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Hi, I'm Mark Emiley on behalf of Expert Village. In this segment, we are going to chill our
wort and get it ready to put our yeast into. To do this, we're first going to take our
wort and put it into our sink. Next, we're going to take our drain plug and put it in
there and start flowing cold water. In the chilling process, we're trying to drop the
temperature of the wort as fast as we can to encourage something called "cold break"
which will precipitate proteins and also get the wort to a temperature at which we can
mix in our yeast as quickly as we can so the yeast has the best chance of establishing
itself since it's the dominant microbe in the wort. While I'm doing this, I'm stirring
the water around the pot in order to break up the boundary layer that's forming of hot
water. Also, you can kind of give the pot a little stir and that breaks up the boundary
layer on the inside so this will encourage a cooler slowing...or a faster cooling. While
you are waiting for your wort to chill, you may want to get a head start on the next step
which is yeast preparation. Since we put in steeping hops, we're going to need to take
those out before we mix them with our water. So we're going to go take our tongs and go
put them in our sanitization solution so they will be nice and clean before we need to use
them. While we are waiting for it to cool, we are going to start filling our bucket up
with some nice cold water. Now, with these buckets, this typically represents the halfway
mark or (I'm sorry) the five gallon mark. So, we're going to start filling it to roughly
two and a half gallons and then we're going to top off with the wort and then whatever
else we need to get just above five and a half gallons. So grab your water and start
pouring and filling it up. You're going to want to fill your airlock half up with sanitizing
solution or water. This is going to help prevent any microbes or air from getting in and also
allow the carbon dioxide to escape. Now, with our freshly sanitized tongs, we can go in
and take out our hop sack. Let it drip for a minute or so. You really don't want to try
to introduce any kind of bacteria at this point because the wort is very vulnerable.
And after a minute or so of letting it drain, I'm just going to throw that in the garbage.
The hot kettle will heat up your water pretty quickly, so once its gotten to a pretty warm
temperature, you're going to want to drain it. And then we are going to fill it up and
get some ice next time. Now that we've filled the sink up again with a nice cold batch of
water, we're going to make it even colder by adding a whole bunch of ice from our refrigerator.
Then we are going to continue to swirl the water around it so that it gets nice and cold
and breaks up the hot boundary layer. After a half-hour or so, you should be able to take
out your pot, hold your hand here, and if it doesn't feel hot at all, you are in good
shape. If it still feels pretty hot, you're probably going to want to let it sit in some
cold water for a little while longer.