Running hot wort through an immersion coil in cold water to cool ?

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LoloMT7

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So I've been thinking I want to build a tiered stand to put my equipment on for brew day. I don't have a HLT and don't have any desire to use one. I would rather batch sparge or just ladle in Hot water (my fly sparge method)

At any rate I would like to get away from using my immersion wort chiller and would like to try another method. I have a counter flow chiller but was wondering if I would be able to get away without using it. Would something like the following chill the wort enough? I'm curious if anyone has tried something like this. That is using the immersion chiller coil in reverse in a sense. By submerging it in ice water and letting hot wort run through it slowly to chill. Any thoughts on why or why not this setup will work? Maybe a small pump to circulate the cold water in the bucket would be needed? Thanks all.

tiered idea.jpg
 
i made one this weekend and tried it. 25' of 3/8" copper dropped temp by 50 with one pass so i think it was just to short so i think im gonna make it into an immersion or a counterflow chiller
 
You can do that and I have, and it works well, but cleaning the inside of a coil is going to be a job you don't want to half ass...ever.... Also, one pass isn't going to cool your wort to pitching temp in the drawing you have shown.

You'll have to use your pump to recirculate the wort through the bucket. It also use a metric ton of ice if you try to cool the wort with ice in the bucket before the wort gets down to a manageable temperature...like 100F or so.

The way I cooled using the method you're asking about is to chill the wort with the IC down to 100F, then recirculate in through the ice water bucket til it got to pitching temp...agitating the ice and replenishing it when necessary.

I have tried them all (including CFC). I use IC and a pond pump in an ice water bucket to recirculate the cold water through the IC until I'm at pitch temp. I also whirlpool the wort with my brew pump to promote faster cooling in the brew kettle.
 
You definitely want to keep the cooling water moving, for the same reason you want to keep hot wort moving in a kettle with an IC. In the absence of movement a very pronounced high temperature region develops around the tubing that will cut the cooling efficiency in a huge way. You can test the effect with an IC by holding the outflow end while leaving hot wort sitting, then giving the wort a stir.

As for cleaning it'd likely be no worse than cleaning a CFC, and probably easier than cleaning a plate chiller...

Cheers!
 
Lots of folks use a setup more or less like this one. There are two problems with it (which are really just symptoms of one problem.)

First, you probably have to make a few passes with the wort to get it totally down to pitching temperature and you may find you need to add ice and cold water to the Cold Liquor Tank now and then to keep it cool.

Second, if you are recirculating your wort through the chiller, you need to be certain that you've done a good job of sterilizing.

And there's a third problem... any time you start pumping your wort through a chilling conduit you need to be prepared for some additional wort loss. It's just really hard to recover ALL your wort from the pump, chiller line etc.

I used to have one of these "reverse chiller coils" and it's sitting on a shelf in my garage. Ultimately, you're going to probably be happier with a standard immersion chiller that you can hook up to your kitchen sink. You boil the chiller IN the wort for the last few minutes of the boil so it is sterilized. If you're really really paranoid about cleanliness and "clean flavor" you can boil the chiller in another pot of clean water instead of in the wort. (After you've finished, and cleaned everything up you should boil it AGAIN in clean water to clean and sterilize it for your next dunking boiling wort.)

This way you can dunk the chiller into your brew kettle, crank up the cold water in your sink and watch as the chiller happily drops your wort temp down to somewhere in the zone of 65 degrees or so. (Depends on how cold your tap water gets, really.)

Where this doesn't work is places like S. Nevada and Arizona where the tap water never gets below 80. (Why those crazy people live there, I don't know...) You however live in cool Montana, not too far from me, btw (Butte).

Lolo, if you DO want to go forward with your heat-exchange chiller (that's what it really is...) it does give you some pretty cool options going forward. But THAT's a whole nother thread and starts to talk about HERM style brewing.
 
First, you probably have to make a few passes with the wort to get it totally down to pitching temperature and you WILL find you need to add ice and cold water to the Cold Liquor Tank now and then to keep it cool.

I agree with everything in your post, but I would change this one little word.

For a typical 5 G batch of ale though, you could accomplish it with 2 water changes (in the cool liquor tank)...the first should just be straight tap water, don't waste your ice. recirc to cool it down to 120-130. Then do it again with fresh tap water and ice. Agitate. It may take a 3rd water change depending on how fast you lose your ice in 120-130 temps.
 
I agree with everything in your post, but I would change this one little word.

For a typical 5 G batch of ale though, you could accomplish it with 2 water changes (in the cool liquor tank)...the first should just be straight tap water, don't waste your ice. recirc to cool it down to 120-130. Then do it again with fresh tap water and ice. Agitate. It may take a 3rd water change depending on how fast you lose your ice in 120-130 temps.

I tried this once.

Once.

It took 42 pounds of ice to chill 5 gallons of wort from boiling to 70 degrees this way.

I wouldn't recommend it. A wort chiller is a great pre-chiller for a CFC, though!
 
Just curious - how is this easier to clean than a counterflow chiller? Isn't it essentially the same thing? Instead of an outer hose you have a bucket of ice, but you still have the inside of the coil to clean. No?
 
I was trying to be "positive". :D

I tried to use my heat-exchange coil twice. Now it sits on a shelf in my garage with dents and kinks it didn't have when I first made it...
 
Ultimately, you're going to probably be happier with a standard immersion chiller that you can hook up to your kitchen sink. You boil the chiller IN the wort for the last few minutes of the boil so it is sterilized.

Thanks for all the quick replies guys. I currently do use an immersion chiller now and add it at the 10-15 minute mark so I know how that all works. More then anything I was just trying to get away from using soooo much water. I can also understand that I would probably have to have the wort recirculate a few times if I did use my method above.. killing more time. My ground water is really cold so maybe i'll just end up giving the CFC a try and working out a way to recirculate the water down the road.
 
The heat-exchange chiller is no easier to clean than a counterflow chiller. In fact it's exactly the same. Pump boiling water through it for 10 or 15 minutes at minimum and then pump some sanitizer through it. And that really ought to be done before and after using it.

Hence my 'love hate' relationship with my CFC. I'm thrilled that the wort comes out ready to pitch pretty much as fast as I can pump it from my BK.

I'm not thrilled about firing up my HLT again, getting to boiling and purging the entire CFC before and after I use it.
 
I'm not thrilled about firing up my HLT again, getting to boiling and purging the entire CFC before and after I use it.

I love my CFC!

I recirculate the last 15 minutes of the boil with it, and then when the boil is over, I turn on the water. The CFC is sanitized, the wort is clear and cooled, and then to clear, I run the cleaner through it when I clean the boil kettle. I was considering a plate chiller a few years ago, but the CFC works so well for me that I'm not going to change. Of course, I have very cold tap water so it chills effectively.

It does use quite a bit of water. I save the first 10 gallons or so of the hottest water, to use for cleaning and rinsing and for the washing machine, but the rest goes down the drain oftentimes.
 
I tried this once.

Once.

It took 42 pounds of ice to chill 5 gallons of wort from boiling to 70 degrees this way.

I wouldn't recommend it. A wort chiller is a great pre-chiller for a CFC, though!

Agreed. Even though I threw it out there for OP's consumption, I only did it "once" too. :mug:
 
Lolo...
If water usage is what's got ya down on the IC, here's how I cut my water usage WAY back.
1) Between 200-170 I let it flow at a medium rate through the chiller and catch the water for cleaning purposes on the other end.
2)At 170 I dial the flow back, this will slow your cooling time slightly.....but standby I speed it back up at the end. When the flow coming out the end of the discharge hose is tolerable, I start using that water to water the plants. I'm usually about 10G of water into it at this point.
3) At 120F I hook my IC up to a bucket of ice water with a cheap (and I mean cheap, it was $15 at Orchard Supply Hardware) pond pump and a barbed water hose female connection at the outflow. That chills it to pitch temp in no time....I use up to 20lbs of ice if I'm not conserving ice this way, but I save a ton of water. I have done this successfully with 10lbs of ice though and your tap water is colder then mine, so you probably could too. Altogether I figure I use about 15G of tap water to cool as opposed to the 25-30 I used to use when just flowing tap water through the IC the whole time. I also cool considerably faster this way as most of the time you'll see a real slowdown in temperature change as you go below 120 and try to get it down to pitch temp. Since you have a CFC at this point, you could use the pond pump to prime the CFC with ice water and it will work even better.

Using the extra coil you have as a prechiller is also something I've tried and it helps the water usage some..but not as much as the pond pump method in my experience.

Hope this helps. I too struggle with the amount of water wasted by an IC, especially living where I live...water is a scarce resource.

Edit: one important piece that I left out. I use my brew pump to continue moving the wort in the kettle around the IC the whole time, and I manually agitate the ice water in the bucket (when I've moved to the pond pump) as well. Both of these things speeds cooling, and the brew pump recirculating helps save water/speed cooling when you're using tap water.
 
I have a brew buddy that starts his cooling process with rainwater from his rain barrels, before switching over to ice water to do the final chill.

Has 2 55 gallon drums laying horizontally and slightly elevated, they are hooked up in series, and a 150 or so gallon horse watering trough, all equipped with hose bibs to allow attachment of his pump inlet.

Amazing how much water you can collect from the roof of a house!

He uses a CFC for cooldown.
 
I put a valve on my immersion chiller. Like under your kitchen sink or toilet and turn the flow down to where I feel the heat (hot) coming from the exit side and kind of throttle the water that way and it works great for me I don't want cold water blasting through so I control it to the point where I can feel the heat coming out!
Try it you'll like it! :)
One more edit
I didn't like putting the chiller into the wort for the last ten mins because it spit up water that was still in it so now I just soak it in sanitizer with the other things in a 5 gal bucket.
 
I put a valve on my immersion chiller. Like under your kitchen sink or toilet and turn the flow down to where I feel the heat (hot) coming from the exit side and kind of throttle the water that way and it works great for me I don't want cold water blasting through so I control it to the point where I can feel the heat coming out!
Try it you'll like it!

I will try this.. Usually I just whirlpool crank on the water and start doing other things. Thanks :mug:

Edit: I do use some water for clean-up for the mash tun and then I typically like to spray the outside of the kettle to cool it down also.
 
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