How long to chill using chiller?

So my buddies got my a wort chiller as a gift at my bachelor party. I guess I must be making decent beer if they're encouraging my brewing.

Anyway, it's a 25' 3/8" copper immersion chiller. Now that I've got that, I'm looking at getting a turkey fryer for use as a brew pot and moving the operation into the garage. I'll also get an aerator. (This is the slow build up to all-grain).


I don't have that stuff yet, so when brewing tomorrow I'll be boiling ~3.5 gallons on the stove top from my mini-mash + late extract addition. Those that use immersion chillers, how long do you suspect it will take to cool to say around 70F?

My groundwater is probably in the upper 50s as my guess and I will not be using a prechiller of any kind.

I guess one other question, while I'm at it.
I top off my boil with cool water to make the full ferment volume. Up to this point I have brought 3 gallons up to ~170 to kill anything in the water and then chilled it while I did my boil. I think I've seen most people say they just use tap water straight from the tap for the top off water........what do you think? I've been wanting to do that for a while....you know remove what is likely an unnecessary step, but never have the balls to fix something that isn't broken.

Thanks everyone!
Justin

I'd say you're looking at 25-30 minutes to get to 70. I have basically the same chiller, and in the cooler months when the tap water is in the high 50s, I get 5-6 gallons to 70 in 40-45 minutes.

Back when I did extract, I always just topped up with tap water, never had a problem. YMMV.

Bike N Brew said:

I'd say you're looking at 25-30 minutes to get to 70. I have basically the same chiller, and in the cooler months when the tap water is in the high 50s, I get 5-6 gallons to 70 in 40-45 minutes.

Back when I did extract, I always just topped up with tap water, never had a problem. YMMV.

Click to expand...

Hmm, I've been looking into a chiller, but this doesn't sound helpful to me. I can get 5 gallons down to ~70-80 within 15-20 minutes in an ice bath in my kitchen sink. I just forget to make ice every week (need about 15lbs of it or so) and buying it is counter productive to the cause (It's bad enough I'm buying water too). Oh well..

I cool 5 gallons in about 20 minutes with 30 feet of 1/4 inch & stirring slowly. An ice bath might be as fast, but there is no way I'm lifting five gallons boiling wort!

I used the cold water bath when I did extracts. Dropped the pot into one side of the sinkk and gently stirred the beer and stirred the sink water...

When the water got warm, I'd drop it into the other side of the sink...repeat until I got to 105-110 (about 10 minutes)

Then I'd get my two gallon jugs of (getting ready to freeze) water out of the freezer, that I put there at the beginning of the brew process and use them to top off.

That always got me to 70 degrees...total time, about 15 minutes.

Ironically, I had built my immersion chiller already in preparation for moving to all grain. Never thought to use it in an extract process though.

If you're wanting to put it to the test...go for it. You'll probably get down to pitching temp within 20 minutes. But...if (as you mentioned) you'd like to cut down the process a bit, save the chiller till you're ready for full boils.

I made a 50' chiller with 3/8 copper tubing. On my first use it dropped the temp below 80F in about 10 minutes. This was mid-summer. I was really shocked how fast it was, I figured it would take longer.

20 minutes seems reasonable to hit the pitching temp. All you need to really be concerned about time-wise is getting below 140F to stop the DMS production. With the 25 ft of tubing it will go past 140 very quickly if you stirr slowly. Probably less than 10 minutes to go past 140.

Just a quick follow up....

It chilled about 3.25 gallons of boiling wort to the low/mid 80s in 14 minutes. That combined with tap water in the mid/upper 50s as top off water to a total volume of around 6.0 gallons yielded a 66F wort to pitch yeast into. Worked perfectly!!!

I know when I go to full boils, it will work well. I'd probably stir the chiller around more when I go to cool full 5.5-6.0 gallon boils to increase the cooling efficiency some.

Thanks for the replies.