Wort Chiller

I am new to brewing and I have a question regarding wort chillers. I have seen counter-flow and immersion chillers. What I have not seen, which I am doing, is using an immersion style design (a coiled 3/8" copper tubing line) submerged in a bucket of ice and running the wort through the line into the fermenter. I have ran 3 batches chilling from boil to ~73 degrees. I have achieved this cooling rate as fast as I can siphon the beer through the coil.

What are your thoughts on this process?

I personally wouldn't do it because I'd be concerned about the sterility of the inner copper coils. Once the wort is cooled you risk infection. I guess you could pump boiling water through it, but that requires a pump.

Another way is an immersion chiller and a pre-chiller.

If it was me I would buy a pond pump and pump ice cold water through the immerse chiller instead of a pre chiller

One item of note: I do run ~3 gal of water with Star San through the chiller before I siphon my wort through it.

JoeyChopps said:

If it was me I would buy a pond pump and pump ice cold water through the immerse chiller instead of a pre chiller

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That requires a LOT of ice, doesn't it? I don't have an ice maker, only ice trays, so I have to buy bagged ice and it's expensive.

I have been using two small bags of ice to chill which is about 3 bucks.

Subscribed I am in the process of switching to all grain and I also have this question. I don't see how running 60 degree tap water through my wort is going to cool it where necessary. I also didn't understand why people dont just run the wort through the immersion chiller in a bucket of ice.

I might worry about diminishing quality as you do this. It is hard to get all the water out of an ic before you store it, eventually I would imagine that corrosion and gunk will build up inside of the chiller and give you bad flavors regardless of how much star san is run though it. Remember that cleaning and sterilizing are two very different things.

This design is called a reverse immersion chiller and someone posts about it once a week thinking they were the first to ever think of it.

The calculations have been done before and it was found that it takes about 40 pounds of ice to take 5 gallons of boiling wort down to 70F in a closed environment. They get about $3 for a 15 pound bag around here so it's cost prohibitive for me. Tap water, even in the 80-90F range is highly effective in chilling wort down to 100F due to the initial delta. My tap water on the other hand costs one penny a gallon.

If you've found some magic way to use less than 40lbs of ice, that's awesome.

JoeyChopps said:

If it was me I would buy a pond pump and pump ice cold water through the immerse chiller instead of a pre chiller

Click to expand...

This is exactly what I did last weekend. During the boil I washed out my mash tun (I use a cooler). When it was time to chill... I used my chiller as normal down to about 115dg. Once at 115 I put two bags of ice in my mash tun. Hooked-up my chiller to a pond pump and tossed the pump into the ice bath.

Got down to 65dg in about 10 min...

I have seen others do much better, but not bad for stuff I had sitting around the house.

Cheers

Bobby_M said:

This design is called a reverse immersion chiller and someone posts about it once a week thinking they were the first to ever think of it.

The calculations have been done before and it was found that it takes about 40 pounds of ice to take 5 gallons of boiling wort down to 70F in a closed environment. They get about $3 for a 15 pound bag around here so it's cost prohibitive for me. Tap water, even in the 80-90F range is highly effective in chilling wort down to 100F due to the initial delta. My tap water on the other hand costs one penny a gallon.

If you've found some magic way to use less than 40lbs of ice, that's awesome.

Click to expand...

I'm wondering about the validity of the calculations you are referencing. I've done 5 gallons this way. From boiling to below 60* with 40 pounds of ice in an open bucket on an 80* plus sunny day. Granted it took me an hour and a half with an agonizing slow flow rate.

I have since switched to an immersion chiller because of the problems keeping the inside of the copper coils both clean and sterile.

For my last batch, which was the first use of my immersion chiller, I ran ice water from my cooler conversion mash tun through the chiller. The chiller output went into a bucket, which I dumped back into the mash tun containing ice water. It took a little over 20 minutes from immersion to 80 degrees. I used 3 8-pound bags of ice to do the hob.

One lesson I learned, which should have been obvious because of simple physics, was to connect the cold water to the chiller so that it flows downward through the chiller. I had to move the chiller around quite a bit to circulate the wort around.

sudsmcgee said:

That requires a LOT of ice, doesn't it? I don't have an ice maker, only ice trays, so I have to buy bagged ice and it's expensive.

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10# bags of ice can be bought at McDonald's for $1

Walker said:

10# bags of ice can be bought at McDonald's for $1

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or Taco Johns

Bobby_M said:

This design is called a reverse immersion chiller and someone posts about it once a week thinking they were the first to ever think of it.

The calculations have been done before and it was found that it takes about 40 pounds of ice to take 5 gallons of boiling wort down to 70F in a closed environment. They get about $3 for a 15 pound bag around here so it's cost prohibitive for me. Tap water, even in the 80-90F range is highly effective in chilling wort down to 100F due to the initial delta. My tap water on the other hand costs one penny a gallon.

If you've found some magic way to use less than 40lbs of ice, that's awesome.

Click to expand...

Yeah, it's not new.

I do this on my HERMS system. The coil is clean because I circulate boiling hot wort through it for a few minutes after flame out, then I start the chilling.

It would take too much ice to do all the chilling that way, so I drop the coil into 6 or so gallons of tap water that I mix PBW into and drop the first big chunk of of temps that way.

Then I move the coil into my ice bath with 10 to 15 lbs of ice and finish the chilling.

20 minutes to chill, $1.50 worth of ice (if I did not have the foresight to collect it from the ice maker in the freezer in the preceding week) and I end up with 6 gallons of how PBW to clean with.

Here in Texas I also do the two-step method- water from hose bib is 86F right now, so I recirculate first with the tap water to 110 or so, then switch to a bucket of ice water and a pond pump and bring it down to pitching temp.

The pond pump has been returned to harbor freight twice to upgrade to a larger one ( I don't think any of Harbor Freights pump near what they have advertised).

I would really be worrying more about DMS if you are taking more than 30 min or so to cool your wort below 100F. I only do 10 gallon batches and had a couple that were unacceptable due to DMS because it took me an hour to get temps below 140F.

Wouldn't the sanitation issue posted above be similar for a counterflow?

Plankton said:

Wouldn't the sanitation issue posted above be similar for a counterflow?

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Yup.

I did 10 gallons of a Summer ale a couple weeks ago; the ground water simply is not cold enough to get boiling wort down to 70 degrees in an efficient manner. I am using a Shirron plate chiller and while it works well when it summer time, transfering is PAINFULLY slow to the fermenter..just a trickle.

I pre chill the water in about 54 degree water (water bottles frozen plus ice) and it still is not where I want it. SO I am going to try something new...well new to me.

I purchased a 25 ft SS immersion chiller from NYbrewsupply; it will share double duty with the water prechiller (its really my copper immersion chiller recycled). Still will have the bucket of ice/frozen water bottles, but the wort will be chilled down further upon exit from the Shirron plate chiller. I only need for it to drop an extra 8 to 10 degrees...I think this is doable.

I am going with stainless steel as it is easy to clean and sanitize; I sanitize my carboys prior to transfer from the boil kettle; I run the sanitizer through everything that boiling wort doesnt touch from the carboy full of sanitizer- Shirron chiller, silicone tubing, inline temp guage, everything. Adding the stainless coil is only one additional thing to run the sanitizer through. In short, I wont be worrying about infection. :rockin:

Most of the summer here in Roseville CA is over 90 degrees and my garage/brew area faces the sun for most of my process. As I said, winter, fall and spring are not an issue, in fact I do not even have to run a water prechiller. Summer is a different story.

My rig as of May 2011:

sudsmcgee said:

I personally wouldn't do it because I'd be concerned about the sterility of the inner copper coils. Once the wort is cooled you risk infection. I guess you could pump boiling water through it, but that requires a pump.

Click to expand...

As above posts have noted - a counterflow chiller also pumps wort thru copper tubing...
As long as proper sanitary measures are taken, there is no significant problem with this method, other than the temperature concerns.


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Walker said:

Yeah, it's not new.

I do this on my HERMS system. The coil is clean because I circulate boiling hot wort through it for a few minutes after flame out, then I start the chilling.

It would take too much ice to do all the chilling that way, so I drop the coil into 6 or so gallons of tap water that I mix PBW into and drop the first big chunk of of temps that way.

Then I move the coil into my ice bath with 10 to 15 lbs of ice and finish the chilling.

20 minutes to chill, $1.50 worth of ice (if I did not have the foresight to collect it from the ice maker in the freezer in the preceding week) and I end up with 6 gallons of how PBW to clean with.

Click to expand...

I can't believe I never thought of this before, but your post made me smack my own forehead. Why not have my HERMS coil removable! That's brilliant

HitTheTwit said:

I can't believe I never thought of this before, but your post made me smack my own forehead. Why not have my HERMS coil removable! That's brilliant

Click to expand...

I wouldn't call it brilliant. It was just easier that way.

I was actually surprised that so many people mounted them in the kettles.

Would you be willing to post a pic of how you bent the HERMS coil to remain portable?

HitTheTwit said:

Would you be willing to post a pic of how you bent the HERMS coil to remain portable?

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Pretty much just took my immersion chiller and connected my high temp hoses to it. that's over-simplifying it because I made a chamber on one end for my temp probe to screw into, but just like an IC can be dropped into your kettle... that's how my HERMS coil is dropped into things.

Edit: there are pics in my gallery but I am on my phone right now and getting the links is a PITA.