As you will have gathered from various other blogs, we had a spot of snow last week in London. We both made it into work, as much as anything to see central London completely covered in snow and silent, except for the ringing of church bells. It was marvellous.
There is a beer link. Having already taken advantage of the cold weather to get a couple of lagers brewed, today we used the remnants of our snowman to help cool our wort.
The photo above shows are slightly idiosyncratic method of chilling the wort. We usually fill the massive saucepan with ice, but snow is cheaper. This method chills the wort in about 20-25 minutes, which is quicker than putting the kettle in a bath of ice. We do have one of those wort chillers but we’ve never used it as we couldn’t be bothered to get a pipe that fitted, and this method seems to work just as well.