Which came first, the wort chiller or the turkey fryer?

Got $50 burning a hole in my pocket. Do I buy a turkey fryer set up or make a wort chiller? I'm kit and kilo right now, but a real HBS opened up within range, and I'm leaning towards moving on to bigger things....

I vote MLT and wait a couple weeks til everyon puts there turkey fryers on craigslist cheap... that way you can do both

A chiller first! Using a turkey fryer is great, and will allow full boils of the wort. The thing is, if you can't chill 5 gallons of boiling wort, then a full boil isn't very practical.

But if you have a chiller, you can use it even on a smaller boil to chill the wort fast and do late additions of the bulk of the extract and that would work great.

I made my chiller myself, for under 25usd. I would go with the chiller and wait for after the Christmas for the fryer.Sam's Club has a 9 gallon for 69 usd right now, after the term of the year, the leftover stock drops to 49.

Why does a chiller help with a late extract addition? I'm not saying it doesn't, just an honest question.

Never mind. You're saying to not worry about partial boil, just do late addition to make up for it. I think. Sorry for the pointless post.

Paulfrank said:

Never mind. You're saying to not worry about partial boil, just do late addition to make up for it. I think. Sorry for the pointless post.

Click to expand...

It's NEVER pointless to ask a question! Because I think my post was poorly worded.

I prefer full boils. But if you can't do a full boil, doing a partial boil with adding the late extract addition is a pretty good facsimile. You can still use a wort chiller to chill a partial boil, so it's still useful, and then buy a turkey fryer burner in the future after you have the chiller. I hope that is a somewhat better explanation of what I was trying to say!

Perfect. Thanks again, Yooper. You're a wealth of knowledge. I actually do the late addition move because of your recommendation in other threads.

Yooper said:

A chiller first! Using a turkey fryer is great, and will allow full boils of the wort. The thing is, if you can't chill 5 gallons of boiling wort, then a full boil isn't very practical.

But if you have a chiller, you can use it even on a smaller boil to chill the wort fast and do late additions of the bulk of the extract and that would work great.

Click to expand...

This!

You definitely want to chiller first.
You manage to get it hot enough right now, but efficient cooling is very important and you can't do that yet.

Thanks folks. That's where I'm leaning, but I'll clarify..... I do 3 litre partial boils with about a cup of extract (by my math that gives me 1.040) to get some bitterness and flavour from added hops. Should I put off either until I can do both at once? Or make my chiler and save again for the fryer set up?

I live in Canada, beer, brew gear and shipping all cost a fortune, so I got into this to save a few dollars. Now I can see an avenue to take it farther.

I would still get the chiller first.
With your small boil volume the stovetop should be working fine for now.
Probably before I got the fryer I would look at finding a nice brew pot so that I could do a big enough batch to justify all the time.