Gravity good enough for CFC's?

For all you tiered all grain brewers: Is gravity good enough to get the hot wort from your kettle to the counter flow chiller (and through it to the fermenter)? Or do you rely on a venturi type thing like the Wortwizard, or an electric pump? I tried gravity by itself and just had a hard time getting the flow started.

Cheers

personally i dont have a counterflow chiller but when brewing on my freinds herms system with a cfc, we used gravity and it worked fine. Keep in mind it gets super slow at the end but still works. Its generally a modified syphon and as long as the inlet is above the outlet tube it will work

Gravity flow will work, but might not be the best way to go. I've used immersion chillers, counterflow chillers and water baths to cool the wort. I am currently using a pump with a sort of home made hybrid counterflow chiller.

You can improve the flow rate by elevating the kettle as much as you can. There are considerable resistance losses through the long length of tubing in the chiller and this will tend to slow the flow. You really want to chill the wort as fast as you can in order to help preserve the hop flavor and aroma contributions. A pump speeds things up dramatically. Well worth the investment.

Catt22 said:

Gravity flow will work, but might not be the best way to go. I've used immersion chillers, counterflow chillers and water baths to cool the wort....You really want to chill the wort as fast as you can in order to help preserve the hop flavor and aroma contributions. A pump speeds things up dramatically. Well worth the investment.

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Yup, what he said. +1

I use a CFC and gravity... Works good so far...

I also use my CFC on gravity...probably takes longer to all of the wort into the fermenter than if I had a pump setup, but it works for me.

FYI I am using a keggle with weldless bulkhead so there is the force of the wort draining from the bottom of the keggle to get flow from through the CFC.

Before this I had to stick my CFC pickup tube down the side of my pot into the top of the wort and have a syphon already started. A copper racking cane in the wort didn't work for me.

I gravity feed a plate chiller ...no problems here.

You could argue that some of the benefit of an external exchanger is lost when flowing the wort slowly but it will still work. A pump is idea since you can hot-wort sanitize it easily by recirculating back to the kettle. The easiest way to get the flow started would be to fill the coil with sanitizer and plug the output. Hook up your kettle to the input and open up the CFC output. Collect the sanitizer in a bucket and when you see beer, direct it into the fermenter.

Gravity is fine, we just drained 11 gallons through our 20 foot cfc into the fermenter in about 15 minutes (went from ~200* to 68*).

Keg output is about 10-12 inches above cfc input, which is maybe 8-10 inches above the hose outlet sitting in the fermenter (total height, 18-22 inches).

opalko said:

For all you tiered all grain brewers: Is gravity good enough to get the hot wort from your kettle to the counter flow chiller (and through it to the fermenter)? Or do you rely on a venturi type thing like the Wortwizard, or an electric pump? I tried gravity by itself and just had a hard time getting the flow started.

Cheers

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