I brewed up another batch of Oatmeal Stout with a few minor tweaks (I’ll post the recipe separately). Got up at 5AM on Sunday morning to brew so I could hopefully finish before my wife went to work at 11.

Everything went fine with the batch except my chilling process.  I guess I didn’t clear my water supply hose well enough after the last session (Holiday Ale), because it had some frozen blockages in it.  So I had 7.5 gallons of 212F wort in my kettle on the burner and no way to hook up the immersion chiller (IC).

The only option I had was to transfer the beer directly into a sanitized bucket fermentor, add the IC to the bucket of wort, then carry the 5.5 gallons to the side of the house where I could get the IC to reach the faucet.  I chilled as usual without issue.

My concern is adding 212F wort to a plastic bucket may force some plastic like flavors to become evident in the beer.  I know from my extract days I used to put hot wort in a the bucket with out problem.  But in that case, I just added cold top off water right away.  Using a chiller, the wort cools down slower than that.

We’ll just have to wait and see.  Check back on this in a few weeks when I get the beer into a keg.