Chilling Wort in Arizona

I'm just looking for some tips and tricks from Arizona brewers (and others who brew in hot climates) to get wort down to pitching temperature now that we're getting into the hot months.

I just brewed an ESB on Tuesday after work and had a hard time getting it down below 74F using hose water through a 3/8", 50' copper IC and 25' of copper in an ice bath as a pre-chiller for the water. Ambient temp outside was probably around 85F. I had to transfer it to the fermenter and then put that in an ice bath to get it down into the 60s.

I've got an old refrigerator set up as a fermentation chamber and trying to keep the brewing going as long as possible.

Thanks for any tips!

I use a 900GPH pump , and recirculate ice water through my chiller. I have a 70qt coleman xtreme cooler, I place the pump in, dump a 20 lb bag of ice in, fill it with just enough cold water to make it slushy, then after running tap water through the chiller to get the temps down to about +/-100°f, I hook up the pump and recirc the ice water while stirring my chiller constantly, I have yet to get a march pump set up, so I don't have the ability to whirlpool yet, but that is the next item on my gadget list, now that I have just completed my fermentation chamber.

Anyhow, I have to use more ice in the heat of the summer, up to 40lbs, but when the temps are in the 80's I can get away with a single 20 lb bag when brewing 5 gallons, 10 gallons is a whole different story!

I would suggest getting an inexpensive pump from harbor freight to recirculate ice water, it is more efficeint than a pre chiller, or you could recirc ice water through the pre chiller too, and dubbel-up, uh, dubbel-up, uh! (beer humor)

At least this is my method...

Fill 8-12 Gatorade bottles and sanitize the outside of them. Place them in your freezer until brew day. Drop them in to your wort one to two at a time. Replace as they melt. You can use them in conjunction with your chiller.

Schnitzengiggle said:

I use a 900GPH pump , and recirculate ice water through my chiller. I have a 70qt coleman xtreme cooler, I place the pump in, dump a 20 lb bag of ice in, fill it with just enough cold water to make it slushy, then after running tap water through the chiller to get the temps down to about +/-100°f, I hook up the pump and recirc the ice water while stirring my chiller constantly, I have yet to get a march pump set up, so I don't have the ability to whirlpool yet, but that is the next item on my gadget list, now that I have just completed my fermentation chamber.

Anyhow, I have to use more ice in the heat of the summer, up to 40lbs, but when the temps are in the 80's I can get away with a single 20 lb bag when brewing 5 gallons, 10 gallons is a whole different story!

I would suggest getting an inexpensive pump from harbor freight to recirculate ice water, it is more efficeint than a pre chiller, or you could recirc ice water through the pre chiller too, and dubbel-up, uh, dubbel-up, uh! (beer humor)

At least this is my method...

Click to expand...

Thanks for that quick reply -- glad to see another Tucson homebrewer! I've read up on the whirlpool chiller and think that would be a great upgrade. I'm going for the kegging setup next but I like your pumped ice water method. I'm guessing that's a submersible pump you drop in your cooler without having to make any mods to the cooler?

I use my Counter Flow chiller in the summer, recirculating Ice water through it, same method as above but with the CFC and gravity flowing the beer to the fermenter...comes out nearly to cold 55-60f

Krrazy said:

Thanks for that quick reply -- glad to see another Tucson homebrewer! I've read up on the whirlpool chiller and think that would be a great upgrade. I'm going for the kegging setup next but I like your pumped ice water method. I'm guessing that's a submersible pump you drop in your cooler without having to make any mods to the cooler?

Click to expand...

Correct, submersible pump.

FWIW, yes, go for the kegging setup first, if I knew then what I knwo now, I would have done the keg setup first (bottling is a *****!)

The pump I bought was like $30 and I had the cooler, I just have to py the $2.50 for a 20 lb bag o'ice

I'm with schnitzengiggle,

I use 100ft of hose and then put 25 lbs of ice on top of that and enough water to cover the ice. I also put rock salt in to lower the temp as low as possible. I think last time I had the water to -8C. I run that through an IC and stir the **** out of it. Hasn't taken more than 15 minutes to get down to temp (75-80F).

If you are getting close to pitching temp but not all the way there you could always leave an extra gallon or two out of the whole brewing process (leaving you with a relatively high gravity wort) and get the gallon or two that you left out to almost freezing (or atleast 40-45F), when you transfer the finished wort into the fermenter your temperature will equalize at or around where you want to be. If you use plastic buckets you could even boil the water before you put it in the fermenter to ensure that there are no chances of getting any infectious agents in there.

I haven't brewed in the summer yet, but I am ready for the challenge

btw... i went back and read iparks comment... maybe buying a CFC isn't a bad idea...

jlaureanti said:

I'm with schnitzengiggle,

I use 100ft of hose and then put 25 lbs of ice on top of that and enough water to cover the ice. I also put rock salt in to lower the temp as low as possible. I think last time I had the water to -8C. I run that through an IC and stir the **** out of it. Hasn't taken more than 15 minutes to get down to temp (75-80F).

If you are getting close to pitching temp but not all the way there you could always leave an extra gallon or two out of the whole brewing process (leaving you with a relatively high gravity wort) and get the gallon or two that you left out to almost freezing (or atleast 40-45F), when you transfer the finished wort into the fermenter your temperature will equalize at or around where you want to be. If you use plastic buckets you could even boil the water before you put it in the fermenter to ensure that there are no chances of getting any infectious agents in there.

I haven't brewed in the summer yet, but I am ready for the challenge

btw... i went back and read iparks comment... maybe buying a CFC isn't a bad idea...

Click to expand...

A CFC would be nice, but without a March pump, I think that it would be more trouble than it is worth, slow to go by gravity, and hard to clean without a pump.

You can't get below 74 even with an ice bath?? Something just doesn't sound right there.

Here is my suggestion: Do not bother with an ice bath at all until you get below about 100 degrees. You want the coldest water toward the end of the chill. Don't use it all up in the beginning when you don't really need it. Tap water will chill boiling water just fine.
And maybe you just need to slow down the water. If your tap water isn't very cold, you need to run it slow so it will cool down in the ice bath. Measure the temperature of the water as it's coming out of the cooler too. If it's not much warmer than tap temperature, you're just wasting water.
To make your ice pre-chiller work better, add salt to the mixture. This will lower the temperature of your water. Ice water will only be 32 F, while salt/ice/water can get down below 0 F.

IceFisherChris said:

You can't get below 74 even with an ice bath?? Something just doesn't sound right there.

Here is my suggestion: Do not bother with an ice bath at all until you get below about 100 degrees. You want the coldest water toward the end of the chill. Don't use it all up in the beginning when you don't really need it. Tap water will chill boiling water just fine.
And maybe you just need to slow down the water. If your tap water isn't very cold, you need to run it slow so it will cool down in the ice bath. Measure the temperature of the water as it's coming out of the cooler too. If it's not much warmer than tap temperature, you're just wasting water.
To make your ice pre-chiller work better, add salt to the mixture. This will lower the temperature of your water. Ice water will only be 32 F, while salt/ice/water can get down below 0 F.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestions, they mirror what I'm already doing except for the fact that I do this outside with the hose rather than with tap water. The rate of change was getting so slow toward the end that I just stopped at 74 after sitting there for several minutes whirlpooling with a spoon while the water was running -- I probably could have gotten a bit lower but at that point I was getting concerned about the amount of time it was taking. The temperature of the hose water and the tap water are pretty much the same here. Pipes aren't buried very deeply so the fellow Tucsonans can attest to the joy of turning on the "cold" tap only to get something that feels about the same as the warm tap. My current procedure is to turn the hose bib on just until I start to see water coming out of the outlet of my IC at a good rate, I guess I could try to throttle that back a little more, but I don't have much room to work with there. I'm sure the water in my pre-chill tank is plenty cold, I think the hose water is just rushing through the 25' of copper too quickly to dissipate that heat. Of course I've never run any tests without a kettle of wort that I'm desperate to cool down so maybe that would be in order, but I can see the advantage of the submersible method in that you know that you're pumping that very cold water directly into the IC rather than hoping that the hose water gets cooled down somewhere close when running through the pre-chiller. I think it sounds like a good investment for AZ brewing.

Thanks for the good discussion, I know there is some good info here that will be helpful to others too.

Schnitzengiggle said:

I use a 900GPH pump , and recirculate ice water through my chiller. I have a 70qt coleman xtreme cooler, I place the pump in, dump a 20 lb bag of ice in, fill it with just enough cold water to make it slushy, then after running tap water through the chiller to get the temps down to about +/-100°f, I hook up the pump and recirc the ice water while stirring my chiller constantly, I have yet to get a march pump set up, so I don't have the ability to whirlpool yet, but that is the next item on my gadget list, now that I have just completed my fermentation chamber.

Anyhow, I have to use more ice in the heat of the summer, up to 40lbs, but when the temps are in the 80's I can get away with a single 20 lb bag when brewing 5 gallons, 10 gallons is a whole different story!

I would suggest getting an inexpensive pump from harbor freight to recirculate ice water, it is more efficeint than a pre chiller, or you could recirc ice water through the pre chiller too, and dubbel-up, uh, dubbel-up, uh! (beer humor)

At least this is my method...

Click to expand...

When you dubbeled up you needed a second "uh" after the second "dubbel up".


Just saying.

Update: I bought a 258GPH pump from Harbor Freight

I was going to go with a larger 1/4HP model, but with a wedding coming up in a few months, I decided to go with the $25 option at half the cost.

I liked this model for the suction cup stand and the included fittings including a 1/2" hose barb that mated right up with hose I previously had connected to my pre-chiller. After I got it home and did some testing, I was a little concerned since there was such a large difference in flow rate through my 50 feet of copper compared to my hose (I was getting about .5gal/minute with the pump).

I used the setup yesterday and it ended up working great. The boiling wort was chilled to 100 degrees F using the hose and then I switched over to the pump sitting in a cooler of ice water with salt. I used one 8lb bag of ice and got from boiling to 65 degrees F in 20 minutes.

I hope this holds up through the summer, thanks for the tips!

I use the same set up and cooling has not been an issue for me for years. I had the same HF pump for the first year, but had to replace it cause I kept breaking off the barbed nipple. Be careful with that part because it is weak.

One other option that I do is to make my own ice in bulk. I found that the cubes melted too quick, and the ice got pricey. I have a tray that I put about 20 old 16oz water bottles with the tops cut off in . I fill these with water and store the whole tray in the freezer. When Im done, I refill them and am ready for the next brew day. Of course it helps that I have a spare freezer. These pint sized cubes cool the water well and last a lot longer. On really hot days I will use the hose, then the water bottle cubes, and then if still needed I dump the ice tray from the fridge in.

Wow, I really like the idea of those large ice...cylinders I guess they'd be. I didn't mention it but I did throw in some 16-20oz plastic bottles that were frozen as well to up the water level and help the bag of ice.

Thank you for the reply!

Krrazy said:

I'm just looking for some tips and tricks from Arizona brewers (and others who brew in hot climates) to get wort down to pitching temperature now that we're getting into the hot months.

I just brewed an ESB on Tuesday after work and had a hard time getting it down below 74F using hose water through a 3/8", 50' copper IC and 25' of copper in an ice bath as a pre-chiller for the water. Ambient temp outside was probably around 85F. I had to transfer it to the fermenter and then put that in an ice bath to get it down into the 60s.

I've got an old refrigerator set up as a fermentation chamber and trying to keep the brewing going as long as possible.

Thanks for any tips!

Click to expand...

This is exactly what I do, and I have no problem dropping down to the 60s in about 20-30minutes.

The trick is, constant agitation of the pre-chiller, and the IC. It gets a little tiring, but i move around the pre-chiller with one hand, and move around the IC with the other. Also check your flow rates. I keep mine pretty high from 212 down to 100*, then i lower it quite a bit from 100 down so that the pre-chiller can do it's thing.

scottland said:

The trick is, constant agitation...

Click to expand...

I agree...I almost constantly whirlpooled last weekend and that was a big help!

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