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**weirdboy** · 07-14-2009, 02:55 PM

Use one of these, a 50' immersion chiller feeding into a plate chiller, and an ice bath and your wort will go back in time.

**ChshreCat** · 08-08-2009, 12:29 AM

Ok. I picked up the smaller model of this today and plan on brewing my saison tomorrow. I'm a partial boil brewer, so my boil volume should be about 4 gallons and I should finish around 3. Not as much volume as most folks on here need to cool, but with the smallest cooling paddle it should give us a baseline idea of how these will work for a brewer.

I'll take a thermometer reading and hit my mash timer when I start using this thing and see how long it takes to get to pitching temp if it takes me all the way down. If it melts all the ice before I hit pitching temp, I'll report how long that took and how low it got.

Catt22 · 08-08-2009, 05:58 PM

Did it work?

**ChshreCat** · 08-08-2009, 06:02 PM

My brew day fell through. No beer today for me. :P

So, everything is in the fridge and freezer until I can get a few hours again.

**BrewBeemer** · 08-08-2009, 06:52 PM

I bet after a couple of minutes holding up two gallons twirling that thing you would become mad at yourself especially if you have a bad back. All I can think of is a another Billy Mays as seen on TV product. For a small batch it might help but looks more like a PITA to use and a waste of money when brewing 10 to 15 net at the corny's item. All ideas start out good but in the real world use I question this item for larger volumes chilled. Can't beat a IC
coil JMO.

**ChshreCat** · 08-10-2009, 12:05 AM

Yeah, but if your water temps are high then an IC won't do it for you. Plus, they use a lot of water and some folks don't want to do that.

These are already used in restaurants to cool down large kettles of soup before moving them to the cooler. If it works for them it might work for us.

And if my back was so bad I can't stir for a few minutes, then I probably wouldn't be able to brew in the first place.

**ChshreCat** · 08-10-2009, 12:05 AM

Gonna start my brew in an hour or so. Gonna give this thing a try and report back.

**arturo7** · 08-10-2009, 06:08 AM

We're waiting...

Or at least I am, for the results.

shek · 08-10-2009, 06:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChshreCat

Gonna start my brew in an hour or so. Gonna give this thing a try and report back.

Any luck? The physics just dont seem like it would work. It takes about 11 gallons of zero deg F water to cool down 6 gallons of 212 deg water to 75 deg F (and thats if you get 100% thermal equillibrium which would require either mixing them together or waiting a long time). I've been using an aquarium pump to push prechilled water through my IC. I put the pump in a four gallon stock pot with cold water (my cold is about 70), and I collect the hot water coming from the IC and use it to water the lawn, or save it to use to wash all of equipment. Once the water coming out of the IC (not the wort in the kettle) is down to about 100 I start recycling the water back into the stock pot, this is when I start to add ice to the stock pot (sometimes I also put a powerhead in the stock pot to circulate the ice and water and make pre-chill the water to an even lower temp). Two trays worth of ice from the icemaker in my freezer is usually more than enough for me to go from 6 gallons of boiling wort down to 70 degrees in under half an hour. I think the tube diameter of my IC is on the small side, and this method to pre-chill the water is a good way to compromise. I haven't kept an exact measurement, but I doubt I used more than 15 gallons of water, which I could probably reduce if I started stockpiling more ice from my icemaker to start pre-chilling the water right at the start of using the IC.

**ChshreCat** · 08-10-2009, 07:00 AM

Okiedoke. Just got done using it.

As for the back ache thing. I should have seen the obvious. It's full of ice. It floats. It bobbed there with the handle sticking out of the wort and I was able to swirl it around with just a couple fingers. Easy as cake.

I started using it on the wort at 180F. I have the small version of the paddle, 64oz, which sat in the freezer for 48 hours before use. My post boil volume was just a shade under 3 gallons.

Per instructions, I let it sit out for 5 minutes before putting it in the kettle. It was quite noisy going in.

0 minutes- 180F

After 7 minutes it was 160

10 minutes- 152F

15 minutes- 139F

20 minutes- 127F

25 minutes- 120F

At 25 minutes the ice was down to a sliver so I set it aside and cooled using my usual sink-full-of-cold-water method the rest of the way.

One mistake I made was that when I started with the paddle, I set the kettle back on the big burner of my stove for stability, not thinking about how hot it still was so that likely slowed things down a little bit as residual heat was transferred to the wort. I moved it to the empty sink after the 10 minute mark.

Even without it being on the warm burner, I don't believe it would've taken me all the way down to pitching temps, though I might have gotten a few more degrees out of it before the ice gave out. I also could have opened the cap and filled it with ice and water and continued, per instructions.

On my next brew, I'm going to combine methods. I will put the pot in a sink full of cold water and then use the cooling paddle at the same time. I think that should get me down to pitching temps much faster than either method alone.

I think this could be a good method for additional cooling for folks that use an IC, but don't have water temps cold enough to bring their wort all the way down to pitching temps. If you use the IC to get down as far as they can, the cooling paddle should be able to bring it the rest of the way. With larger volumes though I would recommend the 128oz version. The smaller one fit just right in my pot that I use for boiling on the stove. The larger one is the same diameter, but is twice as long.