I usually just throw on a pair of work gloves, pick up the whole 4-5 gallons of water and dump it into the tun.
I, however, use my 10 gallon pot with ball valve to heat my strike water and I'm thinking of just opening the valve and letting it drain into the tun instead of lifting the heavy pot full of near-boiling water.
I have a hunch, however, that the water cools as it comes out of the spout. Can someone confirm this? If my hunch is correct, can someone tell me by how much it cools so that I can adjust my water temp appropriately?
You are probably right, but I dont know of any ratio. If your line is short and of a large diameter (less surface area faster flow rate) it may not be a problem. This is what is called learning your system.
Yeah...that's what I was afraid of. *dash1*
I'll do it one more time the old way and then I'll spend the time doing a test (bringing water up to strike temp, draining it through the ball valve, and seeing what I get).
I've been using trial and error with my five gallon Igloo cooler. I generally like to mash eight pounds of grain in about three gallons of water at about 150F. So if I heat the water to 165F, it looses about 7F when I pour it into the cooler. It looses another 8F when I add grain. Although today was a bit of "error", when I lost an extra 2F and had to add a bit of boiling water until I was back up in temp. I inadvertently brought it up to 153F, before I was able to cool it down to 152F. Oh well, not really a disaster and I'm curious how it will turn out.
Jim,
I frequently run the water into my tun via the ball valve in the kettle I'm using to heat my strike water. I usually heat my water about 10 degrees higher than beersmith gives me for my strike temperature, and then use my full amount of strike water to preheat my tun. I've not noticed that running the water through the ball valve has any significant impact on the water temperature in the tun vs. just dumping it in all at once. I'm sure it impacts it, but probably on the order of a fraction of a degree. Way less than the impact of the room-temperature tun and room-temperature grains.
-Adam
Nice. Good to know! Thanks, Adam! I will brew again within the next few weeks and I'll try it.