question about cold break

I've had a few batches that have a ton of cold break. I have a counterflow chiller and the wort goes in clear and comes out very cloudy. Sometimes it's so thick it looks like you could strain out the pieces (hypothetically of course). I'm not sure if cold break is a problem, and if so how to stop it from happening. the beer seems to turn out ok so must not be too terrible. Any ideas? Also, any ideas on keeping a counterflow clean after use? I generally siphon some oxyclean into it and plug it for a while. Same with sterilizing.

cold break shouldn't be a problem at all - some even contend that it is beneficial. i don't use a CFC, so no first hand experience, but what you do sounds reasonable.

That particulate stuff that forms after the temperature of the wort is reduced beyond a certain temperature I assume you are referring to, although you use a different cooling apparatus to me. That is quite normal, theoretically ofcourse, it may be possible to filter if catering for a commercial audience. For the home brewer though, it is pure goodness that you KNOW settles with the rest of the sediment during the primary/secondary fermentations. Therefore, it must be concluded that this is nothing more than a phantom issue.

I don't do this because of cold break but it is a side benefit. Since I brew in the garage (Doors open of course, big and little) I have to transfer the wort down to the basement, it's a recipe for disaster carrying a full carboy down the stairs so I run the chilled wort into an extra bottling bucket. By the time I'm ready to transfer it to the carboy most of the cold break has settled out in the bottling bucket, I still get some but I don't worry about it,

checkout whirlpooling in th wiki. it's what most professional breweries do.

Don't sweat the cold break. I get more cold break now after switching to a CFC and the only change in the beer I make now is that they don't have the same problem with chill haze that they had before. I don't try to filter out the cold break at all. It all settles out in the primary.

That's basically what I figured, but I thought I'd check to see if anyone here had some other information about it. It doesn't seem to cause any problems, so I'll leave it alone.

What you are doing with sanitizing your cfc seems to be the way to go!!
See: http://homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=24433&highlight=sanitize+chiller

Sea said:

checkout whirlpooling in th wiki. it's what most professional breweries do.

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This won't work with CFC's, unless as someone noted above you re-transfer your wort after chilling. As the CFC chills the wort passing through it the cold break precipitates and is apparent when the wort comes out of the CFC. For those of us that use immersion chillers we chill all the wort at one time, the cold break precipitates and then we can transfer the clear wort into our fermentors. Some claim this is an advantage of immersion chillers but as noted above it has little affect on the final product for most brewers.