wort chilling with a refridgerator/freezer

Has anyone ever tried chilling wort by putting the brew pot into the refridgerator or freezer ?

Did it work ok ?

I suspect that's a lot more work than your fridge was designed to handle and it's not going to be fast either. You need the amazing thermal capacity of liquid to do this job.

That would make the system work too hard as well as warm up everything else in there. Not a good idea IMO.

I tried mine in the freezer. Didn't work as good as the ice water bath in the sink IMO. I'm guessing the direct contact between the ice water and th pot works way better than just cold air. Let's hear what the pros have to say I'm a newb.

homebrewer_99 said:

That would make the system work too hard as well as warm up everything else in there. Not a good idea IMO.

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what if there is nothing else in there except for beer ?

Only twice, but it was a commercial walk-in freezer. Lots of coolth and fans to speed heat removal. The biggest problem is air doesn't remove heat well. If your refrigerator lacks a circulation fan cooling will be slow.

If beer is the only think in there, it's still going to take a long time. Air has a much lower heat capacity than water. That's a LOT of heat and residential fridges are not made to remove that much at a time.

Wouldn't that also create a lot of condensation? I think that you would end up having a big puddle drain out of there. Also it would take a really long time and pretty much negate your aroma hops.

Cheers

think about how long it takes a room temperature soda to get down to 40F in the fridge.

HOURS..probably 2-3 hours to get 12 oz to drop 30 degrees.

I'd say it'll take at least 12-18 hours to drop 5 gallons from 210F to 70F for pitching at normal fridge temp.

Yeah, it'd take quite some time. It takes 20 minutes or so for my hydrometer jar full of 165F wort after my mash to cool to around 80 so I can take a reading. I couldn't immagine 5 gallons from boiling, that's a lot of energy to take out of it.

I do put my yeast starter wort in the flask on top of an ice cube tray in the freezer for cooling. That works quite well but a 2 1/2 - 5 gallon work needs a nice ice bath or wort cooler.

Mutilated1 said:

what if there is nothing else in there except for beer ?

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Even if there is nothing else in the freezer beises the wort, an ice water or even cold tap water bath will be much faster. That's because water is a much better conductor of heat than air, so if you surround it in water, the water will conduct the heat away far faster than air, even if the air were colder. That's the reason that boiling, braising, or pressure cooking (which raises the boiling point) will cook meat much faster than putting it in an oven that would be much hotter than the boiling point or even the raised boling point of a pressure cooker. Another good example is defrosting a turkey in an ice water bath (which takes hours), as opposed to the fridge (which takes days). If you want to do an experiment and prove which is the better conductor, put an ice cube on a plate and another ice cube in a glass of room temperature water. Even though the ice will cool the water to cooler than room temperature as it melts, the ice cube in the water will melt much faster than the one left out. Alton Brown (host of Good Eats on the Food Network) even demonstrated how water was a better conductor of heat than air. He had large but uniform pieces of ice in different mediums, and the piece submerged in cold water melted faster than a piece placed in a 100 degree oven. The piece under slowly running water melted the fastest. Even though we are comparing defrosting to cooling, both are being done with the same principle, which is conducting heat.

Everyone's point about air being a poor means of removing heat is right on, but there is another factor worth pointing out.

Metal, an excellent conductor of heat/cold, is what the wort is sitting in. Placing ice/ice water directly against the metal will cause it to super cool just as on the burner makes it super heat.

no doubt ice bath is the best bet. Although, if you have an empty meat freezer (good number of hunters I know have this problem when not in season ) and you can find a way to encase the pot with the wort in a bigger container that has the ice bath and THEN put it in the freezer, you would have the same effect of the ice bath, with the added cooling on the wort's surface. That could speed it up.