First Brew Day - Aroma Hops In - Pt 4

Continuing on from Part 3, Boiling The Wort & Bittering Hops. (Excuse the tenses, some of this was posted at the time it was happening, the rest, like this bit, has been edited in later.)

The Aroma Hops ready to be added to the boiled wort and bittering hops.

The aroma hops have been added, just giving them 20 minutes soak before stirring and waiting another 20 minutes (according to the instructions in the book for this recipe see part one, mashing the grist .)

20 minutes from adding the aroma hops, there appears to be what looks like a very slight oily looking film. I'm thinking it might be the essential oils coming from the hops. It appears to be coming from the floating hop debris... just waiting on some response in my Brew Day thread on Jim's Beer Kit forum as to if this is normal or not... [edit - some feedback suggested it was as I thought, essential oils from the hops.]

Coming up to 30 minutes from adding aroma hops and the wort is clearing noticeably. I could only see 1 ring of the chiller coil a few minutes ago, now there are 3!

A few mins left before immersion cooling starts. The wort temperature has already dropped to 66C so it looks like I won't be needing to run the chiller for as long, which is nice.

Immersion, wort chiller fired up after the aroma hops had had 40 minutes. Worked a treat!!!! The initial outflow was warm but not hot and a bit of tweaking of the cold water flow rate soon got a good through flow of cooling water through the copper coils of the wort chiller.

The wort chiller in action. waste water is running off into my empty mash tun.

Rather than waste the out flowing water from the wort chiller, I ran it to my now empty mash tun but there was little need to worry about waste water. The hot wort was cooled to 32C before the tun was even filled. (poured it into the water butt outside for the garden).

Ooops, I've got a bit ahead of myself now so there's a bit more about the wort chilling in the next post, chilling the wort and pitching the yeast.