Getting back into brewing seems to be plagued with all sorts of obstacles. This time I ran out of propane before getting the wort to a boil. And yes, it was at night again and I was far from being in the mood for a midnight propane run.
But this time I got the wort up to 98 C, which is hot enough to pasteurize it and I decided to go a different route – the no chill approach. While the wort was still hot I covered it with aluminum foil:
The wort sat this way over night on the deck and I moved it into the house in the morning. After 24 hrs the temperature dropped to 32C. During that time the pH fell from 5.27 to 5.14. I’m not sure if this is sign of an infection, but it smelled just fine. So I brought it to a boil. A lot of coagulation already happened in the hot wort and an oddly brown layer of trub developed during heating:
Other than that the boil seems to be going as normal.
pH is a function of temperature.
Yes it is. But I always test and report the pH of a room temperature sample. I.e. I tested a cooled sample of the wort when I collected it and I tested the wort after it had been sitting for a day and after I cooled a sample to around 25 C.
Sucks… that’s happened to me a couple of times, so now I have two propane tanks just to be sure…
You’re mnakig me drool over the 10 gallon kettle. Did you get a burner as well, or are you going to rock the 10 gallon on the stove? Since (so far) I’m just doing stove-top, I went cheap and easy and grabbed a 5 gallon stockpot as my brew kettle. So far it has worked pretty well, and I can do 4 gallons of water without boiling over.Still, I’m really envious of your wort chiller as well. Apparently bending the copper pipe is a real pain, so my idea of mnakig my own is out the window. They aren’t all that expensive, really, so I should just suck it up. As it is, I’m chilling the wort in a sink of icewater and dropping from 200 to 75 in about 20 minutes. Thank goodness for Denver’s altitude, as it gives me about 20 degrees for free!