Hot tubing

Hey,

I have searched around a bit but had a hard time finding anything really definitive. I started out making wine - lots and lots of wine - and migrated into making beer kits, then extract brew... and now am going to do my first all-grain beer on Sunday.

My question is about the clear tubing I have from wine making. When I have cleaned it with hot water it gets really soft. I want to know if it is unsafe or bad-tasting to use the tubing to transfer wort that is near boiling temperature. I'd rather not go out and spend money on new tubing if I don't need to, but I do want to do it right. Thoughts? And if this isn't okay, what should I be using? Cheers

You shouldn't be transferring near boiling wort. Your wort is cooled before you transfer it. Coming out of the mashtun, the wort is in the 150 range. That might make the tubing soft, but it's usually ok.

Hmm. After the boil is finished I want to siphon the wort through my wort chiller... which is a coiled copper deal but will need tubing on each end of it. Or am I just totally lost

Bdogg said:

Hmm. After the boil is finished I want to siphon the wort through my wort chiller... which is a coiled copper deal but will need tubing on each end of it. Or am I just totally lost

Click to expand...

I think you are lost.. beer doesn't run through the chiller, WATER runs through the chiller. The chiller is hooked up to a water source then the chiller is submerged in the wort. The water runs through the coils and cools the beer.

On a side note.... is the siphon tubing that you get at the LHBS any different than what you would get in the plumbing department at Home Depot?

I ask because I need some more tubing and Home Depot is a whole lot closer to me than my LHBS. I just want to make sure that tubing from HD is safe to use?

OHIOSTEVE said:

I think you are lost.. beer doesn't run through the chiller, WATER runs through the chiller. The chiller is hooked up to a water source then the chiller is submerged in the wort. The water runs through the coils and cools the beer.

Click to expand...

Unless you have a counter-flow chiller, that is! Can you post a link to a picture of the kind of chiller you have?

I want to post a picture! My camera is busted and cell phone can't transfer files

It is kind of a frankenstein chiller of my own. Since there is an ice machine in the basement of my building, I am just going to fill up a 20 gallon rubber maid container with ice and run the copper tubing through an ice bath. Cumbersome yes, but I don't have the tools to build a counterflow one and I am really excited to make some beer... call it a compromise. When the time is right I'll get some fittings and do it properly... As an aside - I ran 3 gallons of boiling water through it to test out how it works and it worked perfectly - got it down to 28c in what seemed like a flash.

Anyway, the plan with this was to just siphon through the chiller using regular tubing from wine making. So presumably it is non-toxic but there is nothing written on the tubes to indicate any temperature use guidelines...

In that case, you're going to want silicone tubing. Vinyl tubing is usually only rated for 175F.

Does it look like this?:
http://www.homebrewers.com/product/...ASE&utm_medium=CPC&utm_content=&utm_campaign=

I think that you'd be happier to use it as an immersion wort chiller. That is, you put it into the boiling wort, and then run cold water through it until the wort is cool. Transferring boiling wort through tubing and back just seems like trouble. It won't hold siphon, probably, and it might not chill enough for the first pass anyway. 38C is still WAY too hot to pitch yeast, and it's hardest to drop those last 18C degrees. Most people who use similar set up use a counterflow chiller, and/or a pump.

Yeah probably. It is just a 30ft coiled tube I picked up from home depot. I ran boiling water out of the pot, through the bath (on a chair), and then into a primary fermenter (on the floor). My rationale of course was taking a 2 minute elevator ride versus spending half a day putting the thing together... for the first try. Eventually I would do that of course. Though there is nothing stopping me from doing the exact same thing except siphoning cold water through... which is certainly a good possibility if I shouldn't be using the tubing in hot water. Hmm.

Trust me, siphoning (either wort or water) won't be much fun! The easiest (and most efficient) way to use the wort chiller is to attach one end to a faucet, and run cold water through it.

The water comes out hot at first, and you can save it to wash equipment, or even send it to your washing machine.

I have two hoses- one "in" and one "out". The water goes in the chiller from the faucet, without pumps or siphon. It's quick, and you can get your boiling wort to pitching temperature in 20 minutes or so.

What you want is a pump from a fish tank to push water through the coil, immerse the coil in the boiling wort for a minute or two before your turn off the heat to sanitize it then fill a tub with ice from the ice machine and enough water to start pumping. Then just cycle the water with the fish pump through the copper coil and back into the tub. If it melts all the ice and is still too warm dump most of the water and add more ice.

The ice/water mix will chill the wort better than sticking it in ice alone.

It is difficult to properly sanitize the inside of the coil by siphoning and pumps that can take the heat of the boiling wort are extremely expensive compared to the $10 or $15 pump you can get for cold water.

Thanks guys. I did some bending and messing around tonight. I am going to use it as an immersion chiller instead and I can do essentially the same thing without trying to hunt down food-grade silicone tubing and it will be much easier. Thanks for the advice . Does anything need to be done to the copper tube before I stick it in, in terms of its reactivity? It is brand new, the bendy kind (obviously) that you use for hooking up an ice tray in your fridge or whatever. All the ones I've seen in pictures look corroded. Just crossing tees and dotting eyes.

I think I just gave mine a quick cleaning with a sponge in some oxyclean and rinsed it well before I used it the first time.

The wort is acidic and will clean the copper much too well.

The outside will oxidize between every batch. The oxidation will not hurt your beer, just make sure to put the coil in the beer for a couple minutes before your boil finishes, the boiling wort will kill any bad bugs on the outside pretty quickly.

As for before your first use, oxyclean should take any kind of pulling lubricant etc. that might be left on from the manufacturing process.

i thought this thread was about hot tubs...