind of krausen forming, or if I was totally devoid of life.  I wouldn’t know if I had a yeast factory going until the day I dumped it in my beer, so I was suddenly feeling not so bright.

Then, since I’m paranoid of extract flavors sneaking into my beer, I always chill my yeast starter in the fridge for a few days to get the yeast to collect at the bottom and then decant off the extract beer water.  This is another time when you want to see what’s inside in your growler.  The last thing you want to do after nurturing your little crop of yeast over the last few days is to pour some of it down the drain on brew day.

So don’t do it.  Do your yeast starter in a clear or see-through container.  If you’re worried about the light getting to it (which I never really could find if this was something to be worried about or not), but it in a box or wrap it with a towel or something.