Brilliance or stupidity: The Poor Man's Wort Chilled

[Krovitz]

Hello Fellow Brewers,

I've been looking into a new kettle lately. (Almost got an 8 gal pot with ball valve and thermometer for 75 bucks on Craigslist, but I was minutes too late. Minutes!) That got me thinking about how I would chill it. Immersion chillers seem wasteful without a pump and plate chillers seem just as pricey and I'm not even sure how those things work. So I have come up with an ice bath hybrid.

Basically, it would be a ball valve on a 5 gal homer bucket. Run a silicone hose from the kettle to the barb inside the bucket. Fill bucket with ice and water to the brim. Let gravity do the work down into the fermenter.

Now a couple questions arise. Has anyone tried this? How many feet of hose would need to be submerged in the ice bath to get 200*+ wort to pitching temperature? Would the ice melt way too fast to be practical? If it does work, how will it effect the cold break?

I imagine there are more things I'm not considering. Obviously everything would be sanitized. Let me know what you guys think, or if you have tried anything similar. Thanks.

Mike

Edit: G.D. auto correct. Chiller not chilled. Chiller!

 

[tre9er]

I think you're talking about what some guys do with their HERMS coils, chill the coil, run WORT through it, instead of water through it, straight into fermenter. The guys with HERMS coils do this but they use a pump. I wonder what the flow would be like on this...

 

[nhwrecker]

My first thought on this is that the silicone hose won't make a good heat exchanger - you'd want to use copper in order to transfer the heat from the hot wort out to ice - so you'd basically be taking an immersion chiller and putting it in an ice bath - which has been talked about a lot on here.

 

[feinbera]

The reason chillers are expensive is because you need 25-50 feet of metal tubing to get enough contact area between the hot medium and the cold medium for chilling to work (in a reasonable amount of time). Metal conducts heat much better than plastic/silicone/etc -- so, you would need more than 50 feet; 100? 200? They make potholders out of silicone because it's so good at preventing heat from transferring from the hot side to the cold side; your tubing will be actively working against you, keeping the heat from escaping your wort and getting into your ice bath.

If your hundreds of feet of boiling-temperature-rated tubing didn't turn out to be more expensive than the few dozen of copper or stainless, you'd also have to worry about whether it's possible to gravity-feed through several hundred feet of 3/8" tubing, especially a fluid that's full of kettle trub waiting to gum things up, but I imagine your hardware store bill will stop you before you get that far.

 

[Krovitz]

Thanks for the help fellas. Once again, HBT members have saved me from wasting money on bad ideas. Haha. I didn't even think of the insulating properties of silicone. The inside of copper seems like it would be tricky to clean but I'll check it out on here. Oh well. Back to the drawing board. And by drawing board, I mean Craigslist. Thanks again for the advice. I'll start saving for an immersion chiller and pump.

 

[tre9er]

Thanks for the help fellas. Once again, HBT members have saved me from wasting money on bad ideas. Haha. I didn't even think of the insulating properties of silicone. The inside of copper seems like it would be tricky to clean but I'll check it out on here. Oh well. Back to the drawing board. And by drawing board, I mean Craigslist. Thanks again for the advice. I'll start saving for an immersion chiller and pump.

Make your own IC. 50' of 3/8 copper tubing is about $45. A few hose clamps, $2. Vinyl tubing, $10. Garden hose fitting, a few bucks.

If you can buy a 50' chiller for under $60 shipped, go for it. I made mine. Was as easy as wrapping it around a small water cooler jug (like the kind you take to a kid's game, the hand-held size) and putting some hose clamps on.

 

[eastoak]

a plate chiller is more efficient as far as water use as long as the water temps are reasonably cold.

 

[KegKiller]

Just came across this on youtube. Seems pretty good if you have low enough ground water temps.

 

[mariojr]

Any shaped coil that is fully submerged in wort would work very efficiently to chill.

 

[Krovitz]

Thanks fellas. Seems homemade might be the way to go. Do you need to fill copper with water and seal it to bend it?

 

[Calichusetts]

I could see that idea working on a 3 gallon batch or something, but once you get to 5 gallon, the IC is the way to go. You could run some copper in the buchet and then have it lead to a pot in an ice bath if it was a small batch.

I do 1 gallon batches...by the time I pour the wort into the chilled pot in the ice bath, its practically at 70-80 for me. I have to hustle to get the yeast ready!

 

[Runner]

I've thought about placing the garden hose going to my immersion chiller into an ice chest containing ice water to drop the temperature feeding into the immersion chiller which would speed up the wort chilling process. Is that reasonable, or also a waste of time?

 

[brewguyver]

I've thought about placing the garden hose going to my immersion chiller into an ice chest containing ice water to drop the temperature feeding into the immersion chiller which would speed up the wort chilling process. Is that reasonable, or also a waste of time?

[edit: I don't think you'll see much difference if you put the garden hose in an ice bath.] However, if you can afford to use another immersion chiller and run the garden hose through that into the ice bath it works pretty well.

I picked up a 1/5 HP sump pump on eBay for $30 - going to try putting it in an ice bath and running through the immersion chiller and back. I did it with our last pumpkin brew. Worked great and only used 10 gal of water!

 

[barrooze]

This is what I got: 1/2" OD X 50 FT - $56.17

Those prices are the lowest I found when buying my copper. Good luck!