Herms coil to cool wort after boil?

I was building a single tier brew rig and will have a large herms coil in my HLT and was just wondering if it would work to run the wort through the coil after the boil to cool it down? HLT would be filled with cold water so the wort would go from the boil pot into the coil in the HLT then back to the boil pot.

Don't see why not. The only issue is that you'd have to clean the interior of the coil afterwards.

True but there is wort going through the coil anyway during the conversion process before it goes to the boil kettle so would have to be cleaned regardless I would imagine. Just figured it would be one less piece to build/buy, no other chiller needed. Plus I could also use the herms coil for a cooling worm in a "water distiller", two rigs in one!

The one issue with this design is all the heat you take out of the wort is going directly into your cooling water so the temperature of the cooling water increases while the temp of the wort decreases making the delta T required for cooling smaller and cooling happens slower and slower. However, if you put a lot of ice in it and continue to replace the ice as it melts and agitate the water, it should work. It would also help if the volume of cooling water is a lot larger than the volume of wort

Personally, rather than using ice, I think any design where cooling water is continually replaced (immersion, plate, counterflow) is a better option.

Agree, my idea was to add a fresh water inlet at the bottom of the HLT and outlet at the top which goes to the drain or collected for cleanup, basically the same idea as a plate chiller. Fresh cold water will always be flowing.

Actually as another bonus, when the wort returns to the boil pot from the coil you can get a nice whirl pool going during the whole cooling process. Hmm.

fhhobbies said:

True but there is wort going through the coil anyway during the conversion process before it goes to the boil kettle so would have to be cleaned regardless I would imagine. Just figured it would be one less piece to build/buy, no other chiller needed. Plus I could also use the herms coil for a cooling worm in a "water distiller", two rigs in one!

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Run your sparge water through your coil and this will clean it at the same time.

I started do chill this ways few batches ago and it takes about 10 minutes to chill 10 gal batch to 60F.
CFC cools it to 80's and HEX (with ~10 lbs of ice) do the rest.
Keep in mind that cooling is more efficient if you stir ice in HLT, at least occasionally.

Fresh cooling water outlet at the top of HLT? I assume you're going to pump it out? ;-)

I use my herms for cooling at the end of the boil. Gets it down to the 50s for the first couple gallons then the HLT heats up enough that the wort will exist in the 80s. I have mine running from the BK, through the HERMS, and then into a plate chiller. By the time the wort is down to the 80s I barely need to run the plate chiller to get to my pitch temp...unless the ******* plate chiller gets clogged but that's another story!

atreid said:

Fresh cooling water outlet at the top of HLT? I assume you're going to pump it out? ;-)

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Should work providing the outlet is bigger but would certainly be better to have inlet at the top then just open the valve at the bottom and let it flow out to drain or where ever.

Yeah that was my point exactly...

I used my herms coil to try and cool my wort for the first time. It took me about 40 minutes to chill and I had to use all the ice I had available which was only about 15 pounds. I would recommend using a different method to try and chill..

Using only HEX to chill is not enough, especially without continuous water supply.
Better option is to cool the wort to 80-100F with chiller and then transfer it trough ice filled HLT to chill it to pitching temperature.
This is much more efficient, since hot wort will melt ice pretty quickly.