Collecting chiller water for brewing?

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austinb

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I brewed a batch on Friday and decided to measure the amount of water it took to chill a 10 gallon batch with my homemade counter flow chiller with 25ft of coiled tubing. It ended up at about 60 gallons of water!

I hate to be wasteful so during the summer I normally water my garden with the chiller but here in Oregon it rains for about 8 months of the year so my plants definitely have no need for extra water now. Therefore I am trying to brainstorm other ways to recycle the water. I've seen lots of 55 gallon food grade barrels on Craigslist for relatively cheap. I could definitely reuse some of the water for cleaning and sanitizing but I don't think I would use a full 55 gallon barrel between batches just for cleaning. Is there any reason I couldn't use this water for brewing too? I would imagine if people ferment in plastic buckets then there shouldn't be an issue with weird flavors from water that has been stored in a food grade barrel for a month or so. Am I correct or is there something I'm not taking into account?
 
Build a cooling tower, it will be awesome :D If I had more time I would.
 
I just did a test last week to see how much water I used to make a batch of beer. I read my meter before and after it was around 300 gallons.
 
I just did a test last week to see how much water I used to make a batch of beer. I read my meter before and after it was around 300 gallons.

Damn, how much beer are you brewing? Wife didn't do a load of washing at the same time?
The cooling tower was an actual real comment, I have an idea for building one. Got the sub pump, bucket, some stuff to make the tower. All I really am waiting on is setting up my plate chiller so I can actaully test out whether the idea works :D
Can see why not, wet bulb round here is usually 18 degrees C max and I generally brew at night so that helps even more.
 
I fill the washing machine full, then a couple of five gallon buckets, and then my ten gallon mashtun. Then. do a loads laundry. Yea I know I'm wiped!!
 
I fill a 10gal tub with the hot water for clean-up and then dump it in the garden when I'm done with it. When the water coming out of the IC cools off I throw the hose in the flowerbed and do my regular watering. No waste at all if you figure I'd water the plants either way.
 
I hook up my small fountain pump and from my rain barrel and recirculate it thru no waste so to speak of, I have 2 175 gallon rain barrels + 3 55gallon ones, water is only free when it rains
 
Commercial breweries often recapture chiller water for brewing - BUT you need to make sure to filter it to remove chlorine.
 
Commercial breweries often recapture chiller water for brewing - BUT you need to make sure to filter it to remove chlorine.

But they are most likely using that water for the next batch straight away.
 
If you double batch it's perfect. The spent water from the chiller goes straight to the HLT at well over 100*. Saves water, and energy from not having to heat the water as much with a burner for your second batch.
 
Dunno how warm your ground water is or how fast your flow is through your chiller but I generally chill 23L of wort to sub 20 degrees celsius with only about 30L of water. That's if I use a chiller. You could always embrace the Aussie way and no-chill into an HDPE water storage cube!
 
OK, now I'm going to have to figure out how much water my immersion chiller uses. If I'm dumping 50+ gallons I may have to capture some of the very abundant rain water and get a pump.
A 50 gallon drum with one gutter drain running into it would be an endless supply around here.
It would have to be a cheap pump to make it worth it though.
 
Dunno how warm your ground water is or how fast your flow is through your chiller but I generally chill 23L of wort to sub 20 degrees celsius with only about 30L of water. That's if I use a chiller. You could always embrace the Aussie way and no-chill into an HDPE water storage cube!

Sounds like you're awfully lucky. Ground water here in the summer is 25-26 easily. I usually have to finish chilling with my IC.

OK, now I'm going to have to figure out how much water my immersion chiller uses. If I'm dumping 50+ gallons I may have to capture some of the very abundant rain water and get a pump.
A 50 gallon drum with one gutter drain running into it would be an endless supply around here.
It would have to be a cheap pump to make it worth it though.

Submersible's are pretty cheap. I'm not sure I'd use water that's been sitting stagnant too long though for chilling if that's what you're implying. That kind of water can get a lot of nasties in it I wouldn't want coming near my equipment.
 
OK, now I'm going to have to figure out how much water my immersion chiller uses. If I'm dumping 50+ gallons I may have to capture some of the very abundant rain water and get a pump.
A 50 gallon drum with one gutter drain running into it would be an endless supply around here.
It would have to be a cheap pump to make it worth it though.

Checkout the pond pumps at Lowes/HD/etc.
 
The next time I brew, I'll have to figure out how much I'm using. I'd love to figure out a way to capture rain water, but it doesn't rain enough year-round (where I am) to use that reliably. It'll certainly be something worth looking into for when it DOES rain. Filtering will be absolutely necessary, of course.
 
Hey - thanks for posting this. I'm getting ready to use an IC for the first time on my next brew, so it's good to have an idea of how much water it will use.

I read my meter before and after it was around 300 gallons.

Your meter must be different than mine, mine measures in "units" not gallons (1 unit = 748 gallons), so it would be very hard to accurately measure this way.

Looking at a recent bill and doing the math, it looks like my city currently charges about 1.3 cents / gallon. So 60 gallons comes to around 78 cents. That's much cheaper than the two bags of ice per brew I've been buying for ice baths!

If you're worried about "wasting" it, I read that the average shower head puts out about 2.5 gallons per minute. Assuming you brew once a month and shower daily, just cut one minute or so off each shower, and that should more than offset for the water used cooling your brew. :mug:
 
Dunno how warm your ground water is or how fast your flow is through your chiller but I generally chill 23L of wort to sub 20 degrees celsius with only about 30L of water. That's if I use a chiller. You could always embrace the Aussie way and no-chill into an HDPE water storage cube!

How much coil is in your chiller? Mine is only 25 ft (7.6m), if yours is a 50 ft (15.4m) then it will probably be more efficient and you don't have to run the water quite as fast. Also I would imagine your ground water is colder if you are only using a little more water than the volume of beer you are chilling. My ground water is about 53F (11.6C) so it is not significantly cooler than the temperature I am trying to cool my wort to...if my ground water was around 40F (4.4C) I would imagine it would be more efficient. I suppose next time I could try filling my big 12 gallon (45L) bucket with water and ice and use my pond pump to push the colder water through the chiller.
 
How much coil is in your chiller? Mine is only 25 ft (7.6m), if yours is a 50 ft (15.4m) then it will probably be more efficient and you don't have to run the water quite as fast. Also I would imagine your ground water is colder if you are only using a little more water than the volume of beer you are chilling. My ground water is about 53F (11.6C) so it is not significantly cooler than the temperature I am trying to cool my wort to...if my ground water was around 40F (4.4C) I would imagine it would be more efficient. I suppose next time I could try filling my big 12 gallon (45L) bucket with water and ice and use my pond pump to push the colder water through the chiller.


Ya I tried this ice approach with my 20 gallon kettle - you wouldn't believe how fast it goes! This is with a 50-plate chiller.
 
Sounds like you're awfully lucky. Ground water here in the summer is 25-26 easily. I usually have to finish chilling with my IC.



Submersible's are pretty cheap. I'm not sure I'd use water that's been sitting stagnant too long though for chilling if that's what you're implying. That kind of water can get a lot of nasties in it I wouldn't want coming near my equipment.

Probably 4" of rain in the last 24 hours here. November can see 3 feet or more of rain. Sometimes December is worse.
Water in a barrel collected from roof drains wouldn't get too old at least six months of the year around here.
Besides, if it's inside the copper coils, it doesn't matter what it is. I've read about people getting fancy refrigerant coils in their conical. I would much rather have rain water make it into my beer than refrigerant! Not that either of them touches the beer.
 
How much coil is in your chiller? Mine is only 25 ft (7.6m), if yours is a 50 ft (15.4m) then it will probably be more efficient and you don't have to run the water quite as fast. Also I would imagine your ground water is colder if you are only using a little more water than the volume of beer you are chilling. My ground water is about 53F (11.6C) so it is not significantly cooler than the temperature I am trying to cool my wort to...if my ground water was around 40F (4.4C) I would imagine it would be more efficient. I suppose next time I could try filling my big 12 gallon (45L) bucket with water and ice and use my pond pump to push the colder water through the chiller.

I use a 30 plate chiller, I set my water in flow reasonably slow and the wort out flow about 2/3 of the water speed so I use 30L of chilling water once there's 20-23L of wort in the fermenter. I think people crank their flow speed WAY up on the chiller. I recall seeing a Brewing TV episode where Keeler had strong enough flow through the chiller to water the garden as a spray. What you want is for the water out to be running slow enough that it's practically boiling so it's taking as much heat out in one pass as it can. I usually start my water going at a slow speed and then crack the ball valve on my kettle slowly until the wort out is at the temp I need it, then slowly bump both up together to get a decent flow rate. My wort can go into the fermenter at 20C and the chilling water can be going into my storage vessel at 70-80C. As far as I'm concerned if you aren't sucking out as much heat per molecule of chilling water you're wasting water.
 
I use a 30 plate chiller, I set my water in flow reasonably slow and the wort out flow about 2/3 of the water speed so I use 30L of chilling water once there's 20-23L of wort in the fermenter. I think people crank their flow speed WAY up on the chiller. I recall seeing a Brewing TV episode where Keeler had strong enough flow through the chiller to water the garden as a spray. What you want is for the water out to be running slow enough that it's practically boiling so it's taking as much heat out in one pass as it can. I usually start my water going at a slow speed and then crack the ball valve on my kettle slowly until the wort out is at the temp I need it, then slowly bump both up together to get a decent flow rate. My wort can go into the fermenter at 20C and the chilling water can be going into my storage vessel at 70-80C. As far as I'm concerned if you aren't sucking out as much heat per molecule of chilling water you're wasting water.

Your plate chiller must be more efficient than my counterflow chiller because I am pretty careful to set the water only as high as it needs to be to get the beer coming out of the chiller into the carboy to a good fermentation temperature (probably around 19-21C). If I turned it down any lower it would be coming out too hot. I do have to turn the water up pretty high to get it to temperature, maybe not high enough to make a spray but just under that.
 
Probably 4" of rain in the last 24 hours here. November can see 3 feet or more of rain. Sometimes December is worse.
Water in a barrel collected from roof drains wouldn't get too old at least six months of the year around here.
Besides, if it's inside the copper coils, it doesn't matter what it is. I've read about people getting fancy refrigerant coils in their conical. I would much rather have rain water make it into my beer than refrigerant! Not that either of them touches the beer.

Gotta love the weather here in the PNW. At one point yesterday afternoon it was raining so hard that my patio which the rain normally has no problem running of quickly was maintaining about 1/4 inch of water. This is the reason it would be silly for me to water the plants with my chiller. Maybe I just gotta fill the washing machine and use the rest for cleaning my equipment.
 
Gotta love the weather here in the PNW. At one point yesterday afternoon it was raining so hard that my patio which the rain normally has no problem running of quickly was maintaining about 1/4 inch of water. This is the reason it would be silly for me to water the plants with my chiller. Maybe I just gotta fill the washing machine and use the rest for cleaning my equipment.

Yep. One of the ridges in the Southern part of the county ( about 20 miles from my house ) registered 120 MPH winds yesterday.
Semi blew over on one of the bridges in Aberdeen, one on the Astoria bridge, and somewhere else local.
Rained so bad, wind so strong that there were white caps coming across a parking lot across the street from my office. White caps with less than an inch of rain water sheeting across the parking lot!
No shortage of fresh rain water to recycle for cooling around here. An outdoor barrel will vary from 35° to probably 50° for months on end also.
You just need to filter the debris from the trees before it gets to the pump.
 
Yep. One of the ridges in the Southern part of the county ( about 20 miles from my house ) registered 120 MPH winds yesterday.
Semi blew over on one of the bridges in Aberdeen, one on the Astoria bridge, and somewhere else local.
Rained so bad, wind so strong that there were white caps coming across a parking lot across the street from my office. White caps with less than an inch of rain water sheeting across the parking lot!
No shortage of fresh rain water to recycle for cooling around here. An outdoor barrel will vary from 35° to probably 50° for months on end also.
You just need to filter the debris from the trees before it gets to the pump.

Maybe looking into a rainwater recirculation system is a good idea to chill my wort. I've wanted to install a rain barrel system for gardening anyway.

If I was using a cheap plate chiller I might worry about using rainwater. However, since I am using a counterflow chiller where the beer goes through solid copper tubing the entire length of the water hose which surrounds it plus sticks out 6 inches on each side before it attaches to tubing (silicone on hot side and vinyl on cold side) there is really no possible way to accidentally contaminate the beer with rainwater. Would I need more than a 55 gallon rain barrel?
 
I would think that 55 gallons would be good. That's a lot of water.
Maybe put some sort of screen over the top to keep from having storm debris end up in there.
Part of the year you will use more. Water temp right now would probably be what? 55° if it were outside for daytime highs and night time lows? Part of the year there you will be pulling from under ice and you would be chilling much faster.
Use will depend on water temp.
Maybe keep it in the shade if that's practical to help keep the temperature of the water down. Less sun effect.
 
Have small 6x6 inch screens over the hole for mine to keep leaves and debris out. All I do is open the spigot into 5 gallon bucket with pump, to the coil, return goes to the top of rain barrel flow is controlled by restricting the water returning to rain barrel.
 
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