Whirpooling with an immersion chiller

[Lebowski509]

HI All,

Looking to start whirl pooling my wort at flame out. It should be easy for me as I have a SS BME kettle with a built in whirlpool port. My question is who has experience whirl pooling with a immersion chiller in place? Is it useless of just less effective or does it work just fine. Seems like the mass of the chiller would screw up the hemodynamics of whirl-pooling, would love to hear from anyone with some experience with this. Thanks!

 

[HobbitBeer]

The mass of the chiller will absolutely get in the way of the cone that is created by the whirlpool, but some whirlpool is better than no whirlpool. I also have an immersion chiller, and the cone isn't as tight as it would be with a plate chiller and a pump, but it does a pretty damn good job regardless.

If you're using gravity to drop it into your fermenter, let your wort sit for a while (20-30 minutes) so that the thermal currents die off and the cone can compress a little bit. I generally get ~10 seconds of hazy transfer, then the rest will generally be clear.

 

[3 Dawg Night]

You'll probably see your chilling time go WAY down once you're whirlpooling with your IC. You could always pull your IC once you get down to pitching temp, so that it's not interfering with cone formation.

 

[day_trippr]

Seriously, that's all there is to it: chill down to pitching temperature, yank the IC, lid the kettle, and spin the wort for another couple of minutes.
Kill the pump and let the wort sit for 20 minutes while getting some cleaning done, then draw off the settled wort, preferably with a side pick-up dip tube for maximum benefit...

Cheers!

 

[kevin58]

I leave my IC in the kettle while I whirlpool. It helps speed up the chilling and I have not noticed any interference with the whirlpool operation or results.

 

[Bramling Cross]

I run the same process day_trippr mentions and it works great, although I let things settle a bit longer. During the summer I make a point of cooling about 5F past my pitching temp just to make certain that the wort doesn't warm past the pitching temp while I let it settle.