Lol!
. I too, contrarian, am looking forward to daveshep's report on his brew day.
Dave, I hope you don't mind a few of us idiots hijacking your thread while we are waiting
. (You can get us back on-topic at any time, or when you do brew, start a new topic if that is easier
).
Hoses and Hot Water
As for the hose, I think any of us can taste water from a hose and know whether it is good or bad. We also know that the hotter the hose, the more likely it is to taste like crap. Most hoses I think would be rubber or vinyl and most forms of these mediums are not food-graded to high temps at all. Even at 60C you will get off-flavours. In a garden hose, in the sun, you'll be getting up to 70C I would think (that's a bit above scalding). I think on most hoses, running the water through as some of you have suggested will be fine. I think though on some old hoses, the water never tastes good no matter what you do???
Chilling and Temperature Differentials
[Am not going to convert from C to F. Suffice to know that 100C is boiling point and 0 C is freezing.]
Brew4me, you mentioned, "So using the tap water first lets you get the temp down (albeit slower) to ~27 C and then you can use the ice to finish the job." Where you say, "albeit slower", the time difference will actually be unnoticeable in many scenarios. I'm not too sure how to explain this well so I'll just give some scenarios and practical suggestions instead...
If your wort is at 100C, you can not even use a chiller and it will very rapidly cool to 85C on a normal home brew batch size of say 6.0 gallons/22.7 L VFO (Volume at Flame-Out). This is because the temperature differential between the wort (100C) and the ambient air (let's say 25C) is large).
Let's say that you are using an immersion chiller and your mains water is 25 C, the first thing you will notice is to get the wort to say 50C, it makes very little difference as to how quickly you will get there whether you run your chiller at a trickle versus running it quickly. Running the tap water through at a bit more than a good trickle while jiggling your immersion chiller will give you far quicker cooling than turning your hose on full-blast and not jiggling the chiller. This is more a surface area thing than a differential thing however, if you were even able to make enough iced water to run through your chiller, no matter what method you used, the colder water would make very little difference in the time it took to reach 50C.
Once we get down to about 35C, things will begin to slow down because the temperature differential between 25C and 35C is much smaller. It's a bit like
Brownian motion where we have two different solutions (gas or liquid) divided by a permeable membrane. Let's say on the left hand side we have a really salty solution and on the right hand side we have just plain water. Very quickly, the water on the right will become salty but the rate as to which it becomes salty continually declines and it could take ages for the right hand side to become as salty as the left.
Regardless of the above, with a bit of jiggling, you should be able to get your wort down to about 28C before things get really slow. The problem is you want to get to around 20 C for a lot of ales and less than 10 C for some lagers.
Getting to Pitching Temperature
This is the bit no one likes to talk about in books, magazines, forums etc, etc, as this is where the hard chilling or decisions come into play. If your tap/faucet temperature is 25C, then nothing you do will get your wort below that 25C let alone quickly.
Didn't expect to write so much (as usual) and am out of time now. I'll come back to this 'Getting to Pitching Temperature' problem tomorrow or the next day and will try and do some illustrations to make it easier.
Gotta go!
PP
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