Can sanitized zip lock bags with ice packs be added to hot wort?

My wort chiller has a hole in one of the coils and I and need to try to bring 10 gallons of wort down to cold break temps fast. I was thinking of using about 5-10 zip lock gallon freezer bags that each will have ice packs inside them to help chill the wort. The ice packs are left over from yeast shipments and I want to be sure that any leaks in these will stay in the zip lock freezer bags.

My question is will this be a good idea or am I missing something I should be aware of? For example, is there any chance the zip lock bags could melt when added to the hot wort?

Thanks for any input.

I would be worried about the plastic, there are not many plastics capable of handling temps in the upper 100's. If you have the capability I would try to use solder to braze the leak in the IC...just make sure to test it before putting into wort and clean off the flux from the outside.

I don't know what they put in those cold bags but it ain't water. Mine have some kind of a sticky, slimy goo. I know they say it's non toxic but I sure don't want it in my beer!

I have dumped a copious amount of ice in mine with good results. Just account for the dilution beforehand and you will be fine.

can you make an ice bath in your sink? it's gotta be a better option than throwing stuff directly into the beer.

I have poured boiling water in Freezer bags while camping to make dinner, and they held up to the abuse. Just make sure they are freezer bags, because I dont know many sandwiches that get up to 212 degrees.

What I have done with no problems is to sanitize the inside of a 1/2 gallon water jug and fill it half full with Brita filtered water. Put that in the freezer overnight. Then after boiling the wort I cut bottom of the plastic jug off and put the ice directly into the hot wort. Cools it right down. Just make sure everything is sanitized.

NRS

Dogphish said:

can you make an ice bath in your sink? it's gotta be a better option than throwing stuff directly into the beer.

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A large bucket with ice water does the trick. About 2-3 large bags of ice with 2-3 gallons of water. Just spin whatever your keeping your wort in around the ice water. Can cool it in about 15-20 mins

I ended up splitting the finished 12 gallons of beer into three different smaller pots and placed each of these into an ice bath using ice from the conv. store and the frozen cold packs. It took about 40 minutes to go from 220 F to 70 F which is not bad and would have been the same with the immersion chiller trying to take on 12 gallons. I couldn't get to fixing the chiller today because the local hardware store was closed for the holiday.

The idea of taking several of these cold packs and double or triple bagging them came from reading how some people take water bottles that are 2/3 full or water, freeze them and then sanitize these prior to putting the bottles into the wort for cooling. I thought about using these cold packs instead since I seem to have about 2 dozen of them but I opted out because I was unsure of how the plastic freezer bags would handle the heat. I am still going to do a trial run with these with just boiling water to see how it turns out and will post the results.

Thanks for everyone's comments.

OK...did the trial run and I can now say that I won't be using the method to cool my beer in the future. I am consider using cold packs in a large bucket to stick my existing wort chiller in (as a prechiller) once I build a chiller large chiller that is more suitable for chiller 10-12 gallon sized batches. Not sure of how much bigger this new chiller would have to be in order to be effective....any ideas?

I can norally cool my wort down quite rapidly by immersing it in and rotating it in an ice bath in one of those big plastic beer buckets with the rope handles. Takes no more than about 10-15min to get to 80F.

bdeck02 said:

I can norally cool my wort down quite rapidly by immersing it in and rotating it in an ice bath in one of those big plastic beer buckets with the rope handles. Takes no more than about 10-15min to get to 80F.

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That is with the help of an additional gallon of near freezing water poured into the wort. That won't help you if you do full boils though.