People who follow this blog will know that during the deep freeze in December/January I was without water for a week as well as having water turned off at certain times before and after the new year. This prevented me from brewing any beer. The other week I brewed my smoked Mild and I noticed that our water pressure was down. I still had fresh water coming in from the mains but it was unable to make it to the water tank in the attic so bathrooms were offline. Thankfully it was all back by the evening but while I was brewing, to be on the safe side I decided to keep the water that was used during the cooling phase.I better explain this for those who are not brewers themselves. When you are finished boiling the wort, you need to cool it down to room temperature as quickly as possible before you pitch the yeast. If you left it to cool naturally it would take hours and chances are you would get an infection before the yeast can take hold.
To cool it quickly most brewers will use a simple wort chiller. This is basically a copper or aluminium pipe that has been made in to a coil. One end is hooked up to a water supply and the other end expels the water. It works off a heat transfer principal. The water that comes out of the wort chiller starts off hot and as the wort chills it comes out cold.
Usually this water goes down the sink and is wasted, except what I usually did in the past was use the hot water from the beginning to wash dishes etc most of which are as a result of the brewing process in the first place.
Since this time I was worried about not having any water in my tank I decided to save all this water. I could not believe how much water was wasted. I filled up my two old fermening buckets which are 30 litres. I filled them up to about 25L and I also filled two Corny kegs which are 19 litres. The hot water I used to make my star san solution and the other three containers I kept to flush the toilets with. Even though the water came back that evening I have used the water from the buckets to flush the toilets so none of the water used during the brewing process went to waste.
I think I will continue this practice.
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