Chilling with frozen soda bottle

Has anyone tried filling a 2-liter bottle with water, freezing, sanitizing, and then using it to stir the wort as a form of chilling? It seems like 3-4 soda bottles should cool things to 65F in a hurry (might get away with 2 if you're also in an ice bath), and would be rather cheap.

Yup, it's been done. As long as everything is sanitiary, you shouldn't have a problem. Just be careful not to let the plastic burn on your pot.

llazy_llama said:

Yup, it's been done. As long as everything is sanitiary, you shouldn't have a problem. Just be careful not to let the plastic burn on your pot.

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Is it effective, or not worth the effort?

Yep, it should work pretty well, especially if you combine this with an ice bath.

Edited: I'm pretty sure Palmer talks about this in his book, or at least something close.

SumnerH said:

Has anyone tried filling a 2-liter bottle with water, freezing, sanitizing, and then using it to stir the wort as a form of chilling? It seems like 3-4 soda bottles should cool things to 65F in a hurry (might get away with 2 if you're also in an ice bath), and would be rather cheap.

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Wow that sounds like a great idea. I never would have thought of that.

We have a small countertop ice cream maker that has a frozen container inside. I float that in my wort every time I brew and it helps a lot. Between that and an ice-water bath I can cool the wort pretty quickly. I want to get a wort chiller but not to cool quicker, just so I don't have to mess with ice and the cleanup.

Great Idea.

I'd sanitize it, then put it in a plastic bag and freeze. that way you don't have to worry about freezing starsan to the bottle if you try to sanitize after you freeze it.

B

Yep, I did this for the first time last weekend for an American Brown Ale I was brewing. I just dropped the frozen bottles in my bucket of sanitizer for about a minute, pulled it out & jiggled a bit to get most of the sanitizer off, then popped it right into the brewpot. It worked very nicely to cool things down. I used 3 and it got things down to around 100 in reasonable time. After that, I just kept cooling with an ice bath.

I'm liking this idea, think I'll try it this weekend.