Cooling paddles

I saw these are a restaurant supply store this afternoon.

Rapi-Kool® Original Quick Chill Freezable Containers / Cold Paddles / New Rapi-Kool® PLUS Cold Paddles / by San Jamar - Restaurant Equipment and Restaurant Supplies at Zesco Products

It's made to cool large stock pots of soup down to fridge temps for storage so bacteria doesn't colonize it while it's sitting and cooling. You fill it with water, freeze it and then just stir. Seems like you could just starsan it.

I wonder how they'd work to cool wort. If I remember right, they said they can be used once the liquid you're cooling is below 190F. Could be a great way to cool wort if you're worried about wasting water or if your tap water doesn't get cold enough. It's supposed to be able to get a big stock pot of soup down below 41F "in minutes".

I bought a new kettle that's too big to fit in my sink and I wasn't looking forward to messing with a chiller. I might pick one of these up before my next brew and see how it works.

Anyone try use of these before? And if not, anyone interested in a review if I do?

That isn't a bad idea.. biggest one is only 128oz of water, but that might be enough to get it down? I like the idea, subscribed for more info =)

They also make a 256oz version.

512k or 1M ?

Sorry I could not resist. (Computer lingo)
Me BAD.
Bad Brewer.

Thirsty_Monk said:

512k or 1M ?

Sorry I could not resist. (Computer lingo)
Me BAD.
Bad Brewer.

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Actually, my mind went to computers too, but older'n that. I first thought of colors!

Very interesting.

Are you gonna go for it Cat?

I think so. Gonna be a few weeks before I brew again. I'm waiting for heat to do a saison.

The company that makes them make some other cool stuff that might be useful to brewers. Moisture control in your keezer anyone?
San Jamar - Smart | Safe | Sanitary

Wouldn't a couple of soda bottles filled with water and frozen do the same thing for basically free?

Wouldn't have the same mass and wouldn't have the big handle so you'd be trying to hold the neck of the bottle when you stir. With a deep kettle, you can get it all through the wort, not just at the surface too.

That's what makes this interesting. It's like a big frozen mash paddle that you stir your wort with to cool it down fast.

For 20 bucks, I think it's worth a try.

Plus, I don't know how a frozen pop bottle would do at 190F.

ChshreCat said:

You fill it with water, freeze it and then just stir. Seems like you could just starsan it.

I bought a new kettle that's too big to fit in my sink and I wasn't looking forward to messing with a chiller. I might pick one of these up before my next brew and see how it works.

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Hmm... it's rated for 190f, so how are you going to get the wort from 212-190 without a chiller?

Also, what size kettle do you have, or rather how much wort are you going to chill with these things? I suspect it will work, it will be a slow process though.

ChshreCat said:

Plus, I don't know how a frozen pop bottle would do at 190F.

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Didn't think about that. Yeah, probably not a bad idea to try for $20

HomebrewJeff said:

Hmm... it's rated for 190f, so how are you going to get the wort from 212-190 without a chiller?

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You should lose 20 degrees at that high of a temp just by turning off the burner. The first few degrees peel right off, it's the last few that are a real pain!

Yeah, soda bottles are made from PET (#1), their max safe temp is 120F, so they would only work for final cooling, or down to lagering pitch temps.

I do the same thing but just using soda bottles (Peel the label to sanitize, fill with salt and water, freeze). Drop your temperature with tap water a bit then add the soda bottles . I can chill about 3 gallons of wort in 10-15 min no problem (no full boils yet). Also no off flavors from the plastic getting too hot.

HomebrewJeff said:

Hmm... it's rated for 190f, so how are you going to get the wort from 212-190 without a chiller?

Also, what size kettle do you have, or rather how much wort are you going to chill with these things? I suspect it will work, it will be a slow process though.

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These are made for restaurants where they'll need to chill 5-10 gallons of soup in a short period of time. They claim "in minutes". How many minutes, I'll have to find out. I'll probably be doing it with a little under 5 gallons.

Even though I use a chiller, these could greatly accelerate the process. I like the cheapness, ease of cleaning / sanitizing and simplicity, too....no moving parts, if you don't count the ice water sloshing around in there.
OTOH, on the down side, I'm not really sure how far one of the two-quart ones would take you. I'd think the gallon size would be pretty hard to move around. I'm thinking it might be REALLY nice to use in conjunction with a wort chiller, take you those last 15 degrees that seem to take forever....

rico567 said:

Even though I use a chiller, these could greatly accelerate the process. I like the cheapness, ease of cleaning / sanitizing and simplicity, too....no moving parts, if you don't count the ice water sloshing around in there.
OTOH, on the down side, I'm not really sure how far one of the two-quart ones would take you. I'd think the gallon size would be pretty hard to move around. I'm thinking it might be REALLY nice to use in conjunction with a wort chiller, take you those last 15 degrees that seem to take forever....

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Yeah, we'll have to see how it works. I'll probably get the smaller once since I'm not doing full boils, but it could give us a baseline. If the small one takes 4 gallons down to pitching temp really quickly, it might be worth someone who does 5 or 10 gallon full boils to try out a larger one. I'll give it the first try.

I was thinking of using the same thing until I checked their site and found the following listed for the Rapi-Kool plus series

San Jamar - Smart | Safe | Sanitary

"Helps to rapidly chill food through the temperature danger zone (135°F (57°C) to 70°F (21°C) in 2 hours, then to 41°F (5°C) within 4 hours."

They don't list what volume that is for but still seems like it might be a problem

ssleeper said:

"Helps to rapidly chill food through the temperature danger zone (135°F (57°C) to 70°F (21°C) in 2 hours, then to 41°F (5°C) within 4 hours."

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I'm pretty sure that quote is just the typical food safety guideline, not a statement of how quickly their product works. Those times are the maximums that food is allowed to spend in the given temperature ranges. I'm betting the Rapi-Kool works faster than that as long as you use one that's properly sized.

yermej said:

I'm pretty sure that quote is just the typical food safety guideline, not a statement of how quickly their product works. Those times are the maximums that food is allowed to spend in the given temperature ranges. I'm betting the Rapi-Kool works faster than that as long as you use one that's properly sized.

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That's what I was thinking. I can't imagine it taking this long. Sticking the pot in an ice bath (what we did at the restaurant i worked at) cooled faster than that, and these are supposed to cool much faster than an ice bath. That's the whole point of the product.

I'm getting one. Will test it. In the next few weeks when I brew again.

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.

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.

Did it work?

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

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

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.

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.

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

We're waiting...


Or at least I am, for the results.

ChshreCat said:

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

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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.

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.

I stand sort of corrected. In my previous post I forgot to include the heat required to change water from solid to liquid which is considerable. It would actually take 4 gallons of zero deg F ice to bring 6 gallons of boiling water to 70 deg F (if you are only accounting for melting of the ice and thermal equilibrium). I'm still a little surprised that this worked as well as it did, but I guess the thermal radiation, heat transfer to the stove, evaporation from the top of the stired wort and air cooling of the sides of the kettle are not negligible, and maybe account for a third of the cooling? Just a guess

This looked interesting, thanks for doing the legwork, ChshreCat!

Not as helpful as I had hoped. My cheapo immersion wort chiller takes 3.5 gallons of wort just off the boil down to 70 F in 18 minutes. I'll stick with that.

C-Cat, maybe this is a silly question, but were you spinning the paddle?

arturo7 said:

C-Cat, maybe this is a silly question, but were you spinning the paddle?

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Most of the time, I would hold the paddle at a slight angle and spin it slowly as I stirred. That way the melted water surrounding the ice inside the paddle would circulate as it went. Seemed the best way to avoid a thermal barrier between the outer wall and the ice.

carbon111 said:

This looked interesting, thanks for doing the legwork, ChshreCat!

Not as helpful as I had hoped. My cheapo immersion wort chiller takes 3.5 gallons of wort just off the boil down to 70 F in 18 minutes. I'll stick with that.

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If your groundwater is cool enough, that's great. This would be more for folks that can't get that low with an IC or don't want to use one.

I think with an ice bath and this method together, I should get low really fast.

I agree, it wasn't as exciting as I had hoped.
I noticed that the outer ice quickly melted, and left a big chunk in the inside. When I touched the outside of the wand, it was hot...
I spun it, and stirred the wort, and then gave up, and put the boil pot (5 gallon batch in a 7.5 gallon pot) into the bathtub.
Just my two cent, but I'd skip the wand, and use the 20 bucks for even the cheapest of copper immersion chillers...

Yeah, a chiller is faster and more efficient as well as less labor-and-time-intensive.

...at least if your groundwater is cool enough, like it is here in WA.

dleonard said:

I agree, it wasn't as exciting as I had hoped.
I noticed that the outer ice quickly melted, and left a big chunk in the inside. When I touched the outside of the wand, it was hot...
I spun it, and stirred the wort, and then gave up, and put the boil pot (5 gallon batch in a 7.5 gallon pot) into the bathtub.
Just my two cent, but I'd skip the wand, and use the 20 bucks for even the cheapest of copper immersion chillers...

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I don't know. It was cooling about as fast with the wand as it does in the sink for me. A bathtub would be faster than my sink with all that volume though.

I felt the side of mine too and noticed that it was hot, but that would be expected. It's in contact with the hot wort, so when you pull it out it would take a minute for it to get cold again.

Overall, I think it's a useful tool in the right situations. With cold groundwater an IC would definitely be faster but this would have it's place for people trying to find other options.

Maybe for people with warm ground water? Get it down as far as possible quickly with the IC chiller, then use the paddle for the rest? Got to look both ways......

SkiSoloII said:

Maybe for people with warm ground water? Get it down as far as possible quickly with the IC chiller, then use the paddle for the rest? Got to look both ways......

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That's what I was figuring. This won't replace your current chilling method if you can get it down to pitching temp in a reasonable amount of time already, but for folks having trouble doing that now, this is an option.