As someone who lives in a hot climate where droughts occur regularly and where the groundwater is 80+ degrees in the summer, I've been doing mostly no-chill brewing (letting the hot wort passively chill in an HDPE cube overnight then pitching the next day) to reduce my brewing water usage.
I've been really happy with the results, and I'm finally beginning to nail hoppy styles. Anyone else have no-chill experience who'd like to compare notes?
Oh yeah. Some commonly offered advice is to move your hop additions 20 mins back (your usually 60 min go in at 40 mins, your 40 mins at 20, etc). This works, but I found this resulted in too much bitterness and little aroma/flavor for hoppy styles.
I had a fellow home brewer recommend just putting every hop addition, save the bittering charge, directly into the cube and racking the wort on top of it. That’s worked really well for me.
Your 60 minute addition isn't going to get any more bitterness compared to adding it at 40 mins. I'd use a 60 min addition for bittering and throw the rest in at flameout, like an extended whirlpool.
I've been no chil brewing for about 5 batches now and have noticed no ill effects. In fact, I've made some of my best beers. The only thing I don't like is that cleaning the cube is a bit of a pain in the ass, and I don't have any surplus hot water to clean my pump and kettle with. I think I definitely end up using a lot less water overall though which makes me feel good. Water is cheap and plentiful where I am so that isn't a huge deal, though I do like the saved time during brew day. I'm trying to make my IPAs more bitter anyway so that part doesn't bother me.
Yes, primarily hop timing. You can't use your usual hop schedule with a no-chill setup because the wort stays near-boiling for much longer, extracting more alpha acids over time. It's also hard to get aroma/flavor out of boil additions for the same reason, so many no-chillers just add their late hops directly to the cube as a sort of knockout addition.
There's also a theoretically increased risk of infection cuz you wait longer to pitch, but the boiling wort sanitizes the cube anyway and I've never heard of anyone having a bad fermentation because of it.