My first brew in 12 years!

I brewed today for the first time in 12 years. It's been awhile. Now that I'm not a student I could afford to get a little fancier equipment, namely an outdoor burner and an immersion chiller. I made my immersion chiller out of 50 ft. of 3/8" copper tubing. Let me tell you, I had no idea how quickly this would cool my wort! I copied the "rib-cage" design here on the forums. I cooled my wort from boiling (more than 210*) down to 80* in a little less than 10 minutes. It took at least that amount of time to get it the rest of the way down to 70* to pitch my yeast. I was just incredibly shocked at how fast it cooled down the wort. 12 years ago I used to pour my hot wort into the cold-water-filled carboy and have to let it sit over night in order to get it down to 70* to pitch.

Well, I'm really excited to be getting back into homebrewing. I'm going to do probably one more extract batch and then move on to the all-grain method.

Cheers!

I'm with ya... I just recently started brewing again after 8 or 9 years of absence from the hobby. I also rebuilt my immersion chiller in the process of getting back into it. I made basically the same thing you did but I used 1/2" copper tubing instead of the 3/8".

In the warmer months when the ground water temp is warmer, it is a little harder to get the wort down to 70 degrees. I'm thinking about buying a submersible water pump and recirculating ice water from a 5-gallon bucket through the wort during that final cooling stage. There are lots of threads on here about doing that. In fact, some folks do that for the entire chill process rather than hooking up to a spigot.