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Tom1209

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A friend that has home brewed beer suggested a wort chiller for an issue I have. Each year I work with a church youth group and prepare about 50 gallons of chili for a fundraiser on the super bowl weekend. We have a pretty good kitchen set up with industrial stove and fridge. We prepare chili in batches of 10 gallons ( 5, two gallon pots). We have the cooking containers cool outside so that the chili can be comfortably handled and placed into one quart plastic containers and then into the fridge. The cooling is also done so the fridge is not overwhelmed and can cool the product down in a shorter time. This slows things up.
My friend suggested I use a wort cooler as it can cool down hot liquid very fast.
My question is,, if I have 10 gallons of chili at about 200 deg F, using about 10 gpm water flow of 50 deg F, and a 3/8” by 50 ft copper chiller, do you think I can use this set up to cool to under 100 deg F in under 15 minutes?
How long does it take to cool 10 gallons of brew to what temp with a wort chiller set up?
Thanks for any info.
 
That question could've been on one of my chemical engineering fluid dynamics tests!! Unfortunately, I haven't worked as a chem e for about 10 years and would need to look up equations, thermodynamic coefficients and figure a reasonable estimate for the viscosity of chili in order to solve it I think.

A small help may be that many people using a wort chiller can cool 10 gallons to under 100*F in around 20 min or so. Your flowrate of 50gpm is pretty substantial. Your plan should work, but I wouldn't venture a guess on how long it will take as there are too many unknowns for me. To help speed it along, try to pass your cooling flow through an ice bath before the chiller to drop it as low as you can. Try to stir your chili in the opposite direction as your chiller flow to maximize contact. Hope this provides some help to you, but for any real numerical answers, ill leave that for the engineers that still practice the science!
 
It should work. I think the hard part will be the constant stirring you'll need to do to keep chili in contact with the chiller. It's a lot less fluid than wort.

Man, now i'm hungry for chili.;)
 
I also can't speak for the amount of time it will take. But I can say using a wort chiller should work very well and I think you'll be happy to have gone this route.
 
Thanks for the help.
I work as an engineering manager myself and thought of running some calcs but lately I've been spending spare time helping my son and friends with AP physics. I'm sure chili has a higher heat capacity than water and stirring is needed but I just wanted to get a general idea of how fast a wort chiller works on wort to see if buying one might be worth the time saved. I realized later I have an engineer that runs some pretty sophisticated heat exchanger programs, maybe I can re-task him for while. Or I could ask others to run some calcs but we'd then likely get no real work. I don't think our director will mind as she's a beer and chili aficionado.
great forum!
 
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