Wort Chiller problems

So I went to the hardware store, bought 25' of copper tubing, some plumbing fittings, and came home happy and excited about chilling wort like the pros.

Well, of course I decide to use it when I have an audience, teaching 4 friends how to brew beer, and it was getting late and we were getting tired.

And I guess I got too excited, used the siphon to pump some too-hot liquid through the auto siphon. The whole hops clogged the siphon, the outer tube half melted (into roughly a bananna shaped bend at the end) and it of course stopped sucking, which sucks.

So now I need a new siphon, I'm not clear really whether I got the wort chiller cleaned out, I hope I did of course.

To get around it, I quickly sanitized a wire seive, poured the hot wort through it into the fermenter, topped off whatever remaining water it needed (which was room temperature, not chilled, as I thought the chiller would bring the temp down for me) and we had to wait until the morning to pitch the yeast. Everything seems to have come out fine, it fermented and we're moving to secondary this week.

Up until this point we used commerically produced ice IN the bucket, and never had a problem. We hoped this would be a more acceptable solution to the problem...

Any suggestions for next time? Is there a better siphon I can use considering how much tubing that stuff has to travel before it moves to the fermenter?

thx.

kvh

I made my own copper racking cane out of some 5/8" tubing, and put a SS screen over the end of it. Works like a charm. You can also buy SS racking canes. Instead of making a filter out of screen, you can buy those copper scrub pads (the ones without soap in them!) and put that over the end to keep the junk out.

I use a brew kettle with a ball valve in the bottom. To keep the hops from clogging the works, I connected one of these false bottoms. Solves two problems: no siphoning and no hops mess.

Alternately, I've used this hops bag setup with success a few times.

KVH, you did build a counterflow chiller right? Where the cooling water flows around the copper coil inside a larger hose? Based on your post, I could assume you used an immersion chiller and attempted to siphon your wort through it.

Bobby -

It was just a simple immersion chiller. And it was working perfectly, putting out room temperature wort while it worked.

Next time perhaps.

kvh

Immersion chillers don't "put out" room temperature wort. When you say it "put out" wort it makes it sound like you were using a counterflow chiller. Immersion chillers are simply a coil of copper tubing with cold water running through it that is "immersed" in the hot wort and cool the entire wort all at once. It takes about 10-20 minutes to get the wort down to room temperature.

kvh, if it's an immersion chiller, the wort doesn't go through it. You run cold water through the chiller while the chiller is immersed in the boil kettle full of wort. Typically you have the cold water input coming from your sink or garden hose, and a short length of hose attached to the other end that is placed in the sink drain or on the ground (if you are outside). Heat from the nearly boiling wort is absorbed by the cold water running inside of the copper tubing. The wort stays in your boil kettle, and you siphon it or drain it or pour it into your fermenter when it is cool.

Appendix C of John Palmer's How to Brew explains about two of the most common types of chillers, the immersion chiller and the counterflow chiller. Take a look at the descriptions in that appendix.

Hmm...I'm with Brewman - were you pumping wort through the tubing with the tubing immersed in cold water? There's really nothing wrong with that...except that you'll melt your auto-siphon.

The "proper" means of using it is as Brewman suggests above. Your whole brew kettle full of wort would eventually be cooled that way, then you only have to siphon room temperature wort.

Yuri_Rage said:

pumping wort through the tubing with the tubing immersed in cold water

Click to expand...

HAHAHA - I'd never heard that one before. That's a new one.

kvh, I sympathize with you because I melted my auto-siphon too using a counter-flow chiller. Moral of the story: Never siphon hot wort. Fit your copper tubing to hook up to the garden hose and run cold water through it, and then dip it into the whole kettle of hot wort to cool all the wort at once in place without having to siphon it. Good luck man.

Secondary moral to the story, don't use counterflow chillers OR the novel method yuri described above. Why? They all feature the same weakness: They cool your wort a little bit at a time rather than all at once, which causes the hop oils in the hot wort to degrade, affecting flavor. Also, with the method Yuri described, the cold water bath would warm up and thus the wort output at the end would be hotter than the wort output at the beginning. Unevenly chilled wort = bad. I don't know why, but I have a hunch it's bad.

according to Jamil Z. it is bad because the wort that isn't being cooled and is sitting at 150+ but below boil is creating DMS but isn't able to outgas it because there is no boil.

Eh, I like my counterflow chiller. Yes, I get cold break in the fermenter, but I doubt I get much DMS or hop degradation - it only takes a few minutes to transfer the wort through the chiller. I don't even waste that much water (see the link in my signature). I'm stickin' with it.

I'd probably just do the cheap route and use a submersible aquarium pump (which I have a number of) to pump the cold water. In fact that is what I am planning with my upcoming immersion chiller.