Hello! This is Dan Franklin owner of HopTech Homebrewing Supplies in Dublin, California.

We’ve just finished cooking our beer and now we’re going to go on to our next step which is the cooling process and we’re going to take our beer once we’ve cooled it and we’re going to move it into our settling bucket. This is an area you want to be careful because you’re going to be dealing with hot wort. So there’s two ways to cool it, either an ice bath or a wort chiller.

First time brewers, beginner brewers, most of you would be using the ice bath method where we’re going to take our sink, fill it full of some water, put the stopper in it so it doesn’t recap. Put the beer in it and add ice around it. This takes approximately an hour to two hours. We’re going to use a sample pot here. When your wort—so actually now you have beer. When your beer—when you can put your hands on it, that’s all you need for coolness. You’re not looking to get it cold. You just need to get it to a room temperature so you could transfer it over. So let’s get started.

One thing I do want to mention that’s extremely important, this is a great time, a great opportunity to sanitize your buckets. Sanitation is one of the most key, the most important elements of home brewing. They say sanitation, sanitation, sanitation. You’re going to sanitize your holding tanks, your fermenters, your bottle. One of the ways of sanitizing the way that I recommend is using iodophor. Iodophor is an odorless, tasteless sanitizer. You don’t have to rinse it out as well.

You’re going to put—in this case, I’ve put some water in here, let me show you. Add a little more water and then you’re going to pour some sanitation, sanitizer. A couple of cap fulls, a couple of nice cap fulls. It’s inexpensive, you don’t need a lot but once again, you want to make sure you have enough in there to do the job. Take your brewing spoon it’s perfect way to stir this in. Stir this in by the way, your caps, your spoon, everything used to be sanitized.

Now my particular bucket has a spicket on. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to fill this up, over let it overflow full of sanitizer in my sink. I’m going to open up the spicket as well. And we will drain that out and I will do this to both buckets. Here is a sample spicket. I’m just going to open it up, let the sanitizer run through the spicket as well. So everything is going to be sanitized. And it takes an hour and a half to two hours to cool your beers. This is a great time to get your first bucket ready to go. So let’s go ahead and we’re going to move the beer over, cool it down.

For time purposes, I’m going to use a wort chiller. However, we’re going to show you a demonstration on how to do it in a sink. Also, you need to sanitize your lid. So I take my lid and I turn it around, and I get it nice and sanitized—don’t over everything okay. I’m going to set it on the saddle lid face down so it’s not going to be exposed to air. And what I was referring to, you’re going to take your bucket, open it up, we’re just going to let it run on out. This is going to sanitize your spicket as well and the spicket guards in there, and the spicket we’re going to let it run down. I’m going to put this lid back on here. Keep anything from getting in there. And once this is done, it’ll be ready to put your cool down wort at this point and I keep saying the word wort, it is now—you officially have a beer, the makings of beer it’s in the wort stage, it will ferment out, and it will become beer.

Let’s just let this run and we’re going to our cooling of our beer.